The Value of an Engineering Degree

At about $10,000 tuition per semester, an Engineering degree is worth $80,000. It's a hefty deposit, but it's the mandatory prerequisite for entering the Engineering industry (without prior work experience). 

But what happens in the 4-years that transforms a student into an Engineer? 

What I learned in Engineering School is...

I've leafed through my old notebooks: pages and pages of handwritten notes, equations, and solutions. These notes provide objective evidence I learned this material in my past, even if I can’t recall it at the moment. I remember the late nights of studying, and the emotions (stress, despair, etc.) from completing these arbitrary assignments. Through all my effort, these homework answers wouldn’t achieve anything, since they were just theoretical problems with known solutions.

I started my Mechanical Engineering (ME) degree when I was 18 years old. Even then, I wasn’t quite sure what engineers worked on (maybe, engines?). As I went through the undergraduate studies, I went through the typical academic pattern: sit through lectures, read chapters, copy/paste solutions for homework, and cram for exams.

Dramatic reenactment of me studying

This type of education is flawed since it only requires rote memorization (monkey see, monkey do) to succeed. A straight-A student only has to remember the right formula to plug and chug through the assignment (consider the difference between knowledge vs wisdom). 

The true purpose of these assignments were personal growth. Nobody had forced me to enroll into engineering school except for myself. Like an RPG game, school to used to level-up minds so they can to solve high-level problems.

The class subjects itself may not seem irrelevant, but they're typically abstract concepts that make them challenging to learn. A self-respecting engineer should feel capable of approaching any problem with a refined methodology. A professor told me that when an engineer is stumped, they should never say: “I don’t know”. Instead they should say: “let me check my notes”, and then go through their textbooks (or Google search) to gather more information to devise their problem statement.

School: Learning how to learn

An engineer’s education should prepare them with the skills to approach brand new problems never encountered before. If they were easy problems, people wouldn’t have to spend years studying (and thousands of dollars) to hone these skills.

The ME curriculum is diverse; requiring classes in thermodynamics, material sciences, statics, and linear algebra. Throughout my degree, my only focus was on completing the coursework. While going through these courses, I wasn’t seeing the bigger picture yet, but I was still gaining essential skills:

• Time management: Balancing between school, work, extracurricular, and entertainment
• Workload management: Prioritizing between five different course loads
• Listening comprehension: Gaining value from lectures and group meetings
• Reading comprehension: Efficient learning from assigned readings

Experience and improvement of these skills are highly beneficiary for any major, industry, hobby, relationship, etc. 

Industry: The Real-Word

Once I completed by school and actually began working, I was able to put these skills into practice in the manufacturing industry. Unlike school, where my work quality could only impact my grade, work as a manufacturing engineer impacts the entire site’s productivity and quality system. I was in the position to make massive savings for the company, or to get our site shutdown. 

Within industry, I was bombarded with loads of jargon, both from the proprietary product line and industry gold standards. The first meetings were hard to follow; none of my classes ever taught about statistical process control, validation pathway, or gage R&Rs. My medical device classes taught about the general FDA 510K process, however the stakes are completely higher when product is already being manufactured, purchased, distributed, and inserted into real patients.

A manufacturing site will have an internal quality system to train their employees on important documents. There are hundreds of assigned readings for these documents (work instructions, manufacturing procedures, standard operating procedures, etc.). There is rarely a structured curriculum to learn this material; an entry-level engineer is assumed capable of learning it all without hand-holding.

Once I’ve finished all these trainings, it is assumed by everyone that I have complete working knowledge on the product line and quality system. Unlike school’s reading material, these documents were very real and had massive impact on how we operate our business. Employees at all levels are bound to these documents. Any changes made to these documents requires awareness of their widespread impact to other processes and sites.

An engineer is industry is usually responsible for multiple projects or assignments. Specifically, a manufacturing engineer owns these projects, as well as supports the production line which may have unpredictable issues. Properly functioning as an engineer in industry requires rapid adaptation to different mindsets between projects, similar to managing four different classes in school.

Conclusion

A college degrees provides objective evidence to employer’s that a candidate is capable of learning and completing assigned tasks. Juggling multiple classes helps prepare students for the competing priorities that work (and life) demands. Being able to rapidly adapt to different subjects and environments is invaluable for any field.

In life, we encounter problems that don’t have solutions at the back of the book. Companies rely on trained engineers that can rapidly learn material and develop the most optimal solutions.