Universities are teaching it all wrong, we need to flip the engineering education model

I think the universities are teaching software engineering and engineering in general all wrong. You see, they don’t inspire people and relate the curriculum of what they are learning into our real life.

I remember so many classes that I just couldn’t understand why we were learning the topic and how it applied to real life. Classes that I felt like I was never going to use the knowledge that was being taught again. Some of that I have found to be true, and some of it, it just took years to understand why it was important.

When I think back over my university career, I’m super happy with the education I received. I went to Virginia Tech, and they taught me everything I needed to know for the foundations of my engineering career. But when I think back over both my engineering and professional career, there was definitely something missing when I left Virginia Tech as both an undergrad and graduate student.

The reality is I didn’t leave school with all the skills I needed to be an engineer and many of them came later as I ventured into the real world; and these skills don’t just include technical skills! They tell you this in school, university is just building the foundations, but I also think we can do better; we can inspire people to create things from a younger age while they are still in school or even before.

Think about it, it is the best time! You have a group of like-minded people who are actually paying to be together, probably the only time in the history of your life that that happens at such high of a cost. And when you are paying for something, you are incentivized to take advantage of it.

The problem is, the engineer curriculum is not currently designed to inspire. We don’t start out each class at the beginning of the semester talking about how the content of what you are going to learn this semester is useful in the real world. No, we start out by opening our text books and learning the basics of an integral or a differential equation or a for loop.

But how does this apply to the real world? Well I will tell you, as a student sitting down in that seat at the beginning of each semester, I had no idea. I just knew that this was a class I had to take. And halfway through the semester, for a majority of those classes, I started to hate it. It was just something I had to get through to get to the end of the semester and put those credits on my record.

But why was it this way? Because we never understood why what we were being taught mattered. If each and every thing that we learned had a real purpose, it wouldn’t have just been something we had to get through, it would have been something that we were excited about. It would have been something that we could learn to solve a problem!

I have to give Virginia Tech a lot of credit, we did have a lot of engineering teams such as the autonomous vehicle team, the solar decathlon team, and the robotic team; but those were optional things that you had to get the motivation inside of yourself to go become a part of.

Unless you took that initiative, you didn’t become part of those teams. And at the time, I felt so overwhelmed in my school work and marching band that I never took the initiative to be a part of those groups.

These teams were not mentioned in class very much and we never really talked about how what we were learning in class could apply to help those teams. But I’ll bet you those teams would have loved our help!

Looking back on it now, I missed an amazing opportunity at a critical time in my life and the history of technology on our planet. The technology from what those early groups did are now becoming mainstream.

Just think of the Google and Uber cars that are actual legal to drive on roads in some US states now. Virginia Tech has also has maybe the only smart road in the country where the Google car and many other car companies safety features have been tested. If I had been a part of that, my career would have skyrocketed forward much faster

I can’t say I’m upset with where I turned out, I’ve learned some amazing skills at companies I’ve worked for since I left Virginia Tech and I love what I am doing now. But if I had taken advantage of those groups, my life may have taken a different turn and I could have been at the forefront of that technology.

We need to flip the education system on its head. It needs to focus on the real world first and then we teach all of the skills to get there. We need to inspire our students to understand why they are learning the content they are forced to consume in the classroom. Maybe we even cut out some of the content where that time could be better spent somewhere else, like participating in a technology team.

I don’t think I really became an engineer until I worked at my internships and first job that I really loved in New York City. It was there that I started seeing the whole engineering process.

We had to have electrical engineers that designed the circuit boards; we had to have software engineers that knew how to control the boards and write all the advanced algorithms needed to run the system; we had to work with board design houses. We had to employ mechanical engineers that designed the enclosures for the product we were building. We had to have quality assurance engineers that made sure our product met all the requirements. We had to understand the whole engineering process, from start to finish. And finish isn’t that product leaving the assembly line, it is that product making it’s way into the hands of the consumer.

This is real engineering, and I don’t think it is taught correctly in school. You should come out of school feeling like you could join any of these engineering firms and jump right into the process. I know I didn’t feel that way when I left school, and it took several more years to get there. I still learn every day and cannot say I’m a subject matter expert for every step, but at least I know the process.

The last piece I want to talk about is communication and feedback. It also takes communication to build a successful product and company; communication with the end users. It is so critical and something that is overlooked and not taught to engineers in school.

I feel like a lot of engineers just want to be in the back room and keep coding, but what happens when you actually get out in the field and start talking to your customer and using the product yourself? You start to see where it can be improved, you start to see how it works really well, and what changes that you can make to improve the product for your customer. Which then will give them a better product and you more sales!

So in summary, let’s flip this engineer education model. We need to inspire others to create products for the real world and understand why what they are learning will make an impact on the future. Virginia Tech’s motto is “Invent the Future” and we need inspire the minds of our students to do it!