Studying for a career in engineering takes a lot of your time from the age of 18 (and slightly before) until the age of 67 (in the UK) and sometimes beyond. So use GCSEs to find out about the rest of the world and life!


The most useful (in the long term) subjects I studied at O level and CSE were: History, Sociology, English Lit, and - most of all - Music.

The Maths, English Language, and Physics I did I would largely have learned anyway (and indeed largely did anyway) because I was interested in engineering (and English).


I believe very very strongly that schools should be broadening your knowledge, not narrowing it for some adults' idea of a possible 9-5 job for you - when your idea or the job itself might change completely after a few years anyway! Also, GCSEs are a fantastic "taster" for finding a whole range of things which you (or particularly your parents) might not have dreamed could become a life long interest, whether in work or not. Hence the fact that I encouraged my children to do as many as possible. The actual GCSE qualification is pretty much irrelevant for anything except one thing (see below), it's the new insight that you get on the way that's important.


The "one thing" that the GCSE result is useful for is this: when you find a GCSE subject that unexpectedly grabs you, you can then demonstrating to sixth form or FE colleges (again in the UK) that you are genuinely interested in that subject and are prepared to work at it.


At my children's school they used to (when they were there) study GCSEs and A levels over 5 years, this meant that they could gather huge numbers of them if they wanted. (In fact my daughter took GCSE Astronomy when she was 12, but that was an after-school activity run by the school.) Excellent idea, opened their eyes to all sorts of things: both for my daughter who knew form an early age exactly what she wanted to do, but it confirmed it for her and gave here useful wider sills, and to my son who until the moment he applied to Uni didn't.


One of the (many) reasons I'm so passionate about this is because of two complementary well-known issues we see in the UK related to engineering.

1. Those who have not studied engineering, and who come form non-engineering backgrounds, don't know anything about it at all, and consequently make badly informed political and societal decisions regarding engineering.

2. Those who have studied engineering and nothing else, and who often (in fact in my experience very often) come from engineering family backgrounds, struggle to put their work in context, and often do not understand the societal implications and constraints on their work. As a trivial example, trying to explain to my parents-in-law how to work Windows.

Very interesting debate on this topic last night at the IEEE / IRSE seminar on Ethics in Engineering. We all have a duty to understand each other's world and explain our own. And the wider our underlying knowledge outside our area of specialism the more likely we are to be able to do this.

The above, of course, applies to every profession - not just engineering.


But anyway, life's about much more than what we do 9-5. As my father, a Chartered Engineer, very wisely told me when I was a teenager (probably when I was making my O level choices): "if all you know about is engineering you'll grow up to be a very boring person".


Cheers,


Andy

Studying for a career in engineering takes a lot of your time from the age of 18 (and slightly before) until the age of 67 (in the UK) and sometimes beyond. So use GCSEs to find out about the rest of the world and life!


The most useful (in the long term) subjects I studied at O level and CSE were: History, Sociology, English Lit, and - most of all - Music.

The Maths, English Language, and Physics I did I would largely have learned anyway (and indeed largely did anyway) because I was interested in engineering (and English).


I believe very very strongly that schools should be broadening your knowledge, not narrowing it for some adults' idea of a possible 9-5 job for you - when your idea or the job itself might change completely after a few years anyway! Also, GCSEs are a fantastic "taster" for finding a whole range of things which you (or particularly your parents) might not have dreamed could become a life long interest, whether in work or not. Hence the fact that I encouraged my children to do as many as possible. The actual GCSE qualification is pretty much irrelevant for anything except one thing (see below), it's the new insight that you get on the way that's important.


The "one thing" that the GCSE result is useful for is this: when you find a GCSE subject that unexpectedly grabs you, you can then demonstrating to sixth form or FE colleges (again in the UK) that you are genuinely interested in that subject and are prepared to work at it.


At my children's school they used to (when they were there) study GCSEs and A levels over 5 years, this meant that they could gather huge numbers of them if they wanted. (In fact my daughter took GCSE Astronomy when she was 12, but that was an after-school activity run by the school.) Excellent idea, opened their eyes to all sorts of things: both for my daughter who knew form an early age exactly what she wanted to do, but it confirmed it for her and gave here useful wider sills, and to my son who until the moment he applied to Uni didn't.


One of the (many) reasons I'm so passionate about this is because of two complementary well-known issues we see in the UK related to engineering.

1. Those who have not studied engineering, and who come form non-engineering backgrounds, don't know anything about it at all, and consequently make badly informed political and societal decisions regarding engineering.

2. Those who have studied engineering and nothing else, and who often (in fact in my experience very often) come from engineering family backgrounds, struggle to put their work in context, and often do not understand the societal implications and constraints on their work. As a trivial example, trying to explain to my parents-in-law how to work Windows.

Very interesting debate on this topic last night at the IEEE / IRSE seminar on Ethics in Engineering. We all have a duty to understand each other's world and explain our own. And the wider our underlying knowledge outside our area of specialism the more likely we are to be able to do this.

The above, of course, applies to every profession - not just engineering.


But anyway, life's about much more than what we do 9-5. As my father, a Chartered Engineer, very wisely told me when I was a teenager (probably when I was making my O level choices): "if all you know about is engineering you'll grow up to be a very boring person".


Cheers,


Andy