In news: snipped-for-privacy@q75g2000hsh.googlegroups.com timestamped Wed, 20 Jun 2007 22:53:42 -0700, Benj posted: "[..] [..] A PhD candidate is supposed to be required to contribute to the world's knowledge to obtain the title. The unfortunate aspect of this is that schools are usually highly centered upon class work."
Really?
"[..] Class work tends to involve lots of memory and agreeing with the professor (even when he/she is dead wrong). I knew this one guy, who was the ace student of the EE department. The guy never got a grade below an A in his entire life. But then suddenly classwork was over! He had not the SLIGHTEST clue where to begin doing research. [..]
[..]"
Unfortunately supposed research at the level of a Ph.D. can entail agreeing with a professor who is mistaken. If the professor can be mistaken on established fields in classes, the outlook for comprehending the research issues are not necessarily better.
I think you are right. As a matter of fact, now that I think about it, it might have been worse early on. Back then, if you had original ideas, the world might have never have known. Communication was slow, some letters taking months to reach colleagues. Today I can spam all
200 or so people on my private email list 1000 times in a single hour.
Also, the "social viscosity" was much higher, so if you were born poor, you were likely to remain so, same for being born rich, esteamed (pun intended), etc.
And of course, if I had said in public back then what I said earlier today, I might have been immediately ostracized, with real consequences, whereas now, I can say what I want under and alias that means "The Hot Rabbit".
One can go back 100 years and say pretty much the same thing about undergraduate education in the US, too. It used to be that admission to the top schools is gained simply by saying so. Of course, such choice is limited only to those coming from the appropriate social standing. Universities were supposed to produce fine thinkers (at the undergraduate level! Imagine!), the nation's leaders, etc.
Unfortunately to this gentlemanly arrangement, more and more people want to go to college, and thus a standardization effort began. In order to rank the candidates, grades have to be given. Of course, the new breed of candidates focus more and more on acing the standardized tests, and only the standardized tests.
I'm not saying that this system is ideal, but how can education at all levels be more democratized -- even at the international level -- without using some sort of standard measure of potential? I will come clean that without such opportunities, yours truly will not be where he is today. So perhaps instead of focusing on the negative, we should examine the positive: now there is an ever wider pool of talent who could possibly get a shot at higher education, regardless of where he/she comes from.
What standards are appropriate, and what are the costs of implementing such standards? One can speak of "non- academic, extracurricular achievements," but to a large extent such accomplishments nowadays fall into the standard for evaluation (read: resume-padding).
It is also instructive to compare countries such as the United States, France, China, and India -- where there are nation-wide standardized testing for admissions and students are likely to travel far from their hometown to go to school -- to countries where they do not have such a system, such as Italy, Germany (if I understood the system correctly). In the first group of countries, I have found that it is more common for people to ask where you went to school when just getting acquainted. Maybe this is because if you're from the second group of countries it is easy to guess where you went to school based on your hometown, but my impression is that in the first group of countries, people put more stock on what name shows up on your diploma, or what diplomas you have.
So as a result, I think it is not surprising that there is a lowering of expectation from the graduates, and there's ever more push to prove oneself by doing yet more schooling and getting more degrees. Maybe it is fair that the expectation is lowered, who knows.
I can't help visualizing this name as part of a deleted scene from Watership Down, where Hazel and Clover romp in one burrow while Bigwig and Campion role-play Woundwort and Hyzenthlay in another.
Heck, these days many high-schools require "volunteering" for various community service jobs for a certain number of hours in order to graduate.
I think there is an expectation, at least in the U.S. today, that everyone should go to college even though I don't think the skills truly required by industry are significantly more difficult (on average) than they were historically. Yes, today your generic average office worker needs to be able to use a word processor, spreadhseet, surf the web, etc., but is that really any more difficult than some factory worker who years ago needed to know how to assemble and maintain a handful of machines, type up reports, file, etc.? In many way I think it's actually simpler...
Joel, this is perhaps the result of over-politicization of education in the United States? I agree that college is not for everybody, but no public figure will dare say it in those terms.
In many other (usually more socialist) countries, there are vocational schools for those who are less interested in the pursuit of higher-education at the level of college. And in most of these countries, students are already split up into different tracks even at the middle and high school levels. I think this is a great idea, I don't see anything wrong with being a very good machinist, or woodworker, or anything else that is more suitably taught in vocational school.
In many systems, students have to choose their "major track" in high school: the choices are along the lines of "math and physical science", "life sciences", "social studies", etc.
The argument is then, at what point in one's life should one commit to one of these many choices? And that is another big topic that is hard to answer.
Nobody learns on the job any more - not even technicians. How would you learn basics like Fourier Series,FFTs etc on the job? You need a firm mathematical background to be a professional engineer. As for IC designers, at the Analogue end you do learn a lot on the job but that's after a good honours degree. It would be unthinkable for say Analog Devices to take somebody right out of school. The apprentice scheme is gone forever, we are professionals.
Some companies (especially larger ones) have plenty of formalized in-house training. And of course there are always those things called books... (and these days, the Internet).
Depends on what you want to be a "professional engineer" in. There are plenty of microcontroller/digital guys out there who are quite good at what they do but could no longer tell you much of anything about Laplace or perhaps even phasors. Look at the articles written in, e.g., Circuit Cellar Ink -- most of the authors are "professional" engineers -- and notice that many of them require no more of a formal academic background than that provided in high school to understand.
I'm not at all against continuing education -- I've taken *far* more college credits than I ever had to, because I enjoyed learning. But I also reject the whole "ivory tower of academy" myth that says that you need a degree from a standard four-year university to be a "professional engineer." Look up Jeri Ellsworth sometime --
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-- she barely managed to get out of high school, and while she did later take some college courses, she certainly didn't take the "standard" approach to becoming an engineer.
I'm ashamed(?) to say I've never read one. But I do clearly remember seeing Watership Down at the Dendy Cinema in Melbourne, Australia in the late 1970s. It's now a Christian revival cinema, or was eight years ago.
I saw her video from a Stanford lecture. First of all, she's vastly overhyped. She didn't teach herself anything post-childhood. She in fact learned the best/easiest way of all, by spending lots of time around the best in her field.
It depends on your perspective; she's no more "over hyped" in the field she's in than Microsoft's Windows Vista is in the realm of operating systems.
Not true.
That certainly is true -- "learning on the job," right?
Jer i deserves a great deal of credit for being able to create a reasonably complex "product" starting out with no formal background in the field; many (perhaps even most) of the EEs coming out of today's university system don't demonstrate nearly the tenacity and work ethic that she did.
Maybe, but one has to ask why. I was once assigned to write a technical manual for a laboratory fermentation controller that had over a dozen option cards. I was the new guy, ans everyone else was "busy". Nobody even had the time tell me what it was supposed to do. I spent two weeks exercising it in all its configurations and writing up the results, complete with illustrations of the various screen displays. The boss -- I had been hired over his objections -- pointed out several points on which my write-up differed from the spec. I told him that I hadn't seen the spec -- he had declined to give me one -- and that my write-up conformed to the machine as built. His reply was simple: "I know what I'm talking about. I designed it myself." I responded "I know what I'm talking about. I tested it myself. Show me different if you doubt it." He couldn't.
So she has, "tenacity and work ethic." Applaude her for that, not some fallacy the she is SELF taught. Electronics is so complex nowdays that no one could teach themselves enough to do anything complex. Let's say that I have work ethic. I bet that if I had worked with the best in the CS/EE field on the job working like the food on my table depended on it I would be much better off. The only problem is there is no security in that path, it's either work hard and get good fast or starve.
I dropped out of college, and later (when I wanted to get married and running the service department in a Hi-Fi boutique didn't seem to have an adequate future) I got a technician certificate (T-3) from RCA institutes. Not only did I learn to design transmitters and class-B plate modulators, but harmonic analysis (both algebraically and graphically) and Laplace transforms. Schwartz-Christoffel transformation anyone? I carried a lot of credit with me when I went back to college.
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