At 11:43 AM 1/27/2006, Tom Zickuhr wrote:
Concerning programming languages not being required by Engineering
schools, here's what I've learned as part of my AIAA activities.
The ABET certification is now emphasizing more soft skills such as team
work and presentation skills.
This is not necessarily bad. Back in the late 70s, when I was in college,
they were just getting started with REQUIRING group efforts in software
classes (egoless programming, etc.). Sometimes it works well, sometimes it
doesn't. When interviewing freshly graduated students, it IS something I
look for (along with basic technical competency). Sadly, the huge
competitiveness thing going on in middle and high schools, and in college,
as well, seems to breed a "shaft your neighbor to improve your score"
attitude, which, back in the day, was only characteristic of pre-meds.
And, as far as presentation skills, as long as we're not talking about
"basic power point", everyone should know how to get up in front of a group
and explain what they are doing, what they plan to do, and respond to off
the wall questions in a tactful manner. Hey, they should also be able to
*quickly* write coherently too. I see a lot of folks coming through who
can turn out fine, polished written work, but it takes weeks and weeks, and
the "quick memo to describe an analysis" suffers.
I don't worry about facility with programming skills or RF design. That's
really something you can't learn to a high professional standard in a 4
year curriculum anyway. I figure they can learn by doing things like large
scale software development or how to design receivers, in the context of a
structured project which keeps them from killing themselves or
others. Yes, fresh-outs need basic calculus skills and to understand
fundamental electronics (more current = more power = more heat) and basic
software design (one big program with no modules is bad).
This leaves fewer hours for technical classes. The states are pushing
to guarantee incoming students that they will be able to graduate in four
years, so the schools are reducing the number of hours required to
graduate. This leaves fewer hours for technical classes. The simpler
engineering analyses can be done with a spreadsheet and fairly
complicated work can be done with Matlab/Mathcad. There are plenty of
commercial systems for CFD and FEA. In the squeeze, the schools have
dropped programming.
Which is fine, if you're a ME or a EE. I wouldn't expect a ME to know how
to program at a high level any more than I would expect a software person
to know how to make integrated circuits and discuss the radiation tolerance
issues of thick or thin epi layers. I would expect the ME to use paper and
pencil and a non-graphing calculator to figure out whether a column would
buckle or a canteliever would fail, and, what's even more important, I'd
expect that ME to give me a prediction of what the FEA program would crank
out BEFORE they built and ran the model AND I'd expect them to be able to
explain why the results differed. I wouldn't expect them to tradeoff the
relative performance advantages of Gaussian Elimination vs LU decomposition
vs an interative solver.
And none of this even addresses the issues I heard about the attention
span and interest level of the students for anything they don't see as
immediately applicable.
This is nothing new. In 1977, students griped about the seeming
irrelevance of what they were learning in class. Why learn to program an
OS kernel in MIXAL when no machine made executes it? Why not use PDP-11
Assembler or BAL? I will confess that when I took number theory, and the
midterm had a question along the lines of "given the existence of zero and
one, derive the existence of all rational numbers" I realized that perhaps
I wasn't destined to be a math major. So my Erdos number is infinity.
All 18-25 year olds are flakes and chase whatever is interesting at the
moment. And well they should! Before you're saddled with the quotidian
constraints of earning a living, supporting others (family and work
teammates) you should be able to be a flake. The consequences are
relatively small, and that's your chance to find what YOU really should be
doing with your life. It's telling that lots of Nobel prizes are won for
work that answers questions that arose in the winner when they were quite
young, even if the prize is awarded to middle aged and elderly men and women.
Jim
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