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"What courses were most and least useful to you in your engineering career?"

danzima

Hey there, community! It's a pretty muggy Friday here in Chicago, but also it's Friday, so on the whole things are good.

 

One of our Chicago colleagues is writing an article for another publication on the topic "What courses were most and least useful to you in your engineering career?", and he thought it would be interesting to get input from our community, so I wanted to open the question up to the members area.

Any response that makes it into the article will be credited to you, so maybe that'll be the start of your second career as a public intellectual and you'll wind up doing TED talks in Palm Springs soon enough?

 

Thanks in advance for your input!

Parents

  • By far the most important course I ever took was was called "Statics" (the analysis of static mechanics). This course taught us the fundamental engineering technique of how to solve any tough problem by breaking it down into manageable (solvable) smaller problems. The techniques were important and it has also been very useful to understand static mechanics, but coming away with an attitude and the confidence to believe we can solve any arbitrary problem with this fundamental approach was simply priceless.

    As far as career related knowledge goes, I've learned far, far more on the job than in all my courses put together, but the underlying confidence to solve new problems has been a critical key to success.

    The most useless course I ever took wasn't useless because of the material so much as the Prof who taught it. It was a math course. His English was so atrocious and he had such a heavy accent, it was impossible to understand a single sentence he uttered. Everyone in his courses had major problems figuring out what he was trying to teach.

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  • By far the most important course I ever took was was called "Statics" (the analysis of static mechanics). This course taught us the fundamental engineering technique of how to solve any tough problem by breaking it down into manageable (solvable) smaller problems. The techniques were important and it has also been very useful to understand static mechanics, but coming away with an attitude and the confidence to believe we can solve any arbitrary problem with this fundamental approach was simply priceless.

    As far as career related knowledge goes, I've learned far, far more on the job than in all my courses put together, but the underlying confidence to solve new problems has been a critical key to success.

    The most useless course I ever took wasn't useless because of the material so much as the Prof who taught it. It was a math course. His English was so atrocious and he had such a heavy accent, it was impossible to understand a single sentence he uttered. Everyone in his courses had major problems figuring out what he was trying to teach.

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