L. A. SECTION ENTERPRISE CHAPTER

At the gathering of the AIAA L. A. Section Enterprise Chapter On October 21, 2008, the speaker was Rob Silverstein, President of the Brentwood Kensington Group, Inc., a company offering management services to businesses undergoing transition,. He is also a professor at UCLA. His talk focused on the deficiencies that he observes in present undergraduate engineering education, and the remedies that he believes are needed.

The key issues harming engineering education include

• Mismatch between university interests and student interests
• Misguided student experience, motivations, and goals

The university engineering school, (just like law, business and other schools) is constantly looking for funding in the form of research grants. This hunger leads to a heavy orientation toward academics and research, which in turns manifests itself in an increasing number of "stovepipe" courses in the curriculum, eroding the multidiscipline basic courses. Graduate education is emphasized at the expense of the undergraduate.

The student of today is different than the student of 50 years ago. Fewer things are fixable, cars are too complicated to work on, fewer things are left to the imagination in toys, calculators and computers mask mathematical methodology, and complete assemblies have replaced model-building kits. Silverstein argues that, as a result, the student of today shows less curiosity, lacks patience in building complex assemblies, isn’t adept at taking things apart, and is more interested in good grades than in real learning.

The increased emphasis on narrow specialties by the faculty, combined with the lack of curiosity by the students, results in classes where few questions are asked. Professors properly stress the need for the individual engineer to solve problems, but some seem to have no clue about the importance of teams in industry. Thus students avoid team projects in which other students may affect their grades. Also to their detriment, students tend to avoid collaboration, writing, public speaking, and extra-curricular projects.

Such an approach discourages some perceptive students who realize its narrowness and they leave engineering altogether. Those who stay enter industry poorly prepared for an engineering career. When it comes to competencies important to career success in engineering, the edge goes to those who score highest in social skills: communications, followed by organizational skills, team building, leadership, coping, and then technological skills. For project managers, leadership skills are paramount, followed by interpersonal skills, communication skills, decision making, and negotiation and conflict resolution skills. The data and their sources are shown in Silverstein’s slides in AIAA Enterprise Home Page Archive of Speaker Presentations at Chapter Meetings.

Silverstein recommends a freshman course to orient students towards other courses and extra-curricular activities that the engineering curriculum now lacks. He advocates that career engineers become more involved with engineering students and that government and industry sponsor more student projects and design competitions. Industry needs to provide new hires with an orientation that stresses a multi-disciplinary and collaborative approach and the importance of interpersonal skills.

Guido Frassinelli 07/28/09