I would like to acknowledge those who have posted "excellent" opinions and comments regarding Compliance Engineering and whether it should/should not be taught in Universities. It is not up to us to determine what and how compliance engineering is to be presented in college. This is because those of us who are employed as compliance engineers that subscribe to this group (not including Professors and University instructors), do not teach these undergraduate or graduate courses. These professional educators are aware of the educational environment they work in and most likely are already teaching aspects of compliance engineering in their classes. I am focusing this posting on those who do "not" subscribe to treg, the typical college professor.
With this in mind, I would like to elevate this discussion several steps and into the University system where this discussion should be focused towards. Many professors that teach engineering (not those who subscribe to treg) have tenure and have never worked in industry. Most are unaware of today's engineering environment and the need for compliance engineering. They are interested in presenting the same material to this year's students as they taught 10+ years ago. Few professors are aware of the real world that engineers work in. With budget constraints and lack of university support, course taught are those that bring in revenue and will fulfill the requirements for a particular degree. To develop a course in compliance engineering, the professor should be knowledgeable in today's changing compliance environment. This environment includes high technology designs and international requirements for homologation, EMC, safety, risk assessment, and related items that is difficult even for us to keep up to date, much less professors. Developing a course in compliance engineering takes low priority because they do not possess the expertise to teach the material or the ability to develop a fundamentals course that students would take. Students attending college do not declare "Compliance Engineering" as a major. They are interested, in general, in becoming a design engineer or equivalent. Presenting an awareness of compliance is essential, and should be an upper division course since the material presented will be more current when they graduate. I would like to propose a concept for all subscribers on 'treg' and 'emc-pstc'. Instead of discussing this subject that benefits only newsgroup subscribers, lets take a different approach and do something unique - educate the educators! If each of us can contact the Department Head, Dean or a responsible Professor from our Alma Mater and present to them the need for a compliance course, the first step will have been taken in getting compliance engineering introduced into the curriculum. All it takes is searching your school's web page to get the name of the person to contact. Email, phone, letter or a personal visit to present compliance engineering into the University should take no more than a few minutes of your time. Now to make things easy for those of us who will contact our alma mater The IEEE EMC Society has an Education and Student Activities Committee. The purpose of this committee is to develop and promote EMC education in the Universities. A course outline has already been developed titled "EMC Education Manual". This manual, available free on request, outlines a fundamental course in EMC that is to designed to be taught as an undergraduate course. Dr. Clayton Paul from the University of Kentucky developed this excellent manual and course outline. It is basically a ready-made course that can be presented to university professors to develop an EMC course without having to start from scratch. The contents provides a suggested course outline, EMC Experiments and Demonstrations (Lab Work), and a Bibliography. Present to your University the existance of this Manual. To get additional information, the professor can contact the chairman of the EMC Society Education Society, Mr. Kimball Williams by email. Kimball will direct all inquiries to appropriate committee members. Kimball can be reached at: [email protected]. In addition to the EMC Manual and the Education Committee, there are numerous web pages that we can direct our University contacts to use. I will not list these since there are many and we know which ones are acceptable for use by educators in getting them started. Together, we can make a difference in today's educational environment. I have already contacted my alma mater, will you? --Mark Montrose-- [email protected]
