This class is a joke
Next week, I’ll be finalizing the syllabus for my fall classes. I am again teaching the university studies classes for the electrical engineers. My goal in teaching last year was to help my students develop good study skills and awareness about their learning preferences. I also attempted to teach them some STEM specific skills, like keeping a lab notebook and learning some basic programming, along with helping them try to understand what they were getting themselves into by pursuing a major in engineering. However, in the past two weeks, I’ve been inundated with requests from various people around campus. “Can I give a presentation on X?” where X may or may not be of interest to campus students, especially engineers. I have to admit that this is getting rather annoying as I have a mostly full curriculum. There are times here and there where maybe I have 15 minutes where…
How good we engineers have it
You may think we here at Engineer Blogs are “glass half empty” folks when it comes to employment and salary expectations for engineers (though really, the glass was poorly designed with too much capacity). I’ve talked about the overhyped STEM recruitment here before. It’s no secret I don’t believe in an engineering or STEM shortage. I’ve looked at engineering employment over time and it doesn’t seem to indicate any increasing demand or a salary increase based on a higher market value for engineering professionals (unless you’re a software engineer). Cherish just wrote last week about engineering being a common background for CEOs. One of our commenters asked whether engineers need really be concerned with having more options beyond the engineering job. As a former non-engineer in the workforce, I can certainly sympathize with this perception. It does seem like an engineering degree is much more the key to a job and…
STEM Recruitment Ponzi Scheme
A couple of days ago my colleague GEARS covered some STEM Employment Data that the US Department of Commerce recently released titled STEM: Good Jobs Now and for the Future. Regular readers of mine know I tend to be overly critical of these sorts of assessments. I tend to see them as optimistic and naive. On my own blog a couple weeks ago I talked about engineering jobs by discipline, then I looked at engineering employment over time and engineering pay, and then I broke down engineering employment and pay for mechanical, civil, and electrical engineers. One of the favorite myths the powers that be like to toss around is that a bunch of engineers and technical workers are going to suddenly retire and STEM jobs will be in demand. So in my eyes this report isn’t a whole lot different. Their two major claims: that a STEM degree leads…
Overhaul academia – except in engineering
I’ve come across yet another article on how academia needs to be overhauled. I find these articles interesting because, from the perspective of a scientist, I definitely see where the problem is. On the other hand, I don’t see this as often in engineering. Most of the arguments against the current academic system of training PhDs involves the law of numbers – there are simply too many PhDs and not enough academic jobs to support them. Be that as it may, this doesn’t seem to be as horrible in engineering. I think there are a couple things that make getting a PhD in engineering an easier choice. (Keep in mind that I’m making sweeping generalizations based on my observations and comments from various professors over the years.) First, I think very few engineers actually want to get a PhD. Most see the path to higher marketability as coming through an…