One of the biggest difficulties facing an engineering student today is the fact that by the time they graduate, the technology they learned in college will already begin to be obsolete. This means that the students of today need to be taught to develop the technology of tomorrow. So how do you teach an engineer to develop technology that doesn’t exist yet? To me the answer is fundamental; to me it is a way of thinking.
The classes I have taken at Purdue taught me that there is more to the material than just the material. Each new subject brings about new perspectives, new ways of approaching problems, and new ways of analyzing the world around me. I have taken signal analysis classes, which don’t just teach how to compute Fourier transforms, and what to do with that answer. They teach the idea that any signal can be broken down into fundamental components, and these components manipulated independently before being recombined in a more suitable fashion. I have taken classes on electricity and magnetism, which don’t just teach you how to compute magnetic flux, but provide an understanding of what creates these fields, how they can be tapped into, and what can be gained by doing so. Then there are the circuit classes. These begin by teaching you the basic building blocks, but that is only the first step of circuit design. They taught me that almost anyone can design a circuit, but a truly good engineer can design a circuit that can operate at extreme temperatures, in the presence of extremely noisy conditions and all for a fraction of the cost. This is what being a good engineer is about.
I have always been an avid “do-it-yourself” individual. And a number of the projects I’ve worked on in my own time have contributed as much to my experience as my school work. Granted more often than not it was experience of what not to do, like the time I made a plasma speaker and didn’t buffer the audio input (the CD player I was using to test it nearly exploded under the resulting power surge). These projects have always been a hobby of mine, and are what inspired me to pursue research opportunity at the University. I spent a summer doing undergraduate research with one of my favorite professors in the nanotechnology field. The insights I gained into the inner working in a research field were astounding. Though nothing could have prepared me more for the workforce that the time I had spent as an undergraduate intern.
I worked at a biotechnology company called “Genzyme” for 3 summers as well as a number of winters. I was there helping with the development of their new “Laboratory Information Management System” (LIMS for short). I was writing new programs for the system in order to provide various data reporting options depending on where the information had to go. Since there was sensitive data within the system, these reports had to be very carefully quality controlled to make sure they meet the requirements of the various regulatory agencies for which they were destined. Of all the things I learned working here, the most useful was the perspective. For every hour of invention, there are two hours of documentation, and this is just how it is.
So how do you prepare an engineer for the unknown technologies of the future? The answer is simple, give them perspective. The more varied my experiences became, so too did the variance in what I perceived as solutions increase. There is rarely one answer to a problem, and for a good engineer to pick the best answer, they must know all the possibilities. --Darichar 23:00, 2 February 2012 (UTC)
