Open Ended Questions
I’ve been wanting to post on the topic of Open Ended Questions for some time but haven’t been able to formulate my thoughts properly. One of the things that I think defines a person as an engineer is the ability to put forth potential solutions to open ended questions which may have several answers. I am particularly discussing questions where there is not one ideal solution but rather a series of tradeoffs and the person answering the question must justify their choices. One of the things I tried to do in the classes I taught this past year was to keep some questions open ended to see how students would formulate their answers. In some cases, this was successful but in others, not so much. The other thing that struck me as strange is there wasn’t always a connection between a student’s standing and their ability to answer open ended…
Generalist or Specialist
There’s a phrase: jack of all trades master of none. I was thinking of one’s progression as an engineer. When you graduate college you are in many ways like a Swiss army knife (drawing from rowland jones). You have a wide variety of basic tools but are probably not particularly good at any one thing. In many ways college teaches one the ability to learn engineering. And then you spend the rest of your career learning engineering. But at some point you have to start narrowing it down. Especially if you are, like me, a mechanical engineer or as one of my classmates put it a mercenary engineer. My degree qualified me to work in any number of disciplines: mechanical systems, fluids and heat transfer, structural analysis, flight and aerospace technologies, and manufacturing. The first job you take can often lead you down the path of a particular discipline within your…
Variation in Engineering Concepts Across Schools
I have been lucky enough to travel this month for a week to Korea, three days to Turkey, and four days to Denmark, and to speak with mechanical engineers in all three countries (both professionals and students). It was an intense experience, and I learned an amazing amount – but what also surprised me was how similar engineering is in every place. I have always been very glad that I went to a large state school for my engineering education, rather than an elite school. The main reason I went to the state school was quite simply because I could afford it, whereas I could not afford, say, Harvard. But I was also quite confident that I could receive a quality engineering education without the hefty price tag. For a music degree, or liberal arts, or more “subjective” types of majors, perhaps going to Juliard or a famous art school…