Think outside the box... no, I really mean it

Another serious post folks. This one has been bugging me ever since the Tau Beta Pi conference, but I finally feel put together enough to give you my thoughts on this.

It has to do with thinking outside the box. I know it sounds cheesy, and the phrase is probably overused, but I really mean it. And after looking at countless undergraduate students and listening to their conversations, I am further convinced that people need to do this.

As undergraduates, we engineering students always feel like we need to have a concrete answer for everything. Concrete is the nice way of saying "textbook definition", which is the nice way of saying "get it directly from page 23, line 5." Undergraduates always believe the professors, their notes, and their textbooks. They attempt to apply thermodynamics to all of the world's problems without considering and examining the assumptions that they are making first. This REALLY bugs me. Just the other day, one of my students for the class I TA turned in a document that stated a VERY incorrect statement on the ideal gas law. First, she was trying to use the ideal gas law in a non-ideal gas situation. Second, she was trying to use the ideal gas law to describe a change in pressure - something you can only get from the laws derived from the combined gas law. Third, when I asked about this she had the nerve to tell me that she just put down these bogus ideas because at the time she wrote it she was studying for a thermo test. ::sigh:: The tame version of my response was "NO NO NO NO NO NO NO."

[As a side note, this whole ideal gas law thing just made me think of Vasu's "we have P, and we have V, and we have T... so we can find R!!!" comment all those years ago. Hahahaha... Vasu, I miss you so.]

Here's the thing, kids: stop treating your profs like they know everything. Why? Because they DON'T. Having been out in industry, I can tell you that many of them don't have a freaking clue. They are so protected by this bubble we call academia, with undergraduate students drinking in their every word and graduate students slaving away for them, that they don't know there is an entirely different system outside of college. I can't tell you how many times I've sat through lectures after my two co-ops in which I had to cringe as my professors made very WRONG assumptions about how things work out in the real world. Dina warned me about this shortly before I returned from my first co-op, and man was she right on. I don't mean to bash academia, but you must understand that it is a different world altogether, and that if you want to have a successful life in industry, you can't survive on the same techniques you used in your college years. If you want to stay in academia, be my guest. I have nothing against you; maybe it's a better fit for you. Just don't make ME do it. They'd have to lock me up.

I can't tell you how thankful I am for grad school and the MEM program. Finally I get to have my own opinions - finally I am allowed to defend myself and back up what I want to say based on my prior experience. And people believe me and respect me for it. I now have the freedom that I was yearning for as an undergrad, and I've been able to develop my innovative and creative thinking. I am no longer boxed in. No longer do my professors try to convince me that research is the only way to accomplish anything. Haha! EAT IT!! :-D I've been waiting to say that since freshman year. It's one of those "I am Spartacus!" moments.

I am allowed to use resources outside of books to supplement my opinions and thoughts. I can hold real discussions with people on how to complete certain tasks or make decisions. Not even my professors know the "right" answers - they're waiting for me to tell them what it is! If someone says to me, "do a presentation", I am completely free to explore new methods to do so in order to keep someone's attention. I could do a group skit if it would help get my point across. And if it was well planned and drove the point home, it would be much appreciated by my audience. It is way more important to learn how to read my audience than it is to just complete an assignment.

Don't get me wrong - the point of an undergraduate engineering education is to teach you the fundamentals. But I am not in favor of churning out engineers who can only chirp back what one book or one professor has told them. (However, if you do chirp things, i.e., thermo or the ideal gas law concepts, AT LEAST chirp them correctly. PLEASE.) I'm not saying that everyone should get an MEM, or that everyone should avoid academia; instead, I am only suggesting that you look beyond your textbook environment and understand that it's a different world out there: not everything is confined to a system in a vacuum, without friction, and under constant pressure.