2 replies to this topic

[Art Montemayor]

Tatum:

Your query is very general and not specific; however, I believe I know what is on your mind and what you are anticipating when you graduate.

If you are under the illusion that your engineering school will specifically teach you everything (theory, equations, methods, techniques, etc.) you will need to solve problems in industry, I believe you will find out differently. What I mean by this is that any engineering curiculum can never do that specifically and in detail. There simply is not enough time in 8 semesters nor enough professors with up-to-date, hands-on experience to bring that about.

However, what a good engineering school will do is teach you to learn after you graduate. You should be able to take the basic tools and teachings taught you and combine these with day-to-day key learnings to successfully resolve any engineering problem given you. One of the basic things you should walk out of a university with is the ability to communicate. This, by far, is the outstanding tool that will enable you to inquire, ask questions, and explain your problems in consise, accurate, and articulate language. By doing so, this will generate subsequent detailed and important information that will aid and assist you in forming your own personal expertise with time and opportunity.

Remember: if you are to be a successful engineering leader in the future you must learn to lead, organize and teach those people that will be put under your responsible charge. You cannot lead nor expect persons under you to successfully follow poorly communicated or articulated instructions or orders. The obvious result in such situations is correspondingly poor results or mistakes - leading to failures and possibly accidents. Graduate engineers are expected and paid to be leaders - not followers. They, above everyone else in industry, are supposed to dominate in the technology and make the major and important decisions. The physical and mechanical work is expected to done by those under the engineers - whether they are clerks, operators, or techicians. That is why the engineers are paid the higher salaries - not because they simply graduated, but because more is expected and demanded of them.

It is because of this leadership role that you will never stop learning after you graduate. That, I can easily guarantee, will be what will happen if you continue with your career in engineering. IF you seek a high and responsible engineering position, the answer to your question is that you will use everything you were taught - and then some! In fact, the more successful you become, the more you will regret not having taken more electives while in university - courses like English, writing, Psychology, business, and others. You will discover that the more tools you accumulate, the more problems you can attack successfully and efficiently. You can never learn enough if you are to be an ambitious and successful engineer. The less capabilities you have, the more the probability that you could be assigned to a dead-ended technical position where all that is expected of you is to calculate a specific type of problem day-in and day-out.

So, in summary, it is to the degree of your future expectations in engineering that you will need or use the basic tools that are taught you in university. After I graduated, I found that my university had done a fairly good job of training me to confront the basic problems I first encountered. After that, I also found they had taught me to use the basics to generate more knowledge by extrapolating and extending the basics.

I hope this response has helped form a good idea of what will be expected of you and what you will need after you graduate.