engineering graduate school question

Fortune 100 multinational. If you're really in the workforce, I pity you, because your employer sucks.

You lost me here.

In what way? Attributions are 'joe wrote:' initial lines. One goes with each block (depth) of quoted material. You stripped them. Look back at the message you originally wrote, and what you were replying to (if still available).

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                        cbfalconer at maineline dot net

On Jun 18, 5:32 pm, "Joel Kolstad" wrote:

You hit the nail right on the head.

There is a situation that is even worse than working on some professor's pet poodle: having you own ideas and not being able to pursue them because every researcher in the field automatically insists that you work on their pet project. Utterly disgusting.

What is ironic is that, long ago, Ph.D.-like programs were typically confined to the domain of true thinkers - people who had their own, original ideas, and were unafraid to be left alone for 2 or 3 years in a (metaphorically speaking) empty room to come up with something brilliant.

Today, the Ph.D. program, for many students, is regarded as a program of entitlement - "If you do X, you can expect Y." You can test this assertion very easily. Go to any Ph.D. program in the country, good school, bad school, whatever...does not matter, and ask the aspiring Ph.D. candidates.."What is going to be your focus area?" Until they start in the program, most of them don't have a clue, and those that have already started the program are typically working on some professor's dog.

Now this is not to to say that this is immoral. Obviously, this program of entitlement has become institutionalized and is now consider a normal expectation of the academy.

What is criminal is when you have someone, who has truly original ideas, and that person is squeezed, unable to find a channel to explore, create, etc. Also, if I might continue my misanthropic rant, I do not believe this situation came about accidentally. I have learned that there is a constant struggle between the group and the individual. There is a TV commercial in the United States by the corporation GEICO that makes fun of this fact. But in truth, it is very sad. You have people who have zero creative ability, and rather than leave those alone who do, they pro-actively engage in behaviors to abate any distinction that might arise between their work and the work of others. I have seen this in the academy. I have seen this in industry. I think this is why there are so many other responsibilities that researchers might have, like teaching, etc - there are those who have enough ideas to last 100 generations, and there are those who could not think of anything original to save their lives. If both are in the same department with the same title, the former will attempt to promulgate any policy that allows him/her to do serious research, serious thinking, the kind that the great masters did. The latter will undermine any such policy. What's odd is that you can generally tell within one hour which category these two types of "researchers" fall in. The former will not be able to shut up about new ideas, possibly concocting original ideas in real-time as the discussion proceeds. The latter will be evasive of anything that might test his/her originality. They will be quick to steer the subject away from their work.

I think it is a travesty that these two types of people are typically mixed together in the same department. I wish someday the thought leaders of academia will learn that this is foolish, that it only delays the inevitable [true thinkers eventually find their path anyway, and charlatans die hard], and separate these people. One group will do pure research. The other group can do whatever the hell they want, so long it is not to interfere with the first group.

I've noticed over the last three years that there has been a bit of a backlash against the technorati. You might remember back in the

1970's that there were people who had vague, pseudo-technical titles, like "Business Analyst."

Let's look at this phrase for a moment to see what I am getting at. It has both the words "Business" and "Analyst". Most people who see the word "business" implicitly assume that the holder of the title has business-related skills, like sales, marketing, etc. Most people who see the word"analyst" implicitly assume that the title-holder has analytical ability, a trait typically possessed only by those with technical backgrounds or a proclivity to solve technical problems.

Now this title is extremely convenient. If you meet someone in the hallway, someone with this title earning $130,000US for essentially doing nothing butter uttering jibberish that s/he read in a "management" book at local bookstore, it becomes difficult to disprove that person's worth to the company. If you are a technical person, the charlatan can be excused of his/her technical incompetence because s/he can immediately claim, "I only know the business aspect of our processes." If you are a business person, the the charlatan can, again, worm his/her way out of accountability by claiming, "Hey, I'm just a techie who likes to communicate difficult technical concepts to executives to help them make informed decisions." Executives, many of them technically incompetent (not at all companies), like very much the idea of having a liason between them and the people who actually know what's going on.

So it's a perfect title.

I watched one company recently, in a shake-up, fire many of the contracting engineers, and start creating many "Business Analyst" positions in their place. There were open requisitions for engineers, but all the positions except technical positions were getting filled. I called the head-hunter for the technical positions to give her a heads-up on what was happening, which she later verified. This company has over $1,000,000,000,000US (trillion) under assets, and I had alway suspected that the management was full of caca, many of them grossly incompetent. They were part of an acquired company that had managed to squeeze every penny of profit out of the company and fatten their salaries with it. With 300 employees, there were 40 cases of nepotism, as could be determined from the last names on company intranet. Any how, the parent company got upset, trying to figure out what happened to all the profit, and called for a shake-up, and that's when all the engineers got fired and the "business analyst" positions were created.

This should have been obvious from parking garage. You can tell a lot about a group of people by how they drive in a parking garage (New York notwithstanding). There were one step away from the cut-throat, dog-eat-dog, save-my-own-ass first type of people who would cheat on algebra tests in high school just to get by with a passing grade.

-Le Chaud Lapin-

It sounds like you are falling into a common trap - assuming the past must have been better than the present, because its just to awful to believe things have always been this bad. In practice very very little changes over time.

Steve

Actually it's a bit worse than this. 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. Practical skills (such as original research) aren't even mentioned, let alone taught. 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. And let me emphasize that this was not some clown who had no practical knowledge. He very much knew which end of the soldering iron to grab. But he had no idea where to start research. The poor guy literally freaked out! He couldn't handle it. He dropped out and I don't know if he ever got his degree.

Happily MSEE candidates aren't expected to do anything significant in the way of original work. Most any kind of bogus study will do. But I don't want to imply that the whole exercise is a waste of time. A masters candidate gets a good up front immersion in the whys and whatfors of productive work even though the final product may end up of questionable value. The Thesis is not the point. It is this practical experience in real life questions that actually makes the MSEE so much more valuable to an employer than say the BSEE who actually doesn't have any idea which end of the soldering iron to grab.

Benj

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".

-Le Chaud Lapin-

Why is it not 'Le Lapin Chaud'?

Regards,

Michael

[snip] [snip]

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.

Your mileage may and probably will vary. Julius

Cos iff its got gud gramma and speling, it wouldnt luk lik an inginear wrowt it.

Steve

On Jun 21, 11:37 am, Spehro Pefhany

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.

That's sick. Why doesn't hot bunnies make you think of Playboy, like any normal human being? :-)

Steve

Because he's not actually fluent in Français?

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

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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

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.

Julius

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 --

-- 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.

---Joel

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.