<Jeff Foxworthy’s voice> If it’s a surprise to you that people can obtain a college degree without having any practical job skills then you must NOT be a college graduate.</Jeff Foxworthy’s voice>
Because college graduates are often keenly aware of the gap between academics and the world of work and the vo-tech track folks are the ones who seem to think that a degree in Psychology is job training to be a Clinical Psychologist in the same way as Automotive in vo-tech is training to be a mechanic.
It might surprise a lot of people but there are entire areas under the discipline of electrical engineering that have essentially nothing to do with circuit design, including signal analysis, controls, optics, et cetera. This doesn’t excuse someone with an electrical engineering degree from not knowing something as fundamental as Ohm’s Law, but if they don’t use it regularly it is not entirely unexpected that they might flub a problem in the stress of an impromptu exam. When I ask technical questions of an interviewee I’ll do it in the context of wanting to understand their process of interpreting, breaking down, and coming up with a method for solving a problem rather than being interested in their just getting a correct numerical answer. And of candidates I’ve hired or been instrumental in the hiring decision, I’ve had a very high rate of success in filtering through inadequate candidates and getting excellent employees. I’ll also say that I’m often reluctant to hire PhDs without prior industry experience specifically because they have become hyperfocused in their narrow area of research and often struggle with fundamentals that someone who just graduated with a BS or MS still has in volatile memory.
I’ll note that I once had an interview with an aerospace company in which one of the interviewers spent nearly the entire time asking me to recite mechanical properties for various aluminum and titanium alloys, perform a bolt preload calculation, set up and solve a Mohr’s circle (stress) calculation, and answer a bunch of basic questions about stress and strain analysis, then expressed surprise that I answered nearly all of the questions correctly. Being completely honest, I would attribute this less to being an exceptional candidate than that I had been very recently doing some analysis on these particular (albeit fairly common in this application) alloys, and I would note that spent time at a job in school developing tutorial software for engineering mechanics classes such as statics, dynamics, mechanics of materials, and thus had the methodology for doing these things burned into my brain far deeper than someone who spent a fraction of a semester learning to do these problems for one test and may never have done them again.
The interviewer, however, didn’t ask a single question about my background in actually doing finite element structural analysis, or applying strain results to a fatigue or fracture analysis, or how I would approach a structural analysis on a realistic weldment or forged part, which is curious because while this position doubtless would have required extensive use of FE tools and methodology, I don’t recall ever performing a Mohr’s circle calculation outside of a classroom as any non-trivial real world 3D combined loading scenario would almost certainly require FEA to get an accurate stress distribution, or else use prederived stress and strain formulae from Roark’s or Bruhn instead of wasting time deriving an analytical solution to a non-trivial geometry.
Understanding fundamentals is crucial to being able to understand and solve problems in engineering and physical sciences, but being able to solve textbook-type problems on a pop quiz is really doing more to see if the candidate is good at taking pop quizzes rather than verifying that they actually understand how to apply those fundamentals to real world problems. YMMV, I suppose.
This employee just sounds less lacking in fundamental knowledge than just undisciplined or unmotivated in verifying their work. I’ve actually worked with a number of people like this who were good enough to understand how to do the work but who couldn’t be trusted to provide accurate results without a deep degree of peer review. It’s frustrating, and often these employees just aren’t worth the time it takes to review and correct their work, but fortunately they tend to get an MBA or MS Eng Mngt degree and move into middle management where they can be useless without fucking up basic calculations.
I will say that one thing that I note is that in engineering school you learn a lot of fundamentals but often these aren’t applied in any real world context or (often) reinforced in application outside of the narrow scope of doing problem sets and passing exams, and when you don’t use a principle in such a way as to reinforce the application the basic intuition can be lacking. In prior eras engineers were often assigned to basically intern under the supervision a more senior engineer or designer where they were drilled on how to apply fundamentals in real problems (still largely the case in civil engineering where engineers are required post-graduation to pass the Fundamentals of Engineering exam to get a PE certification) but from what I’ve seen the culture of mentorship has diminished and junior engineers in particular often jump from job to job without ever mastering or even becoming proficient in a specific area of detail application.
A lot of people, including me, thought this was a good idea. There were language directed architectures which let you customize a processor through microcode for a language, and of course you could customize it for a particular application. There was a company that let you design your own instruction set and would produce a processor with that set.
But this was a failure, because only really high volume applications made it work, and we found RISC machines could beat out CISC machines, especially because they were faster to implement and cheaper. Remember, RISC came out of microprogramming, both the first ones at IBM, which had a big microprogramming effort and from Dave Patterson, whose dissertation was about proving microcode correct and who worked on it after he started at Berkeley.
Of course RISC machines today may have reduced instruction sets, but are still complicated.
The rest I agree with, and this hijack is overly long anyway.
I’ve seen technicians, no doubt good ones, post how stupid their PhD bosses are because they can’t run the machine as well as the technicians can. None of them seemed to have an inkling of how the study the technicians were running the machine for got designed. Sometimes they don’t have a clue about the stuff that is learned in college.
Some of the best welding engineers that I know are electrical engineers. Automotive welding is resistance welding, largely, and it’s an electrical engineering process much more than actual degreed welding engineers like to admit.
On thinking about it more, I’d fail anyone who multiplied by 1.0006. A huge part of physics or engineering is knowing what to ignore, because it’s not going to be relevant. To wit, something is irrelevant if it causes a much lower error than something else in your problem. And by far, the largest error in your calculation is going to be the infinite-plates assumption: When your distance between plates is the same as the radius of each plate, you’re going to have very significant edge effects.
There’s also the issue that Bob told Mike to measure the capacitance, not to calculate it (which would also nicely resolve any issues with the edge effects and with the dielectric constant of air).
My first job out of college was with Motorola supporting the production of little electronic things. I have a physics degree, not an EE degree, though. One night at a bar, my friend and I ran into a co-worker that I worked with. We chatted for a while, and he told us all about how he cheated his way through college to get his EE degree. His frat had all of the old exams, and he just memorized them to pass the classes. My friend had an EE degree from the same school, and he had a horrified look on his face, stunned that anyone would cheat their way through college much less admit it in public.
The cheater was found out pretty quickly when they realized that he didn’t know what he was doing, and he lost his job. He was more into music and went on to DJing and concert promotion.
You can get through school by being a diligent student while still not gaining or retaining much useful knowledge or skills. There are a lot of schools with a lot of standards and differing curricula for particular fields of study. Add in the trend of gradeflation, remote learning, and sometimes outright cheating and it’s not that hard. It requires some effort, you have to do the assignments, show up when needed, and can’t tank exams, but you only need to get the minimal required grade for enough required courses to graduate. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, it’s the very reason people are interviewed and tested for jobs.
Some people can do very well at school, gain an appropriate level of skills and knowledge and still just not be a productive worker. That can happen with people who do great at interviews and testing also. Very difficult to screen for that.
I have two engineering degrees that are decades old (neither in electrical engineering). However, I also went to Naval Nuclear Power School, which included a course in electrical engineering, and I actually taught this material when I taught physics…but that was over 20 years ago. Anyway, I had no issue with either problem posted in the OP.
My own experience with incompetence in the workplace was a new hire with a civil engineering degree who was asked to measure the area of sidewalk to be replaced. While walking the site, he measured the length of the sidewalk with a rolling measuring wheel. He then measured the sidewalk width in a few places because the width varied. Instead of multiplying the length by width of each sidewalk section and adding up the individual areas, or multiplying the total length by average width (which would have been close enough for an estimate), he carefully put all of the individual sidewalk lengths and widths into a spreadsheet—then added up all the lengths and added up all the widths and multiplied these two totals to get a result that was wildly off. He then incorrectly converted square feet to square yards.
I was gobsmacked. When I brought this to his attention I expected him to immediately recognize his errors, but he just did not get it, even when I drew him a picture. He did not last long in our department. It’s bad enough to not be able to do basic engineering, but basic plane geometry?!
The operative word, here, is “was”. There was a time when having the ability to produce full-custom silicon was enough to set you apart from your competitors (and counterfeiters).
Exactly. Though “high volume” has changed, in the intervening decades. Selling a few thousand pieces of an item in the 80’s was high enough volume that you could get the folks who were designing the MPUs to pay you a visit in the hope of capturing your business. Now, with ~100K/yr quantities, I’m “just another customer”…
I have several hundred quad core, ~800MHz CPUs (AArch64) in my current design. I “waste” a good deal of that capability building emulated environments that would previously have only been achievable with custom silicon. Writing an emulation is cheaper and more flexible than commiting to silicon, even with VHDL, Verilog, etc. I can fill a stock room with huge quantities of “virgin” components and defer binding their functionality to them until they arrive at a customer’s location. That’s not possible with custom silicon.
IME, folks often enjoy reading about topics that they might have – nor ever likely encounter – any prior experience. Esp if they aren’t forced to participate (e.g., at a cocktail party).
In engineering, one of the best predictors I’ve found is the level of passion for a topic. I am far more inclined to recommend hiring someone who has done something “in his garage” (regardless of the level of technology) than someone who “got good grades”.
Excellent point. I’d say the same about medicine. I’d much rather be treated by a doctor that is putting in effort into my case and who had average grades than the doctor that graduated at the top of their class but barely glances at my chart and rushes through visits.
My PCP would go out of his way to answer my (endless!) questions – much at the cost of folks in the appointments following mine (hey, if he didn’t WANT to spend the extra time with me, he could easily have brushed my questions aside).
He was genuinely interested in “practicing medicine” which, in his mind, involved getting a buy-in from patients. If they were engaged with his recommendations, he assumed they would be more inclined to follow them. Folks who “just wanted another pill” likely had 5 minute experiences and went on their way.
Sadly, he retired (well into his 70’s; I suspect he is NOT enjoying it!) so I now have to “adapt” a new PCP to being more actively involved in my care (I assume most doctors have the attitude that patients don’t really engage in their care so why should they make an extra effort?)
OK, this is the first example in this thread where I, a person whose degrees are all in English literature, understand exactly why it’s wrong
More seriously, from a college professor’s perspective: there are a lot of perverse incentives that keep institutions from gate-keeping as much they should. If you’re adjunct / otherwise non-tenured faculty, you can lose your job if students give you low enough ratings on their end-of-semester evaluation forms (and even if you’re tenured, having to deal with a bunch of grade complaints is a pain in the butt). You’re seldom observed by other faculty, and only rarely is there any systematic attempt to track how students who take courses with a particular instructor do in follow-up courses, let alone in the working world, so it’s tempting to be less rigorous than you ought to be. Moreover, the college wants to retain students and their tuition, so near-unlimited second chances are usually built into the system; and, if the student is engaging in academic cheating and not just general fecklessness, the burden of proof is very high. (As it should be – you don’t want someone to be kicked out of school because they’re simply better at what they do than most students at their level, or because their roommate copied their work unbeknownst to them.)
All of those pressures get amped waaaay up if the student happens to be an athlete in a sport that the school is known for, and while most of those students get funnelled into some major other than electrical engineering, tutoring-that-is-really-cheating-assistance is a thing that can happen in almost all programs of study.
I am not familiar with this practice (“school” is pretty far in the rear view mirror).
Does this mean these “forms” are dispensed in the final session of each class? And, processed after the class has ended?
How is anonymity maintained? I.e., why would I want to be perfectly candid about my experience if I might encounter the same instructor in my NEXT class?
Why would the university act on these subjective evaluations WITHOUT folks standing by their comments? (“face your acusers”)
How can this practice be seen as improving the quality of the school’s “product”?
When I was hired by a airplane manufacturer 40 years ago, we all noticed that all of us engineers had put some variation of “likes to work on cars” as one of our interests on the resumes. We figured the department director specifically looked for that. And I think he was right to pick that - almost everyone hired then is still working here and are good contributors and knows their shit.
Nowadays, they’re mostly done online, but in my experience when they’ve been done on paper, the instructor hands them out during one of the classes near the end of the semester and then leaves the room while the students fill them out. Then one of the students collects them and takes them to the academic office.
But, are they anonymous? Or, do they rely on the notion that the “academic office” will maintain their privacy?
And, if anonymous, how can they (institution) give them any credibility? If you have to defend your OPINIONS, you tend to consider them a lot more carefully.
It seems like collecting them at the end of your education would be a better approach – they can identify their authors and still protect them from recriminations. The school could contact those authors afterwards to address comments from the teachers responding to their comments – if you choose not to defend them, then they are discarded.
Dunno. Above my pay grade but this seems far to easy to abuse and contrary to the assumed goals.
Dunno. Above my pay grade but this seems far to easy to abuse and contrary to the assumed goals.