Tomorrow is the anniversary of Benjamin Franklin’s kite-in-a-thunderstorm experiment. Ohio University (the Athens of Ohio, minus the immediate insolvency) has prepared a fancy poster showing the most exciting electrical engineering experiments of all time.
What do readers think? Will this get young Americans excited about EE?
[And, separately, why is Bruce Jenner becoming a woman more newsworthy than Bruce Jenner allegedly causing the death of a woman with his/her (his and hers?) Cadillac Escalade and trailer (helped by another California driver in a Hummer H2)?]
Personally I am excited about EE right now. This weekend a friend criticized my clunky 17″ HP laptop (with 16 GB of RAM!) and asked when I would be buying a sleek $3000 Apple MacBook so that I could have a smaller screen but more street cred. I told him that I would buy a new laptop when there was a gallium nitride-based internal power converter so that I didn’t have to lug around a power brick. (See Cambridge Electronics web site for an explanation of GaN.) And I guess I’ll buy an electric car when GaN components bring the price down and push the range up.
Umm…That picture of William Gilbert is clearly wrong. That’s not a 16th century scientist. It’s someone from the 19th century. (Probably the playwright William S. Gilbert.)
Maybe this is a better source?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gilbert_%28astronomer%29
I read that several people died trying to replicate Franklin’s experiment.
Maybe Bruce Jenner should not be news, but the public reaction to him is. He symbolizes many things.
2¢ — Engineers and other tech/science types are born, not made. It’s a hardwired DNA thing. And someday we’ll be able to “see aptitude” with a scan or DNA analysis. We all know literary artsy types who couldn’t solve a quadratic equation if given 10 years of tutoring. They’re simply not good at it. They don’t care about it. Nor do they care how an iPhone works. They care about other stuff: Fashion? Art? Language?
Now the question is, how do we excite (stir passion) young folks with the aptitude for engineering to actually pursue engineering as a career? Not easy. Especially if they’re exposed to the siren songs of Wall St. as a late adolescent or young adult. A twitching pair of frogs legs is no match for the Wolf of Wall Street’s house in the Hamptons.
@ Jonathan: Very funny catch, but does that Billy G, the astronomer, have a downloadable high resolution TIFF usable in a sleek poster? http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/56000/56091/56091_w-gilbert.htm
Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (18 November 1836 – 29 May 1911) was an English dramatist, librettist, poet and illustrator best known for his fourteen comic operas produced in collaboration with the composer Sir Arthur Sullivan, of which the most famous include H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, and one of the most frequently performed works in the history of musical theater, The Mikado.
It’s pretty hard to convince a kid to take the long, arduous road to mastering partial differential equations so he can get into the interesting areas of EE – only to find that most of the jobs have been shipped to Asia.
With much less effort and brain power that same kid can learn to calculate net present values in Excel and earn a very comfortable salary in finance.
@Paul K: Engineers and other tech/science types are born, not made. It’s a hardwired DNA thing.
Yep, yet the journalists, educators, and politicians keep wanting to force women into engineering and programming, but all they really want to do is write, teach, and work in HR.
@BillG: With much less effort and brain power that same kid can learn to calculate net present values in Excel and earn a very comfortable salary in finance.
Yep, that pretty much describes my career trajectory – I earned an MBA a few years after my BS Comp Sci, left software development, and got a commercial banking job. The career change hasn’t been more lucrative than tech, but certainly opened more and broader job opportunities.
Are we sure that some people are hard-wired, so to speak, to do EE? I’ve been supervising an intern lately and have noticed that a lot of what makes a good software engineer is simply an unwillingness to quit. People who are persistent and driven to finish a project can be at least reasonably good engineers in my experience, regardless of their original genetic endowment. (Remember that to be a good engineer doesn’t mean knowing how to do absolutely everything on a project; you just have to know when and whom to call for help.)
Hard Wired — No doubt, there’s a place for persistent plodders. Perseverance is a virtue. But if you have to turn the map upside down when heading south, you’ll have a hard time making your case in a meeting with others more gifted.
I once had a supervisor who was “weak” in the engineering nuts and bolts of our systems. However, he knew he was weak. But he was also a great people person, well connected with the buzz of other department offices. He usually had no trouble keeping us nuts and bolts types busy. And deferred any question out of his range to his staff (moi and others). Best supervisor I’ve ever had. He was laid off during a long drought. We missed him, a lot.
Paul: http://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/electrical-and-electronics-engineers.htm says that there were 306,100 EEs being paid in the U.S. in 2012. I hope you’re not going to tell me that all 306,100 of them were stars! (especially since the median $89,630/year salary is less after taxes than the cash payments flowing from a one-night stand with a dermatologist in a lot of U.S. states (e.g., California, Massachusetts, New York, Wisconsin))
1. Incompetent (bad hire)
2. Marginal (borderline bad hire)
3. Competent (meets expectations)
4. Exceptional (exceeds expectations)
5. Super Star (customers send private jets in the middle of a snow storm to fly this guy from Hartford to Phoenix, no questions asked – true story)
1s – There’s only so many of these an office can carry. And they’re usually gone once they’ve been found out.
2s – With coaching and supervision they can be trained to be useful.
3s – With any luck histogram peaks here.
4s – Proposal authors, project leaders, mentors, company rep at customer meets, yadda..
5s – Don’t let him retire. And when he does, bring him back to the office for consulting and special projects. He makes his own hours. Pay him whatever he wants. Because we can’t meet contract schedule without him. And customers know it too.
The “transition” of the word “gender” to mean “sex” in recent years irks me to an irrational extent. Humans are not gendered.
I disagree that people who lack an aptitude in engineering and science are not interested in the subjects. I am very interested in science and engineering, but am unable to do work at a high level. Based on my experience, I am not the only one. Just because someone has a hard time with quadratic equations (or, in my case, second order partial differential equations) doesn’t mean that they are not fascinated by the universe, by solenoids or by GaN batteries.