Engineers are Poorly Educated

I thought I would learn the secrets of the physical world taking honors quantum mechanics and honors electricity and magnetism over the same semester during my junior year in college. All of those nights spent hunched over my desk patiently scribbling out integrals on my notebook paper, only to find I missed a minus sign and my 30 lines of algebra were incorrect. All I learned from those classes was that solving physics problems was hard and time consuming. Passing these difficult courses and others like them are badges of honor (or badges of horror depending on who you ask) for engineering and science students all over the world. I guarantee everyone with a liberal arts degree had at least one fellow student in the hard sciences scold them with a statement similar to “Oh you were up all night writing a paper on a Greek play written 2000 years ago? I had a three hour physics exam at night consisting of only three problems, none of which I could finish. Pick a real major.” In our defense, engineers do get a lot right with our mathematics and computer simulations. Ours are questions ancient plays and philosophers lack the ability to answer. But what happens when we engineers can’t find satisfactory answers to our own questions?

Much of our modern world including electricity, medicine, planes, spaceships, and the internet were created by people who took courses just like the ones we took. Going further, many of these haggard heroes of science created the fields we now study. Standing on the shoulders of giants, we felt it was necessary to let everyone know how great and hard won the view was. Anyone can read an old play, but not anyone can solve multiple partial differential equations within a time limit running on 5 hours of sleep (I found out I couldn’t either). I’m here to tell you that myself and my fellow engineering and science students were deceived. Physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics may describe much of our world, but to paraphrase Shakespeare “There are more things in heaven and earth, Wyatt, than are dreamt of in your quantum mechanics course.” And we should be thankful for that.

Now, to you liberal arts students readjusting your tortoise-shell glasses and brushing the pipe tobacco ash off of your tweed jacket to tell me “My dearest Wyatt, we have been endeavoring to enlighten you engineers for decades that you require education the in the humanities, as everyone does. How can you change the world when you can’t recite Plato from memory?” I get it, saying engineers lack a “well-rounded” education isn’t new. Before you get too excited from this admission of defeat and knock your Earl Grey tea onto the floor, I want to make it clear that I also find it ridiculous to blame any lack of technological progress on engineers avoiding Tacitus and Hume.

Peter Thiel, a famous venture capitalist, summarized our modern technological plight when he stated “We wanted flying cars. Instead we got 140 characters.” Why don’t we have flying cars, supersonic air travel, or energy too cheap to meter? Are there not enough talented people studying physics, or neurology, or chemical engineering? Are all of the nerds going into finance to make money instead of solving world hunger and creating fusion energy?  Globally more people study engineering and science than ever before. What gives?

We like to forget scientific progress is hard.There’s a reason it took thousands of years of recorded human history to get where we are today. The last 100 years have been an aberration of extreme scientific progress, not the norm. To continue the exponential improvement in living standards, engineers will have to ask new questions about old problems. For answers, we will have to look outside of our engineering education as currently practiced.

An unexpected way out of this dilemma revealed itself when I read through advertising executive Rory Sutherland’s book Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business,and Life. When Sutherland described improving public transportation, he reframed the question in a way that an engineer would never instinctively ask: “The scramjet or the hyperloop might be potential moonshots, but making land- or air-travel-speeds so much faster is a really hard problem – and comes with unforeseen dangers. By contrast, I think ‘psychological moonshots’ are comparatively easy. Making a train journey 20 per cent faster might cost hundreds of millions, but making it 20 per cent more enjoyable may cost almost nothing.”

The original engineering problem of improving trains by increasing train speed was reframed into a psychological problem of making the existing trains more enjoyable to ride, so the riders care less about how much time they spend on the train. Rory, with his alchemy, transformed a thorny engineering and public safety problem into a mere bumpy but solvable design problem. This was truly a dark art of the most sinister kind to an engineer. How dare he ignore our beautiful math and magical metals. If anything, Rory understands our own sciences better than us and realizes that tackling the problem with the proposed engineering solutions won’t help anyone anytime soon. What other engineering solutions have been over-optimized and still cannot be easily implemented?

This is where current engineering and science education fails us. Engineers and scientists are trained to see the world as a tangle of interconnected science and math problems. When a problem becomes too difficult to solve with known methods, we create more PhDs to develop complex methods for solving the problem analytically. This is the life of your average science and engineering PhD student - describing and optimizing an already optimized system, process, or phenomena. Of course some problems do have analytical solutions, and our methods are great for finding them. But these methods fail us when we reach the end of meaningful optimization and still lack a usable solution. We are not taught how to leverage other disciplines to reframe problems when we find ourselves mathematically optimizing with no usable solution in sight. My long physics exams demonstrate this deficiency in education. I cannot pass my physics class by deciding that it’s easier for me and better for future physics students to answer “how can I make sitting at this desk for three hours more comfortable?” instead of solving the actual physics problem. However, when solving real-world engineering problems, other solutions outside of further optimization may provide meaningful solutions at lower cost monetarily and mentally, like Rory’s solution for making trains 20% more comfortable instead of 20% faster to improve rider experience. The design problem of rider experience is now the problem to solve, not the engineering problem of increasing train speed. How does this new problem solving tool affect engineers’ current methods?

Many people say that education in engineering and the hard sciences lacks “well-roundedness”. Who cares about being ‘round’? How many useful spherical, not sharp, tools can you think of? Engineering students need to avoid seeking ever more complex mathematically optimized solutions to hard engineering problems that never get implemented. When we find we cannot build our hyperloop right now, is the best answer to continue researching the hyperloop and propose slightly better iterations every few years until someone decides to build one? No, not when solutions are needed now. Instead, look for the alchemical solution as Rory does by reframing the intractable engineering problem into a solvable problem in another field.

Think of this new method like the wonderful Fourier transform. Sometimes you have to transform the problem into a different domain for the solution to show itself. Look outside of your engineering and science textbooks. Study psychology, marketing, economics, and yes maybe even the dreaded sales.You don’t need to recite Shakespeare from memory (but hey you might find you enjoy that too if you tried), but you do need to study other fields outside of math and science. Modern technology continues to demonstrate the power of mathematics when solving engineering problems. But not every engineering problem needs an optimized mathematical solution to benefit the human users. Think of that the next time your simulation for squeezing out an additional 4.3% increase in phone battery life crashes and you question if this problem is even worth solving.