Engineering: We are doing it all wrong
I got good grades in High school and Intermediate and eventually decided to get into engineering as that was the only option for me to continue studying science owing much to my lack of knowledge of other options. After getting all worked up for one year I got into one of the, supposedly premiere institutes of India, IITs.
I don't want to defame IITs or discourage any future aspirants but what I really like to convey is that students who spend crucial years of their lifetime must have a clear understanding of what they are aiming for or on a broad basis they must have a basic idea of Engineering.
So here is the deal, let me get this straight. Engineering is not science nor it is suppose to be. Basically it is more focused on "How things work?" than "Whythings work?" which is what science tries to explain with much needed theories and mathematics. As long as you are getting a machine say a reactor to deliver the desired concentration of final product without getting in to the chemistry of reaction kinetics and thermodynamics, which is however not the real case, you are not at all bad as an engineer but for a scientist every problem needs to viewed from multiple angle and at the end he/she should have a rationale to base his/her logic.
Now, you might ignore this distinction which is exactly what our education has been doing ever since. Students opting for science subjects after high school should be giving a candid introduction to the philosophy of Engineering and Science, as they tend to differ by large extent in higher education, so that they can decide the field that interest them without getting confused.
I would say Science is more about "How things works?" and Engineering is about "Getting things works". Science is about explaining things and Engineering is about making things. As you probably wanted to say scientists tend to not care much about the "use" of they acquired knowledge and Engineers to tend to not care much about many of the underlying details. A classic example would be computer science and software engineering. In theory a computer science student can do well without ever learning how to code and a software engineer can do ok with zero computer science. But being good in computer science helps you in software engineering and I think being able write software is important for a computer scientist, though it is not a necessity. Science and Engineering tend to complement each other, why do you think the distinction is important.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all my apologies for replying so late. I agree to what you said but the fact remains that Science and Engineering are different in approach no matter how complementary they are and this difference is crucial for a student who may have taste and temperament of a scientist as that of an Engineer.
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