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Advice To a New Engineering Graduate

pettitda

What piece of advice would you give (or have you given) to a recent graduate in the engineering field to help them start their career?

 

When I was fresh out of college, an older engineer that I worked with told me that when he was coming up he would spend his lunch hours reading and trying to understand the articles in technical journals.  Then he went on to tell me that there was still time for me to go back to school and become a doctor or a lawyer or anything other than an engineer.  Overall, I'm glad I didn't take the second piece of his advice.  image

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  • I would say whatever you see today will be old by the time you learn it. Therefore never stop learning to stay at the crest of the current wave of technology. And when you have been in this awhile, you will know the difference between balderdash and true knowledge.

    C

  • in reply to clem57

    Clem Martins wrote:

     

    I would say whatever you see today will be old by the time you learn it.

    Yes and no.  The fundamentals like Ohm's Law, Kirchhoff's Laws, Maxwell's Equations, and Boolean Logic haven't changed a bit.  And C programs today look pretty much the same as K&R except for function declarations (thank goodness for ANSI C!)

     

    MOS transistor logic hasn't changed.  They keep making transistors smaller, but they still use them pretty much the same way as mechanical relay networks.

     

    I would add the advice: master the fundamentals.  That's what you can build on.  Learn from old technologies, because ideas move into and out of favor depending on the technology of the time.  An old technology may come back in a different form, so if you know about it that gives you an advantage over the whipper-snappers.

     

    Learn how things fail.  In school you learned about the "ideal case" and "textbook examples" that work when you simulate them.  The real world is much more complex, and things will fail for various interesting reasons that they didn't have time to cover in school.  Learn from these mistakes and how to get around them.  That's how you become an expert.

  • in reply to johnbeetem

    ideas move into and out of favor depending on the technology of the time.  An old technology may come back in a different form, so if you know about it that gives you an advantage over the whipper-snappers.

    That's very true, I've seen that several times.

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