"ENGINEERING EDUCATION AND THE REAL WORLD"

Members of The Theta Tau Fraternity, past and present; and friends of the Theta Tau community.

It is a great honor to be addressing you this evening and I appreciate your tolerance and patience for listening, just when you thought you were getting a bit of relief from the daily grind of classes with professors droning on and on.

As you are aware, Theta Tau started in 1904 right here at the University of Minnesota. It is the nations oldest, largest and foremost fraternity for engineers with 39 active chapters and 29,000 members and alumni.

The mission of Theta Tau is to instill high professional ethics and exemplary standards in the upcoming generation of professional engineers.

Tonight, I'd like to address the topic of how formal education fits into this mission.

I want to focus on the relation of formal engineering education at a university to what is so often referred to as "the real world". Is there a link? Is there any relevance in what you learn here to what you will be doing "out there"? I like to think so.

My goal is to convince you that effective education must cover both the very practical and the highly theoretical, and that both are needed to thrive out there in the real world.

Although my comments are aimed at the students in the audience, I hope that those who are past their student years (but aren't we all still students?) will be able to adapt my comments to their current experiences.

This is a great time to be a young engineer. Incredible new products are being introduced at a dizzying rate. Companies are growing, Gen-Xers are driving startups and entrepreneurship.

You don’t have to wear a tie or a white shirt, and pocket protectors are a thing of the past. The slip-stick (for all you youngsters in the audience, that means "slide-rule") has mercifully been replaced by calculators and computers.

Despite the current down turn in the economy, the unemployment rate is still low, particularly right here in Minnesota. It's even lower for those in the engineering profession.

At the same time, starting salaries are at an all-time high. I hope you go out and make lots of money --- and then donate it right back to the U.

Despite this rosy picture, I want to turn our attention to a trend among engineers that is beginning to concern me.

I’d like to talk about reality.

Now reality doesn’t worry me, but virtual reality does. Don’t get me wrong. I am a big fan of virtual reality. In my lab we are conducting research on new ways of creating virtual product prototypes to reduce or eliminate the need for hardware. Exciting stuff.

But, I’m nervous because modern engineering seems to be moving slowly away from the real world and towards a virtual world dominated by computational analysis, and designs done entirely on the computer.

The nuts and bolts of this virtual engineering world are computer-based simulations of electronic circuits and fluid flows and truss structures. The virtual engineering world prides itself on locating manufacturing plants so far away from company headquarters that most engineers never get to touch the product they are working on.

As engineers, we are slowly losing our ability to interact directly. Simulations and virtual worlds distance us from the real world. I worry that if us engineers lose touch with reality, who is left to retrieve it and who is left to create the next generation of advanced medical devices and smart cars that require a solid grounding in reality.

Many new ventures are by and large service oriented. A service to help you purchase textbooks. A service to deliver groceries to your door.

We are rapidly moving from a manufacturing economy to a service economy based in the virtual world, where rather than generating value through new products, we are simply moving around the value we already have.

Thirty years ago, students entering the engineering program came in with many experiences from their youth which involved direct interaction with mechanical devices. Farm kids spent their time operating and fixing machinery. Gearheads tore apart old cars. Wireheads dove into their reel-to-reel tape recorder to align the heads.

Today, life moves faster, with more choices and more options. Video games have replaced mechanical entertainment devices. Cars are so reliable, they hardly ever need to be repaired. When they do, the electronic ignition and fuel injector control systems make it impossible for the mechanically curious teen to tune the engine. Consumer products are better and cheaper than ever before. They don’t break, and when they do, it is easier and less expensive to discard and purchase new, rather than to repair.

Students now enter the university without childhood experiences that bring them in intimate contact with real devices.

My advice? Buck the trend. Don’t be afraid to be hands-on. Don’t be afraid to take something apart. Don’t be afraid to build something.

Leonardo da Vinci is one of my personal heroes. Artist, architect, anatomist, city planner, inventor, and engineer. Much of Da Vinci’s work is preserved in his sketchbooks, including the Codex "Les-ter" (Leicester), the one purchased by Bill Gates in 1994. Four thousand pages of remarkable, annotated drawings, designs, visual thinking, and inventions.

Da Vinci detailed the intricacies of flying machines, 400 years before the Wright brothers. He invented machines for warfare, and for excavation and for automated manufacturing. He has one sketch of a submarine, which is the earliest known reference to underwater vehicles.

But in the hands-on sense, Da Vinci was a sham. As far as anyone knows, none of his inventions were ever built, and the modern models in the Milan museum are fake.

Leonardo was not a hands-on inventor.

Turn now to Thomas Edison, the world’s most prolific inventor. 1093 patents, including the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph and the motion picture projector.

Edison founded the first industrial research laboratory in 1876 in Menlo Park, New Jersey. He promised a minor invention every 10 days and a major product every six months. His organization had 40 projects going at a time, and applied for up to 400 patents each year.

Edison’s legacy to modern technology is unparalleled. Da Vinci only needed his sketchbook, but what Edison needed to thrive was his lab where he tinkered, played, built and tested. Now there was a hands-on engineer.

My advice to you is to be like Edison. Be hands-on.

Take a welding or sculpture class at your local adult education center or community college. Volunteer to do an engineering workshop in your local elementary school, and build the equipment for your demo yourself.

Enter the Rube Goldberg competition sponsored by Theta Tau.

Take up woodworking or clay making. Engineers who feel comfortable in 3-dimensional arts are better engineers. Invent something, then challenge yourself to build your invention --- not just think of it, not just draw it, not just give it to the machine shop, but build it --- yourself.

Splurge and buy a lathe, or a desk-top milling machine or a table saw, or a printed circuit board making kit, ….or at least a portable circular saw or an electric drill…or even a screwdriver.

Dissect things, build things, understand things.

Think you will get ahead just by knowing computers? Well, guess again. At our local high school, they offer a two-year program in computer networking, certified by Cisco Systems. You can also do it mail order. Computer networking has become the auto-mechanic school of the new millennium.

If a high school student can become a skilled network manager, where does that leave you?

Well, that high school student won’t know how to operate in the real world. She won’t know how to optimize the size and weight of a robotic arm truss structure to go on the next Mars rover, and certainly won’t know that it will be challenging to weld aluminum for the prototype. But, you will know because you have taken the care to ground yourself in reality.

Perhaps this is doing a bit of patting ourselves on the back, but I believe here at the University of Minnesota, hands-on reality is doing quite well thank you, and you, our graduates are well versed in the real world.

At the end of any semester, you can walk through the teaching labs and see real hardware, designed and built by students, be it computer-controlled robots in Mechanical Engineering or novel consumer electronics products in Electrical Engineering, or lightweight concrete canoes in Civil Engineering.

Our instructional labs are real labs filled with real equipment, not virtual labs filled with computer simulations. All of you have or will build at least one project of your own design. These are invaluable experiences. Only by building your designs can you begin to understand what works and what doesn’t, and where the ideal-world theory applies and where it does not.

I think you are now in great shape to buck the virtual trend and to keep us grounded in reality, but you have to work to keep your real-world skills sharp because the world of simulation can be very tempting.

So with all this talk about practical hands-on being so important for making an impact in the real world, why is it that we keepers of curriculum at the University spend so much time on engineering fundamentals?

Let's take off on another path, the second branch of education, in hopes that at the end, the answer to this question becomes clear.

The most disturbing part to me in reading these days about the madrassas in Pakistan and elsewhere that educate thousands of students in fundamental Islam, is not that they teach the Koran, for that is indeed a noble goal. In fact these institutions perform a valuable service by providing free education for the poorest children who have no other place to go for education, food and shelter.

No, what disturbs me about some of the madrassas is the style of education where students learn by parroting instructors. There are no questions, there is no discussion.

Growth through education is all about learning to ask questions, learning to participate in the lively exchange of ideas, learning to challenge, and being open to accepting conflicting views.

You might not think this is relevant to engineering education where everything seems to be set in the stones of history and all that you learn has been that way for 100 years.

But this is very relevant, and I encourage you to take up the path of challenge, even now while you are still learning the fundamentals. But, to challenge effectively, you must know those fundamentals.

Perhaps you would be wise not to challenge engineering bedrock for it is somewhat of a dead end to butt heads with Newton's F=ma.

Rather challenge yourself to apply what you learned to creating new systems and products, to molding engineering theory to new applications such as living systems or the environment or the stock market.

Challenge traditional design conventions the way the Palm company has done with its Palm Pilot. Palm resisted the temptation for feature creep that has plagued Microsoft Word, and over the years has kept its simple, easy-to-use, and effective interface that allows you to note an entry on your calendar without much more thought than writing on a paper-based Day Planner.

Or, challenge convention the way IDEO did when they examined the toothbrush. Why did all toothbrushes have narrow handles, difficult for kids and the elderly to manipulate? Convention. Tradition. Working with Oral-B, IDEO came out with the first line of "fat" toothbrushes, and you only need look on the shelves of your nearest Target store to see their instant success.

Last week I bought a new rake that has two sets of tines spaced like those on a double-blade razor. Crazy idea? Possibly, but this product breaks the mold for rake designs and I couldn't resist? Does it work? Yes, remarkably well, as I found out yesterday taking advantage of the few minutes we had between raindrops to do some lawn cleanup. A nice clean sweep with little effort, although probably not the "twice the raking speed" claimed on the package.

Challenge design conventions. Why is it that a smart bomb can deliver its charge from 30,000 feet with deadly accuracy, but at the same time is subject to human error in entering targeting coordinates. Clearly, design is more than technology. Set yourself the challenge to go beyond how it's done now.

Hey, and keep in mind that if you really know your fundamentals, even F = ma can be challenged Einstein did it with relativity theory and won, showing that F=ma does not generalize when you look beyond familiar experiences.

Armed with the fundamentals, challenge convention and reinvent yourself as the world changes.

Nano is big right now. Billions of federal and industrial dollars are going into nano research and development trying to find useful applications.

Is nano more than just the world getting tired of "micro". Does that extra ten to the minus three mean something? (It's great to be speaking to an engineering audience where I can say things like that.)

Yes, definitely. One need only look at novel coatings, at the particles that make up pollutants, at the molecular-scale of DNA, cell membranes and muscle proteins, and at what must happen to semi-conductors if Moore's law of computing speed will continue, to recognize that small is powerful.

So reinvent yourself. You are learning engineering fundamentals in school. Apply them to the nanoworld. Nano is still governed by physics, it's just that surface tension dominates over gravity and inertia so objects can fall up and mass doesn't really matter.

Reinvent yourself. Biomedical science is undergoing a huge revolution and engineers are right there. Cryogenics have tremendously exciting potential for targeted cancer therapy. These therapies result from the complex response of cells and membranes and catalytic reactions to temperature, but underneath it all is still just chemistry and thermodynamics.

You are educated. You know the fundamentals. You are different than the garage-shop inventor who tinkers with a carburetor and dreams of designing new automobile energy sources. Without knowing the engineering fundamentals this person will never be able to create the new products that will drive genetic engineering, will never be able to understand the potential of nano-machines, will never be able to revolutionize the way we think about products and devices.

Reinvent yourself, armed with the power you have to understand the fundamentals, and the courage to apply them in innovative and exciting new applications that nobody has thought of before.

You may often think that what you are learning is pointless and completely irrelevant to the real world.

"Too theoretical!" "Let's have more Pro/ENGINEER training in class!" "What do I care about the Bernoulli equation; I'm never going to use it in my job!" "Why are we learning theory of programs when all I want to do is learn Java so I can get a job!"

Common cries among engineering undergraduate students. But, the job of the university is to educate. It is not to train. You are smart. You can train as the need arises.

That's the power of engineering education. That's why you are here at the University of Minnesota getting one of the best engineering education in the world.

At the university, learn the fundamentals and arm yourself with the practical so that when the real world changes, you can change too.

Even better, why not let it be you who changes the real world!

Thank you.

[W. Durfee, Theta Tau Alumni Association Founders' Day Dinner, October 15, 2001]