Alun Palmer wrote in message . ..
(Brian Kelly) wrote in
om:


Brian, I can't even understand that sentence. Can you try again?

I screwed that one to the wall good din I? It was late. The Scotch was
lousy.

Don't duck the bullet Alun, I don't have to try again, you bloody well
know what I mean.

I had to read it a few times. I think the reason for poor performance in
UK engineering has nothing to do with the quality of UK engineers and
everything to do with the culture of UK companies, in which the engineers
are not in charge, but instead the accountants are.

And this is not
because we don't study business subjects (we do), or because we don't do
English or History or 'Western Civilisation' in college (the accountants
don't either).

That's universal in capitalist democracies. But it's better than "the
other" system which proved to be mother of all socioeconomic duds of
the prior millenium.

There is a BSME/MBA I know extremely well who rose to the top of a
local technology-based quarter-billion dollar manufacturing
enterprise. He ran into a nasty show-stopping product design problem
which involved the need for far-end analytical work to resolve. He
groused to me about it. Sayeth me; "I toldja 'way back to get yer
PhD!" To which his response was, "Ah phooey, any time I want a PhD
I'll go out and buy one." Which is exactly what he did. That's our
fate and we done it to ourselves.


As I understand it (and I freely admit there are gaps in my knowledge of
your system), you can get a 4-year degree over here with 120 (?) semester-
hours of credit, and maybe only half of it has to be in your major (?).
When I sat down and tried to calculate it (from old timetables, since
there are no hours on my transcript, only grades) my 3-year UK degree
included about 150 semester-hours of classroom time, of which about 120
semester hours was in engineering subjects, the rest being things like
economics, finance, mathematics, etc.

I'm not a product of a traditional four year U.S. engineering school
either so I'm not much better off than you are when it comes to
comparing U.K apples to U.S. oranges, it's a mess. I trudged thru what
is called a five-year "cooperative education" undergrad mech eng
program. It's quite different from the four year schools' approach,
entrance requirements are similar but just about everything else is
different.

The classroom & lab side of the program consists of twelve 11 week
"terms" at a rate of four terms per year vs. semesters. Ten weeks in
class plus "exam week". The Freshman year is spent taking three terms
straight in class. Beyond the third term students serve two terms in
class then two terms out in industry per year on a rotating basis for
four years. The six-month "industry periods" are served working for
firms which are cooperating with the school by providing paid
engineering apprenticeships supervised by both the school and the
firms. In some instances government agencies are the employers.

By the time they drop your dipolma on you you've spent five years at
it but already have two years experience in whatever your field
happens to be. Once you're in you're in for five straight, no summers
at the beach working as a lifeguard BS. One of my brothers went thru
the ME program with me and we both came out with all our bills paid
without tapping our parents and with money in the bank. I doubt that
this is possible today but it's still better than not earning income
by working in your field as a student.

Credits are granted by the classroom hour and half credits are granted
for lab hours. 212 credits were required to graduate, I assume that's
still the case. Plus grades and averages were strictly by the numbers,
an 83 in a course was better than an 82, no such things as As, Bs and
Cs. 65 was the flunk point. All of which was/is completely
incompatible with the way the traditional schools pass out credits and
grades. Made transferring credits to and from other schools a *major*
pain except in the cases of similar schools like MIT and Cincinatti
Tech.

Course work was all over the map. Two or three mandatory terms (it's
been awhile . . !) of English were the only classroom humanities we
took but there were piles of humanities electives available. Two terms
of modern economics plus one of engineering economics were also
mandatory. There were a couple other nontechnical "mandatories" but
I've lost track.

One cute hook they inserted into the program was the "industry reading
courses". Mandatory humanities reading assignments completed while out
in the work force and were tested immediately upon return to class
terms. Normally involved 4-5 arcane tomes per term. History, lit,
psychology, anthropology, philosophy, etc. For which the student got
zero academic credit. None. Zip. Nada.

Class and "lab" work included mandatory military training (U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers ROTC) for two years and voluntary training for the
remaining three years. Completion of all five years of military
training resulted in a commission as a reserve or regular military
officer.

The technical courses were taught by a number of departments beyond
the mech eng people. Heavy doses of chemistry by the chem dept, even
heavier doses of physics by the physics dept thru Nukes 101, materials
science by the metalurgy dept, math out our ears of course via the
math dept, the early courses in applied mechanics from the civil
engineers, EE 101 & 102 from the EE dept. and on and on. From the
beginning thru around the seventh term all technical courses with some
minor variations were the same. With the exception of the biology
majors . One could hop from EE to ME to chem eng at will. From seventh
or so your department took over your mind and body and the rest is
probably very similar to your path.

The place was no fun at all. Gaining admittance was quite competitive
to begin with and when it was all done almost 70% of the Freshman
class had either flunked out or bagged it by the time graduation
rolled out. Parris Island North for five years, the largest private
engineering college on the planet. 85 MEs and something like 90 EEs
came out of my class of '63.

http://www.drexel.edu/


God help science, engineering and western civilization the day
American universities don't have license to pound at least some
modicum of literacy into the thick skulls of the geeklets.

Perhaps that is more of a comment on your high schools than your colleges?

The whole damned system from top to bottom. Stay away from that button
or you'll trigger a megabyte spleen dump and I'm in the mood for doing
just that.

w3rv