Olin College — Re-Engineering Engineering

theodp writes "In its College Issue, the NYT Magazine profiles tuition-free Olin College, which is building a different breed of engineer, stressing creativity, teamwork, and entrepreneurship — and, in no small part, courage. But questions remain as to whether the industry is ready for the freethinking products of Olin, and vice versa. Few of the class of 2006 are going on to grad study in engineering or jobs in the field."

Predicting short term failure and long term succes

Watch the graduates !

They will have trouble with the established firms set in their ways.

Thus they will be unemployed at a high rate.

And because of that they will start their own companies !

And Profit !

Re:Predicting short term failure and long term suc

Or they can start their own companies right away and get short term success, maybe even long term success. Engineers without some amount of business sense might be long term failures too, or even short term failures. It's all a gamble in many ways.

True that

I just graduated in December and ran around applying at places for a while. I got some pretty decent job offers (73k + full medical, dental, vision, 18 days paid vacation + 7 paid holidays... etc), but in the end I ended up just working for myself. Bad i

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And Profit !

Perhaps this is the missing intermediate step in the underwear gnomes' formula?

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It's just like programming. Every company is turbo-stupid in only taking interns and people with 5+ years of experience for any real programming job. So the fresh grads write their own software and a big company buys and and then they get hired.
I like e

Hard facts first

2 stories after the "why are no American kids going to grad school?" article, we have an article that explains how Engineering is teamwork, enthusiasm, and feeling good about yourself. Coincidence?

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I'm more annoyed that it has extended to colleges. It used to be that public schools peddled this super-sensitive horseshit. Now kids are not only learning it in high school, they're having it reinforced throughout college.

I don't know whether to be ecstat

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I hate to break it to you, but being comfortable with teamwork and having confidence in yourself and your abilities (as well as knowing when you don't have all of the information/experience that you need and when to defer to others who *do* have the requis

Re:Hard facts first

Are you suggesting that there's no teamwork in engineering?

Interesting facts:

Most airplanes are designed by one person.

Most computer chips are designed by one person.

Buildings, ditto.

Oh wait. Hmm.

Anyway, even if engineering specifically didn't require the ability to work in a team, modern life does. That's why companies exist in the first place-- you can make more money together than apart.

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Yes but, last time I checked, someone who never learned proper aerodynamics isn't going to be designing an airplane, even with a bunch of them in a team.

Teamwork is nice, but it's more important that you know what you're doing. It's not too hard to learn a

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I disagree. I think it's far easier to teach someone the technical stuff (although they should be expected to know that too), than to teach them how to not be an asshole. How many people with poor people skills have you worked with, who later turned it aro

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I don't disagree per say, but how many people have you worked with that didn't have the necessary technical skills, but later turned it around? I know my total would be 0, and just like the assholes, sometimes they even drag otherwise useful people down wi

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How many people with poor people skills have you worked with, who later turned it around? I know my total would be 0, and I suspect many others have had the same experience.

So true.

A-holes abound in all job fields, and lots of them got their jobs because o

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From personal experience, the lack of engineers has more to do with the lack of jobs for the average person than the lack of graduates. I know many engineers, and the ones that are not working as engineers are not doing so because there were no interestin

Quasi-Old Fart Observation

I'm not that old, 43, but feel like an old timer in engineering. Son of a EE gone Chief Engineer and trained as a GeolE (1987).

Olin is not inventing a new kind of engineer, they are trying to bring back the engineers of my father's generation. But they can put out the finest people on earth and it won't matter. Bean counters run companies now and they don't like what a good engineer has to say. Horrible things like "we need money to develop this idea", "saving ten cents per item will not save you money in the long run when it breaks and you have to replace it" and the ever-popular "outsourcing production to the cheapest labor you can find is not a good idea because it takes a little bit of skill and QA/QC to build it right".

Re:Quasi-Old Fart Observation

I'm kinda the opposite of an old timer in engineering (a current undergrad), so maybe I can give a good opposing viewpoint.

Bean counters run companies now and they don't like what a good engineer has to say.

Olin College was my first choice when I was applying to colleges a few years back (alas, I got rejected) largely because the things they emphasize ("creativity, teamwork, and entrepreneurship") aren't geared to produce engineers that will simply serve the "bean counters" better. Note the emphasis they place on entrepreneurship. These "new" engineers are not supposed to take your standard entry-level engineering job, they're supposed to come up with brand new ideas and create new companies that will be founded on the same concepts that Olin was, thus actually chaging the role of engineers, not just how they're taught.

I think they think that long term change is easier to accomplish by changing the playing field rather than just training the players differently.

Re:Quasi-Old Fart Observation

Ahh, it's good to see some thought process going on out there. But an engineering degree does not an engineer make. My education began in earnest after I graduated and worked under experienced engineers in an entrepreneurial situation. It took two years in the field -- 1987 to 1989 -- before I was ready to play. I maintain contact with college profs and its a good two-way exchange. They have the theory and new ideas, I have the practical experience.

But to make new companies it takes experience and a business plan. Enter the bean counters. And the bean counters now control the playing field.

It can be done, and it still happens. But primarily, engineering is no longer respected. The engineer as innovator is underfunded and engineer as quality/safety voice is unheard.

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But to make new companies it takes experience and a business plan. Enter the bean counters. And the bean counters now control the playing field.

Speaking as a two-time — soon to be three-time — entrepreneur, there's a mix of internal and exter

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they're supposed to come up with brand new ideas and create new companies that will be founded on the same concepts that Olin was

Manufacturing stuff that blows up (people)?

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Having seen a little bit from both sides of the fence, it wouldn't hurt to see those "old school" engineers being asked questions like "ok, who wants this and how much are they willing to pay for it?" (answer: almost noone and almost nothing). Or "customer

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Would you rather ship the best possible product or the one we can make a living of?".

The best possible product that people will buy? There's such a thing as a reputation for quality.

Or "tell me why you think this indian engineer, who's probably in th

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No, he means English singer-songwriter Peter Noone [wikipedia.org].

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LOL

Come *on* moderators! That's gotta be a "+5 funny".

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I'm a bit older, non-degreed and have 25 years experience in process plant design. What I often see is over-reliance on software. CAD especially seems to have caused a lot of problems (some companies do it right, but far too often it's worse than hand-made

Good plan.

Now, let's see it at other levels of communication.

I, as a student of a public high school in America, take in more force-fed facts that are expected to be regurgitated, and get fewer and fewer chances to let my creative juices flow. Rather than writing

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Now, let's see it at other levels of communication.

I, as a student of a public high school in America, take in more force-fed facts that are expected to be regurgitated, and get fewer and fewer chances to let my creative juices flow. Rather than writing th

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I semi-agree with you saying that you are force fed facts in university. The thing about it is, you aren't being forced to learn, its fully up to you, the informations there for you, but if you don't want it, good for you. Now I haven't had to learn a lo

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Now one of the things that always bugged me about primary and secondary education is that they were lacking the creativity to figure out ways to challenge, or at least keep interested the students that found the material in classes excessively easy.

That is mainly a problem of parents not the schools, in that there are ways around it even right now but few parents want to take the effort to do so for their children or actually force their little brats to learn something.

There are magnet schools, dist

Misfits

From TFA:

In some companies, he says, the freethinking products of Olin might have trouble fitting in. "Does industry want people like that? I think that's a very good question, but I think this goes beyond what industry wants," he said. "This is the right thing to do -- this is what industry needs. If the country had more people like this, we'd be in a much better situation."

Does Olin offer courses in:

• How to change Wall St. to stop looking only at the next quarter's results?
• How to deal with PHB's and bean counters?
• How to persuade the customer to fund your "freethinking" idea instead of the customer's idea?

If not, Olin is producing useless misfits. Oh, I agree that "misfit" is something "good" to be sought after in a certain sense -- creativity is what makes us human. But that's not what the economy needs in the post-Industrial Revolution world.

Disruption == Key

One of the key ways that money is made is by disrupting the status quo. Take something that is good, and make it much better. Take something that is thought of as important, and replace it completely. Think of every great product that you know - the kind of products that changed everything how people live and work. The hammer, the wheel, the model-T, the plow, the longbow, the musket, the steam engine, the computer, automated mfg, the internet. Hell, even simple things, like the ipod. These creations have improved the possibilities of the human experience (except, maybe, the ipod ;). This is what Olin college is attempting to inspire.

Industry is floundering because it has stopped giving engineers and creative types the responsibility of actual creation. If we, as a society, wish to bring engineering and manufacturing back to our side of the world, we need colleges and programs like the ones that Olin is taking on. We need engineers who will develop & create beyond our expectations. This is important to the future success of America.

- DaftShadow

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Regarding the Model T, for every Henry Ford we need a thousand assembly line workers. We would need a fundamental change in society to accommodate everyone being a Henry Ford. It would be good if we could change society in that way, and my point was that

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If every engineer was a "Henry Ford", we could develop fully automated robotic production systems, on the cheap, that would completely do away with the need for line technicians. We would also be able to put huge amounts of brain power on challenges like

Paradigm!

Oooh! Oooh! An exciting new paradigm. Is the world really ready for this exciting new paradigm yet. I bet it isn't!

Well, best of luck to them. My exciting new paradigm of sleeping in until midday every day hasn't caught on in the stoic and unchanging business world. They just haven't caught on to my forward and freethinking ways. But just you wait... my Slashdot story is coming soon!

Y-Combinator(Olin)

Interesting :-).

Y-combinator seems to be generating 40 quickie get-big-or-die-trying companies a year. What I found interesting is that in a few years 'Alumnus of Y-combinator' is going to have a very good cachet associated with it - just as an MS from a good college does. There're going to be a bunch of successes and even those who don't succeed will have the associated aura. The guys who put themselves through Y-combinator are a self-selected bunch of motivated people, who might even have an above average chance of succeeding in life.

Olin students might have similar self-selected characteristics. And in a few years, the results of that experiment - with widespread Olin alumni support - are going to be worth watching.

Note, I'm in no way related to either. Just speculating on a correlation that I see.

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Not convinced about that myself. The Y-Combinator companies seem to be mostly cookie-cutter "let's take this well worn problem, and do it in Rails!" type ventures. Wake me up when one has a truly new idea, executes well, and gets big. Until then it's basic

A drop in a bucket ( a very empty bucket at that )

Engineering based firms that hire Computer Science and Computer Engineering undergraduates are struggling to meet their recruitment goals today. Although coming up with new ways to shape the skills and experiences of engineering undergraduates is noble and necessary. It hardly helps with the overall lack of new students majoring in those subjects at university in the first place. This program is an interesting experiment at an elite school. But it hardly has any impact on the lack of students choosing this field.

The other problem I have with it is that the ideas espoused are not terribly new. At the University of Nebraska's School of Engineering students can enter the JD Edwards Honors program with an emphasis in Business.

http://jdedwards.unl.edu/ [unl.edu]

I tend to not hire CompSci or CompE students from this program because as entry level hires they have incredibly unrealistic expectations about their first job. They all want to transition to management right away before cutting their teeth on engineering design. So we tend to skip them over when we get resumes.

Sean

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You say

It hardly helps with the overall lack of new students majoring in those subjects at university in the first place

you also say

I tend to not hire CompSci or CompE students from this program because as entry level hires they have incredibly unrealistic expectations about their first job

To me it follows that what you want is cheap, submissive employees that just do what some "manager" told them

Really, why should somebody do engineering ?, do managment instead. You will know nothing about what you are managing (Di

Few take engineering jobs

  Few of the class of 2006 are going on to grad study in engineering or jobs in the field.

This is no surprise since engineering job opportunities for US citizens have been dwindling in 21st century.

tuition-free?

Someone please show me where on their web site it states that the education is tuition-free. All I can find is this: Cost and Financial Aid [olin.edu]

You have to get the Olin Scholarship, which has the equivalent amount of the tuition. But it certainly does not say

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EVERY admitted student gets the full tuition Olin scholarship.

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I'm one of the Olin Alumni (Class of '07).

Everyone who is admitted receives the scholarship. In fact, for 06 and 07s, room was included as well.

However, we do not offer graduate degrees. Olin is undergrad only.

Former MIT faculty

Several of the Olin faculty members are fantastic teachers who were denied tenure at MIT because (in my opinion) their devotion to teaching cut into their research, which is all that counts toward MIT tenure. (This includes my advisor, Lynn Stein.) I'd be proud to teach at Olin or to send my children (if I had any) there.

learning to think differently

A couple of times a year, I pull up the following and read it, trying to realign my thinking process. I don't know who originally wrote it; I've had it for years. I apologize for the long post, but it's worth it. ++++++++++++++++++++ Some time ago I received a call from a colleague. He was about to give a student a zero for his answer to a physics question, while the student claimed a perfect score. The instructor and the student agreed to an impartial arbiter, and I was selected.I read the examination question: "SHOW HOW IT IS POSSIBLE TO DETERMINE THE HEIGHT OF A TALL BUILDING WITH THE AID OF A BAROMETER." The student had answered, "Take the barometer to the top of the building, attach a long rope to it,lower it to the street, and then bring it up, measuring the length of the rope. The length of the rope is the height of the building." The student really had a strong case for full credit since he had really answered the question completely and correctly! On the other hand, if full credit were given, it could well contribute to a high grade in his physics course and to certify competence in physics, but the answer did not confirm this. I suggested that the student have another try. I gave the student six minutes to answer the question with the warning that the answer should show some knowledge of physics. At the end of five minutes, he had not written anything. I asked if he wished to give up, but he said he had many answers to this problem; he was just thinking of the best one. I excused myself for interrupting him and asked him to please go on. In the next minute, he dashed off his answer which read: "Take the barometer to the top of the building and lean over the edge of the roof. Drop the barometer, timing its fall with a stopwatch.Then, using the formula x=0.5*a*t^^2, calculate the height of the building." At this point, I asked my colleague if he would give up. He conceded,and gave the student almost full credit. While leaving my colleague's office, I recalled that the student had said that he had other answers to the problem,so I asked him what they were. "Well," said the student, "there are many ways of getting the height of a tall building with the aid of a barometer. For example, you could take the barometer out on a sunny day and measure the height of the barometer, the length of its shadow, and the length of the shadow of the building,and by the use of simple proportion, determine the height of the building." "Fine," I said, "and others?" "Yes," said the student, "there is a very basic measurement method you will like. In this method, you take the barometer and begin to walk up the stairs. As you climb the stairs, you mark off the length of the barometer along the wall. You then count the number of marks, and this will give you the height of the building in barometer units." "A very direct method." "Of course. If you want a more sophisticated method, you can tie the barometer to the end of a string, swing it as a pendulum, and determine the value of g at the street level and at the top of the building. From the difference between the two values of g, the height of the building,in principle, can be calculated." "On this same tact, you could take the barometer to the top of the building,attach a long rope to it, lower it to just above the street, and then swing it as a pendulum. You could then calculate the height of the building by the period of the precession". "Finally," he concluded, "there are many other ways of solving the problem.Probably the best," he said, "is to take the barometer to the basement and knock on the superintendent's door. When the superintendent answers, you speak to him as follows: 'Mr. Superintendent, here is a fine barometer. If you will tell me the height of the building, I will give you this barometer." At this point, I asked the student if he really did not know the conventional answer to this question. He admitted that he did, but said that he was fed up with high school and college instructors trying to teach him how to think. The student was Neils Bohr.

Re:learning to think differently

The student was Neils Bohr.

Any relation to Niels Bohr? No, to be serious, that's just a legend and only recently have people started tacking Niels Bohr at the end, just to give the entire story a feeling of vindication.

http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/barometer.asp [snopes.com]

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On the other hand one of the methods breaks the barometer, one of them runs a fair risk of doing so and one of them loses posession of it.

So if you asked the question to business or accounting majors, they'd probably ask who has financial responsibility fo

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I guess they don't teach either counting or spelling at Olin.

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I learned those things while I was supposed to be studdying

It shows. Clearly you weren't studdying enough.

Re:courage

Courage always helped me build the best bridges!

It certainly allows you to cross the worst ones. ;)

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I think they probably mean the courage to try new things instead of sticking to the old tried and true methods. You know, like how progress gets made.

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Courage always helped me build the best bridges!

Well, it helped me tell someone higher up that the bridge he approved would collapse.