Olin College — Re-Engineering Engineering 181
theodp writes "In its College Issue, the NYT Magazine profiles tuition-free Olin College, which is building a different breed of engineer, stressing creativity, teamwork, and entrepreneurship — and, in no small part, courage. But questions remain as to whether the industry is ready for the freethinking products of Olin, and vice versa. Few of the class of 2006 are going on to grad study in engineering or jobs in the field."
Predicting short term failure and long term succes (Score:5, Interesting)
Watch the graduates !
They will have trouble with the established firms set in their ways.
Thus they will be unemployed at a high rate.
And because of that they will start their own companies !
And Profit !
Re:Predicting short term failure and long term suc (Score:4, Interesting)
True that (Score:2)
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You can be right, and you can be so right you're wrong.
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Everyone is a potential customer.
You were being a prick, you got called on it, suck it up and deal.
Ford and Amish (Score:2)
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Not as engineers though right? I mean, engineers still need to work in the industry under a PE before they can sit for their PE license. (broad concept...) Well, I guess they could hire PEs and work under them while still being their boss in some way...
all the best,
drew
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biOFnAlXrV8 [youtube.com]
UFO engineering there...
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Yep, legal in all states to have a PE as one of the managing partners of the company and have non-PEs as the other managers. Not sure about just hiring PEs, but I'm sure that there are some who don't want to be arsed to deal with the business side of things, and would be perfectly happy as chief of engineering or something.
Besides, not all design work requires a PE. You just can't represent yourself as an
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Sure. I wasn't hinting otherwise.
I graduated in 81 with a BS in ocean engineering. I sat for and obtained my Florida State Engineer Intern Certificate. (I seem to remember us calling it the EIT.)
I never did a lick of work in the field after that and ended up teaching myself what I needed to know to get by in the area of computers.
all the best,
drew
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Perhaps this is the missing intermediate step in the underwear gnomes' formula?
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I like engineering being like that too cuz then you get more inventions. It takes a company forever to invent something new with all the budgeting and paperwork and meetings and higher ups and blah blah blah. If engineers can't get hired, they just invent someth
Correct:Predicting short term failure and long (Score:2)
I think, this could be another element (like OSS, Open standards
I can always hope.
Hard facts first (Score:3, Insightful)
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I don't know whether to be ecstatic that my job is secure, or annoyed that my employees from now on will all be clueless idiots....
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In fact, they are very valuable skills and attributes to have. Not just in engineering, but in life.
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Apparently you missed where I said "knowing when you don't have all of the information/experience that you need and when to defer to others who *do* have the requisite skills and experience"
Part of the follow up to realizing that you don't have the information or skills that you need is to acquire them if you need to.
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Re:Hard facts first (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting facts:
Most airplanes are designed by one person.
Most computer chips are designed by one person.
Buildings, ditto.
Oh wait. Hmm.
Anyway, even if engineering specifically didn't require the ability to work in a team, modern life does. That's why companies exist in the first place-- you can make more money together than apart.
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Teamwork is nice, but it's more important that you know what you're doing. It's not too hard to learn at least the basics of teamwork while working on a large project, but it's extremely difficult to learn the basics of what you're doing while working on the same project.
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So true.
A-holes abound in all job fields, and lots of them got their jobs because of who they know,
vs. what they know. Butt kissing and nepotism play a big factor in some jobs in the US.
I imagine it occurs overseas as well.
I have seen ppl at companies here in the US who are totally unqualified for the job
that not even decent ppl to wor
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Not that practicing teamwork skill isn't important - but aside from practice in general social manners, the only useful things I can see actually teaching someone are less teamwork and more leadership.
In my experience, the best teams of anything aren't a group of equals - they're a gro
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Yes... Unfortunately the public school system sucks, and universities are left to do quite a bit of catch-up. My school is very internship oriented (all undergrad engineers must take 6 internships before being allowed to graduate), and it never ceases to amaze me the kind of stupid jerk-off things students do while at work. There's much work to be done yet on them.
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Are you suggesting that there is no mathematics or science or any of the other things this program has to forgo in order to have its students attend the happy feel good courses it describes?
The problem with engineers today isn't that they look at their shoes when talking so someone like they say in the article, thats a joke, not real life. In reality, many engineers are very outgoing people, and those that are not are perfectly capable of working with a team. Real engineers rarely fit the stereotype of
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To digress, when I was a kid, I really thought that I would be working in energy or space. But then I realized
Quasi-Old Fart Observation (Score:5, Informative)
Olin is not inventing a new kind of engineer, they are trying to bring back the engineers of my father's generation. But they can put out the finest people on earth and it won't matter. Bean counters run companies now and they don't like what a good engineer has to say. Horrible things like "we need money to develop this idea", "saving ten cents per item will not save you money in the long run when it breaks and you have to replace it" and the ever-popular "outsourcing production to the cheapest labor you can find is not a good idea because it takes a little bit of skill and QA/QC to build it right".
Re:Quasi-Old Fart Observation (Score:5, Insightful)
Olin College was my first choice when I was applying to colleges a few years back (alas, I got rejected) largely because the things they emphasize ("creativity, teamwork, and entrepreneurship") aren't geared to produce engineers that will simply serve the "bean counters" better. Note the emphasis they place on entrepreneurship. These "new" engineers are not supposed to take your standard entry-level engineering job, they're supposed to come up with brand new ideas and create new companies that will be founded on the same concepts that Olin was, thus actually chaging the role of engineers, not just how they're taught.
I think they think that long term change is easier to accomplish by changing the playing field rather than just training the players differently.
Re:Quasi-Old Fart Observation (Score:5, Interesting)
But to make new companies it takes experience and a business plan. Enter the bean counters. And the bean counters now control the playing field.
It can be done, and it still happens. But primarily, engineering is no longer respected. The engineer as innovator is underfunded and engineer as quality/safety voice is unheard.
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Speaking as a two-time — soon to be three-time — entrepreneur, there's a mix of internal and external factors at play here.
External factors, like America's sue-happy society and mountains of regulation, can't readily be addressed by any individual firm or college program. We can only hope that enough individual firms and college programs take root th
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I agree, you need to do your time in the trenches. If nothing else it gets your head out of the clouds. And if you're going to make mistakes - the raw material of experience - better to do them on someone else's expense rather than your own.
I think the goals are fine, but they'd work better as a postgrad (ideall
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Maybe you should apply to Olin.
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Manufacturing stuff that blows up (people)?
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Would you rather ship the best possible product or the one we can make a living of?".
The best possible product that people will buy? There's such a thing as a reputation for quality.
Or "tell me why you think this indian engineer, who's probably in the top few percentiles of indians in general, can't do as good a job as you?"
He probably can. Good luck getting him for cheap.
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Come *on* moderators! That's gotta be a "+5 funny".
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Good plan. (Score:2, Interesting)
I, as a student of a public high school in America, take in more force-fed facts that are expected to be regurgitated, and get fewer and fewer chances to let my creative juices flow. Rather than writing that a person thinks something happened, I think someone could get more of a benefit out of writing about why it happened.
Perhaps that's why all forms of math are just so hard for me to wrap my head around; I know that things work, but I don't see why
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I, as a student of a public high school in America, take in more force-fed facts that are expected to be regurgitated, and get fewer and fewer chances to let my creative juices flow. Rather than writing that a person thinks something happened, I think someone could get more of a benefit out of writing about why it happened.
Perhaps that's why all forms of math are just so hard for me to wrap my head around; I know that things work, but I don't see why it's u
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Now one of the things that always bugged me about primary and secondary education is that they were lacking the creativity to figure out ways to challenge, or at least keep interested the students that found the material in classes excessively easy.
That is mainly a problem of parents not the schools, in that there are ways around it even right now but few parents want to take the effort to do so for their children or actually force their little brats to learn something.
There are magnet schools, distance learning programs, grade skipping, taking classes at local college, taking classes from higher grades, learning on your own, moving to a district with better schools, sending kids to a district with better schools, summer programs, college level summe
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I agree with you, but I'm seeing a much different problem with our schools. That problem is that the work they make students do is crap!!
My son has a passion for learning and will absorb facts and details, but what he's getting from school for homework make it appear that teachers have a passion for drilling and for useless time wast
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First, that has nothing to do with the No Child Left Behind Act, I can assure you public schools were like that well before Bush was ever president. Hell schools were probably like that before any Bush was president, though that would be from before my time. Many (especially here on /. where Bush isn't exactly seen in high regard (not sure how the reconcile the fact Ted Kennedy was the one who really pushed it through though)) like to blame all the woes of our education system on that act, but that belie
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I will make one suggestion regarding homework, though... I was like you in high school... never did any homework, managed to do all right by acing tests. THIS WILL NOT GET YOU THROUGH COLLEGE, at least
Misfits (Score:3, Insightful)
- How to change Wall St. to stop looking only at the next quarter's results?
- How to deal with PHB's and bean counters?
- How to persuade the customer to fund your "freethinking" idea instead of the customer's idea?
If not, Olin is producing useless misfits. Oh, I agree that "misfit" is something "good" to be sought after in a certain sense -- creativity is what makes us human. But that's not what the economy needs in the post-Industrial Revolution world.Disruption == Key (Score:5, Insightful)
Industry is floundering because it has stopped giving engineers and creative types the responsibility of actual creation. If we, as a society, wish to bring engineering and manufacturing back to our side of the world, we need colleges and programs like the ones that Olin is taking on. We need engineers who will develop & create beyond our expectations. This is important to the future success of America.
- DaftShadow
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Making the claim that engineers need to be by-the-book, follow orders types, is quite disingenuous. They are like that right now, and look what is happening to our engin
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Problem one is how best to train your smartest students.
Problem two is what happens to the line technicians when you automate their jobs. Because realistically they're not all going to be moving to research-level tasks. Most of them won't be anything like smart enough.
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A great point. I still don't have a complete answer to this yet, although I have some ideas that I can expand upon. I should note first that all the 'line technicians' in the USA account for only 2% of the job force. That being said, GEM consortium [gemconsortium.org] has research showing that entrepreneurial a
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After technology throws people out of work, they have an incentive to find a new use for their talents. The Dallas Fed economist W. Michael Cox and the journalist Richard Alm illustrate this process in their 1999 book Myths of Rich and Poor, citing history's most striking example, the drastic decline in agricultural employment: "In 1800, it took nearly 95 of every 100 Americans to feed the country. In 1900, it took 40. Today, it takes just 3....The workers no longer needed on farms have been put to use providing new homes, furniture, clothing, computers, pharmaceuticals, appliances, medical assistance, movies, financial advice, video games, gourmet meals, and an almost dizzying array of other goods and services."
DISCLAIMER: My dad runs a robotics engineering company. I was certainly raised to cheer when a machine could put thirty humans out of their job at the factory, because /every
Paradigm! (Score:3, Funny)
Well, best of luck to them. My exciting new paradigm of sleeping in until midday every day hasn't caught on in the stoic and unchanging business world. They just haven't caught on to my forward and freethinking ways. But just you wait... my Slashdot story is coming soon!
Y-Combinator(Olin) (Score:3, Insightful)
Y-combinator seems to be generating 40 quickie get-big-or-die-trying companies a year. What I found interesting is that in a few years 'Alumnus of Y-combinator' is going to have a very good cachet associated with it - just as an MS from a good college does. There're going to be a bunch of successes and even those who don't succeed will have the associated aura. The guys who put themselves through Y-combinator are a self-selected bunch of motivated people, who might even have an above average chance of succeeding in life.
Olin students might have similar self-selected characteristics. And in a few years, the results of that experiment - with widespread Olin alumni support - are going to be worth watching.
Note, I'm in no way related to either. Just speculating on a correlation that I see.
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A drop in a bucket ( a very empty bucket at that ) (Score:4, Interesting)
The other problem I have with it is that the ideas espoused are not terribly new. At the University of Nebraska's School of Engineering students can enter the JD Edwards Honors program with an emphasis in Business.
http://jdedwards.unl.edu/ [unl.edu]
I tend to not hire CompSci or CompE students from this program because as entry level hires they have incredibly unrealistic expectations about their first job. They all want to transition to management right away before cutting their teeth on engineering design. So we tend to skip them over when we get resumes.
Sean
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You say
It hardly helps with the overall lack of new students majoring in those subjects at university in the first place
you also say
I tend to not hire CompSci or CompE students from this program because as entry level hires they have incredibly unrealistic expectations about their first job
To me it follows that what you want is cheap, submissive employees that just do what some "manager" told them
Really, why should somebody do engineering ?, do managment instead. You will know nothing about what you are managing (Dilber Principle) but at least you will be rewarded with a manager position and the associated money
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So he rightly said that when recruiting for engineering positions, he didn't tend to look at these schools.
By the way, when I started work as an engineer, it was as a Student Apprentice, and I did a lot of workshop, and assembly line, work, as part of it. I have the knuckles to prove it.
Few take engineering jobs (Score:3, Interesting)
Few of the class of 2006 are going on to grad study in engineering or jobs in the field.
This is no surprise since engineering job opportunities for US citizens have been dwindling in 21st century.
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This may not be a bad thing. I would be a much happier engineer if there were more people in the marketing, sales, and product management roles who had a better background in engineering.
tuition-free? (Score:2)
Someone please show me where on their web site it states that the education is tuition-free. All I can find is this: Cost and Financial Aid [olin.edu]
You have to get the Olin Scholarship, which has the equivalent amount of the tuition. But it certainly does not say anyone admitted will be qualified. You certainly will have to go through the competitive qualification process, just like any other colleges?
If it's really tuition-free, I'll apply for a graduate engineering degree in a heart beat.
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Everyone who is admitted receives the scholarship. In fact, for 06 and 07s, room was included as well.
However, we do not offer graduate degrees. Olin is undergrad only.
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Sounds like it's not true in a sense as much as true; room, board and books are not tuition. Did you expect a pony too?
Given an example of your comprehension ability and writing style, I'm not sure that's what kept you out.
Former MIT faculty (Score:3, Informative)
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Besides being up to the department to decide where to place the emphasis, within the the limits of Institute policy,
this is an overly broad generalization. I only know of three tenure cases personally, and in at least one of them
teaching over research was most definitely not a problem. Nobody understands what the hell happened with the second,
and the third being the recent BE prof. is also a complex mess.
Other schools are doing this too (Score:2)
While I am not certain from this story what exactly Olin is doing, the general concept is not new. The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology's "ABET 2000" standard was intentionally designed to allow colleges to come up with programs similar to this. Instead of mandating you will must take "Calculus I, II, & III" like older ABET standards, much more finer requirements are required, which no mandate on which course provides the lecture. For example: I intended an ABET 2000 certified engin
WPI started something similar in the 70's (Score:2)
A project-focused curriculum (I notice that project orientation was the first thing the NYT noted about Olin), including multi-term projects: a Major Qualifying Project
All colleges must do like Olin (Score:2)
learning to think differently (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:learning to think differently (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/barometer.asp [snopes.com]
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I liked the story, I don't think it even needed a name attached to it to have value.
There was a time in high school art class where I refused to do a project because I did not feel that the teacher had a right to grade it using her opinion of what was or was not art or good art. She gave me an F which was enough to prevent my graduating. I ended up having to stay after school and do an art project where it was preagreed that it was not to be graded. I did graduate
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So if you asked the question to business or accounting majors, they'd probably ask who has financial responsibility for returning it safely to its rightful owner.
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I've known Olin Students for the Past Three Years (Score:2, Interesting)
Like I said, I am not qualified on their engineering talent. I do know that they only accept students who can demonstrate a committ
Re:I've known Olin Students for the Past Three Yea (Score:2)
Actually, the funds came from the F. W. Olin Foundation [olin.edu], originally from funds left by Franklin W. Olin [wikipedia.org] after his death. He got the money by starting the Olin Corporation which among other things owned Remington rifles and did a lot of chemical engineering. Olin himself was a Cornell graduate.
Depth (Score:2)
Teamwork comes naturally and doen't have to be taught. On the job, your manager giv
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Teamwork comes naturally, but you need experience. The biggest problem most fresh o
Patience. Wait till 2009 or 2010 to evaluate (Score:2)
Few of the class of 2006 are going on to grad study in engineering or jobs in the field.
2006? Good to keep tabs on graduates, but I think it will take more than a year to gauge the effectiveness of the program in serving its graduates. Maybe wait till 2009 or 2010 to evaluate the prospects of the Olin University Engineers.
I know the best and brightest are often encouraged to do stuff like Peace Corps after graduating. I wonder how many Olin Engineers are building bridges in developing countries and getting some hands on experience that way?
And graduating debt free means they aren't automat
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Re:courage (Score:5, Funny)
It certainly allows you to cross the worst ones.
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Well, it helped me tell someone higher up that the bridge he approved would collapse.
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They just happened to have put in a modicum of effort to lend credence to their social engineering, while
working in a few subtle jokes. http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/2006/mitcannon/ [mit.edu]
For instance, the "moving company"'s name is "How & Ser." & is a ligature of et, latin for and. Read aloud,
How et Ser becomes Howitzer.