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

Interesting topic.

My education dates back nearly to the age of dinosaurs, but as an electronics engineering student, the most valuable classes were in computer programming (Fortran and Assembly Language, 'C' did not exist yet).  These lead me into programming, which at the time of my graduation was an understaffed field, leading me to wide open areas of engineering and proving to be a good source of employment throughout my career.  Equally important was a combination of 'hands-on' and theoretical courses, building knowledge in layers, from basic to advanced, that formed a well rounded 'core' education.  There were no real 'least useful' classes, but maybe some that were not well taught, like English, writing, public speaking, etc., that would have been useful to a career that led into leadership roles.

My education was at a 'for profit' technical university, which here in the USA are really taking a beating in the press.  Some of it well deserved (I later taught at one of these schools, and it was clear the money was more important than the education of students) and some undeserved (I came out of college with an education that fully prepared me to exceed in the work place).  In retrospect, I would have thrived in any learning environment (I was born to be an engineer), but I would have benefited from a more rounded and challenging environment, like and state college/university, which could have allowed me to more fully realize my full potentials.

Gene

Hey Gene,

Ever drop a stack of cards?  I dropped a Cobol box the day before the project was due... fun times.

Jack,

I did not drop the stack, but the runner who took the cards off-site to be processed did, in a puddle.  We got back a waterlogged, random stack of punch cards.  Yeah!

I used punch cards and tapes for several years (military and aviation were slow adopters of technology).

Gene

At the risk of sounding old...

First job was running the tape library in operations.

In college, they hired me in to work the batch station, to answer questions, when the questions I was asking, couldn't be answered by the people in the batch station (no good deed goes unpunished).

Wrestled with a PDP-11 for a while.

Wrote video games for a while (old 8 bit Atari/Commodore stuff as well as 8088 PC)

Keep a slide rule around for the apocalypse.

Wow!  I went straight to the 5 Mbyte hard drive (both washing machine size and years later a card-based solution for an IBM PC).  I remember doing multiple pass assembler programming with paper tape (teletype).  It didn't take too long before I wrote my own magnetic tape assembler, with a CRT editor.

Gene

I too have done the cards, slow and high speed paper tapes, DecTapes, Magnetic Tapes. First hard drive had all of 64 Kwords capacity. Thought I had hit the big time when we upgraded to a 1.2 Mbyte hard disk.

How the times have changed over the decades.

DAB

I too have done the cards, slow and high speed paper tapes, DecTapes, Magnetic Tapes. First hard drive had all of 64 Kwords capacity. Thought I had hit the big time when we upgraded to a 1.2 Mbyte hard disk.

How the times have changed over the decades.

DAB

At the risk of sounding old...

First job was running the tape library in operations.

In college, they hired me in to work the batch station, to answer questions, when the questions I was asking, couldn't be answered by the people in the batch station (no good deed goes unpunished).

Wrestled with a PDP-11 for a while.

Wrote video games for a while (old 8 bit Atari/Commodore stuff as well as 8088 PC)

Keep a slide rule around for the apocalypse.

Wow!  I went straight to the 5 Mbyte hard drive (both washing machine size and years later a card-based solution for an IBM PC).  I remember doing multiple pass assembler programming with paper tape (teletype).  It didn't take too long before I wrote my own magnetic tape assembler, with a CRT editor.

Gene