One of the things that sometimes surprises engineering students is that a degree gives you very little knowledge, in fact it could be argued (and I'd tend to agree) that that the better the degree is, the less knowledge it gives you! Why? Because engineering knowledge dates very very quickly. What a degree should be helping you discover is how to assess, process, and apply knowledge, and that skill can certainly equally well be learned by experience, it's just that a good degree programme gets you there faster.


So I think the way to answer this is, if you're faced with an engineering problem which you've never seen before, can you work out how to solve it? (Of course including working out how to solve it in a way that's as safe, reliable, and efficient as possible, and meets all the customer's needs etc etc. I'm not including the way I solve problems I've never seen before in my workshop, which tends to involve a 2x4 ? ) If so, then you've got to the point that a degree is trying to get you to.


What is important is breaking the idea that the best way to solve problems is always the way they've been solved before. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. Very simplistically, technical training (FE education) teaches how the last generation of engineers solved problems, degree education helps think about how the next generation of engineers can solve problems, and as we all know most problems fall somewhere across these. 


Cheers,


Andy

One of the things that sometimes surprises engineering students is that a degree gives you very little knowledge, in fact it could be argued (and I'd tend to agree) that that the better the degree is, the less knowledge it gives you! Why? Because engineering knowledge dates very very quickly. What a degree should be helping you discover is how to assess, process, and apply knowledge, and that skill can certainly equally well be learned by experience, it's just that a good degree programme gets you there faster.


So I think the way to answer this is, if you're faced with an engineering problem which you've never seen before, can you work out how to solve it? (Of course including working out how to solve it in a way that's as safe, reliable, and efficient as possible, and meets all the customer's needs etc etc. I'm not including the way I solve problems I've never seen before in my workshop, which tends to involve a 2x4 ? ) If so, then you've got to the point that a degree is trying to get you to.


What is important is breaking the idea that the best way to solve problems is always the way they've been solved before. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. Very simplistically, technical training (FE education) teaches how the last generation of engineers solved problems, degree education helps think about how the next generation of engineers can solve problems, and as we all know most problems fall somewhere across these. 


Cheers,


Andy