While 2016 welcomes a new crop of high school and college graduates, it also marks 20 years (!) since my college graduation. So in honor of the high-schoolers who are now facing their first semester in college and the college graduates who are finally going out into the “real” world, here are 5.5 lessons that I learned in engineering school. And while my education was in a technical field, each of these lessons can—and likely will—be applied at some point in your academic or professional career, whether your background is technical, humanitarian, or the arts.
1. Learn the theory
Tools are available to handle virtually any calculation, analysis, or design verification, but as the old adage goes, “garbage in, garbage out.” Don’t get lulled into a false sense of security because the tool is doing the work for you. If you don’t understand the data you’re putting in and have an idea of what the output should be, you may fail to recognize when a result is way off base. Sure, not many of us do long division by hand anymore, but you probably did enough of it as a kid to recognize that 372 divided by 6 does not equal 57.
2. Double-check your work
Gone are the days when you get partial credit for your work, even if the final result is incorrect. If you’re designing the gearbox for a wind turbine and it turns out to be undersized, it won’t matter that you did all the calculations correctly and just forgot to convert your units at the end. Case in point: look at the time and money spent correcting the original Hubble telescope mirror.
3. There’s not always one right answer
If the main purpose of your job was to perform calculations to get numerical results, you might begin to believe that every problem has one, definitive answer. But as engineers, our job is to solve complex problems with many variables, and that means there is almost always more than one “right” answer.
For example, in my senior design class for mechanical engineering, there were six or seven teams competing to solve a manufacturing problem that had been posed by an industry partner. Each team came up with a vastly different solution to the problem, yet all of them were functional, and most were commercially viable. The decision of which design to implement came down to factors that were manufacturer- and plant-specific, such as ease of integration with other equipment. The same is true in the “real” world. Often there are several solutions to a problem, and the one that gets chosen does so not so much for technical reasons, but for reasons of cost, integration, training, or the customer’s familiarity with a particular product or process.
4. Learn *all* the skills
Welding, public speaking, reading circuit diagrams…When you come across an opportunity to learn a new skill, take it. Even if you think you’ll never use it in your professional career, you’ll be surprised at what you might end up doing in a pinch. And even if you never have the need to weld a machine frame or read a circuit diagram, understanding what these skills require will help you work more effectively with the people who actually do them.
5. Prioritize
The majority of us, even high school students, know that we should distinguish the “urgent” from the “important.” But when most of your tasks and timelines are driven by others (i.e. professors or team members), it becomes difficult to weed out the things that aren’t truly important or time-critical. In reality, pretty much everything that gets assigned to you is important in one way or another. But prioritizing based on difficulty, timeframe, and significance to your learning (and passing) is the only way to stay sane in an engineering program. And similar principles apply in the professional world.
5.5 Failure is ok
On the surface, this one seems to go against #2, but hear me out. Yes, it’s important when you’re designing or building something for it to be effective and safe. But not everything that we do as engineers involves final design or assembly. When you’re attacking a completely new problem or looking for a new way to solve an old problem, you need to be creative, which means trying things that might not work. And if your solution doesn’t work, you still learn something from the failure, even if it’s simply disproving a hypothesis.
This one, admittedly though, is difficult for many of us to embrace. Especially if we grew up in a culture where success was measured by test scores and awards won. But today, as engineers, learning through trials and failures means a lot more than getting it right the first time.
What lessons did you learn in engineering school that you would share with recent graduates?
Johnnie Abbott says
Danielle,
You hit the mark on these, but missed one important point. During my over 40 years working as a machinist, sheet metal fabricator and finally Quality Assurance I have been amazed at the number of green engineers that think since they have a college degree and I don’t they are always smatter than me. Years ago I was dealing with a customer engineer on a blueprint issue. The part was a 3″x3″ metal square with a hole in the middle. The problem was that the hole diameter was 4.125″ which made it bigger than the part. The engineer asked me where I graduated college from and when I told him that I was not a college graduate he informed me that he made no mistakes and that he had designed the part using ACAD which makes no mistakes! I finally told him that I would send him an empty box and charge him for the parts in it and for him to prove me wrong that there was not 4.125″ diameter holes in the box. I have always learned everything I could and never told anyone “I don’t know how to do that”. There is a wealth of knowledge out there and there is no reason to not be able to learn the basics of most things.
Paul Bock says
I learned this one from my physicist grandfather that was a radar operator in WWII and application engineering manager of an analog electronic and mechanical instrumentation company. Always work with nature, with the nature of a problem. For example, fans that work with the flow of natural convection will do more useful work than ones that work against the flow of natural convection. So often as engineers I think we feel we have to fight nature to be good engineers. When we can be more productive when we work with nature.
William K. says
Knowing the theory and the kinematics of stuff is the really valuable part of what we should be learning in engineering school. Also we need to be learning to learn. I started out in electronic engineering because that was my degree, but quickly it became vital to be able to also design the physical structures that supported the electronics. Then I learned how to run a Bridgeport milling machine so that I could not only design mechanical stuff but also add in the dimensions that a machinist needs to make those parts. Adding the extra information not only speeds production because the machinist does not need to calculate those dimensions, it also reduces the probability of errors. That helps projects get built faster and cheaper and improves quality at the same time, enhancing one’s reputation.
Knowing the theory is how we can evaluate the results of our calculations, using the “Mazelowski Criteria”, which asks “Is this answer reasonable”. Professor Mazelowski was my instructor for a number of courses, including motion control and complex AC circuit analysis. That simple check has saved me from professional grief on a few occasions, and saved my superiors from some really unfotunate errors a couple of times. Bosses do remember being saved, even if they don’t talk about it.
Mark Sheridan says
A few of points:
Simulation is not reality. You have to validate any analysis that you make with real world testing.
If there is only one right answer, you are in trouble. You have no fallback position when that solution fails. The same with a single source supplier, when he quits making your part or changes the design on you, you are screwed.
Always listen to others, even if they are not as smart as you, they may have more experience which is relevant. And they will always give you ideas if you are open minded.