The promise of college for our generation

[Greg Needel]

Originally Posted by JVN

You've been very dismissive of higher education in your last few posts, but I'm willing to bet that if you want to become an engineer, your future employer will care a lot more about your integral solving abilities, than your abilities as a car mechanic.

Practical knowledge is great, FIRST gives us gobs of it, but unless you put your nose down and learn the theory stuff, you're not going to be any use to anyone as an engineer. We always need to know "why".

-JV

John,
I completely agree that theory definitely is very important, you can't be a good designer/engineer unless you can determine mathematically that something will work or fail before there is alot of money invested the prototype/production line. That being said there is also quite alot of usefulness in knowing manufacturing processes and the "hands on" side of things. The truth of the matter is that you need to have a good balance of both. If you are strictly theoretical and design an "amazingearthchanging thingy" but it can't be built what is the point? On that same note you can't pretend that you are an engineer if you are just a glorified machinist. Learn the theory in the classroom and pick up the practical through clubs (FIRST, mini Baja, SAE). IMO you really need the scale balanced in the middle instead of heavy on one side of the equation.

Greg