Had a cathartic experience tonight complaining about how impractical my civil engineering department is with my senior design teammates...like, why the heck is the extent of our AutoCAD education a few short lab sessions in 312 and a little project...when this is in fact something very practical in our field, in pretty much every sub-discipline?
Why don't we have a class that actually teaches us how to read/prepare engineering drawings and site plans? Seriously? All we have is a construction management class in which we're given a stack of drawings and are more or less left to figure them out on our own, and that's only a small part of the super-crazed and rushed lab section; it's not even the focus of the class.
A bigger question: why don't we ever have design projects in our classes at all until senior design (apart from maybe a feeble notion of a design problem in the homework sets of some of the senior/grad level electives--at least in my concentration)? Surely it would be possible to invent a little project of designing a water treatment plant, or a piping system, or a simple structure, or something along the way, and not just at the end.
I refuse to accept that such a curriculum is not possible because we "only get our feet wet" in a lot of topics. Sure, an undergrad program in civil engineering isn't the same as a master's in a sub-discipline...but what's going on here if we really don't have time for design in an engineering program. Like, hold the phone, sister--what's the actual definition of engineering? Is it learning a bunch of methods that will solve for some nebulous quantity or parameter? Or is it actually about applying science to solve problems, in a way that involves volition and sometimes some creativity?
What would really make sense would be for classes to have a major design problem to, effectively, be the narrative thread through which the class is taught, in order to contextualize new topics and integrate various methods into one overarching purpose. For example: Hello, welcome to the first day of CEE 421, Fundamentals of Hydrology and Hydraulics! My name is Professor Helpful. So, to get us started, let me introduce a scenario that will point to the need for us to study hydrology/hydraulics and that will help us understand all the topics I'm going to introduce over the course of the semester. [Brings up diagram on PowerPoint slide.] Let's say we have a small office building with a 20,000 square foot parking lot. The building is at the bottom of a hill, so it's going to gather a lot of runoff when it rains, right? Why is this a problem? [Waits around for a response...] Well, we don't want there to be flooding around the building, right? So we're going to have to find a way to drain it, and in order to do that, we're going to need to know how much water we're going to have to handle--in terms of a total and in terms of volumetric flow--in order to design a system that will take care of it. That, in essence, is what hydrology's about. Now, once we've got our water collected--it's flowed into our drain and now it's in a pipe, and it's flowing down a pipe...do we know how the flow will act? Do we know how fast it will go and how high the water level will be as a function of the velocity? How is this related to the slope of the pipe, the shape of the pipe, and the roughness of the pipe? These are the kinds of things that hydraulics is concerned with. We'll use these things to figure out how best to design a system of drains, pipes, and detention storage for the excess runoff to best handle the water. Throughout the semester, we'll come back and refer to this example as we solve each component of our problem of how to deal with this runoff. First, let's figure out how we can know how much water we'll be dealing with by using the rational method...
Here's more of what actually happens: Hello, welcome to the first day of CEE 421, Fundamentals of Hydrology and Hydraulics. So, here's a video of a flood. [Plays video]. Yeah, so floods are pretty bad, right? This class has to do with dealing with floods in some general way that can be understood very shallowly by the way I'm going to scratch into some surface material that sets up some definitions that you expect are going to build the foundation for a very logical proceeding into deeper material, but then I'll actually just start throwing some methods at you willy-nilly. OK, first, let's define a watershed...
Look, I've appreciated a lot in all of my classes and there's a good number of professors whom I've enjoyed learning from, and I know I have learned a solid amount that will be useful in the future...but the sad thing is that when I think back to all the classes I've had in my department, the second scenario seems to have been true most of the time. Maybe I'm being unfair and the professor was really trying their best to present things in a way that would make sense, and I was just too dumb to get it, and now it's easy for me to take shots because everything's 20-20 in hindsight, right? I know I haven't been the perfect student either...far from it, really. I've showed up late for more classes than I can count, and I've missed and rushed homework assignments.
But I don't think that's the case. I think I actually would have understood it even less had it not been for a bit of exposure I had to storm sewers in my internship. I think the burden of this academic life would feel a lot lighter if I had a sense of cohesiveness between all of the things I was learning. If I wasn't just pounding out math problems night after night, problems that technically aren't purely theoretical like in a calculus class, but that are so pigeonholed and narrow, that they're analogous to learning how to bake a cake first by taking eggs and putting them in the oven, then separately taking some sugar and putting it in the oven, then separately taking chocolate and putting it in the oven...I think you get the picture.
I know I'm no expert engineer here. I may end up looking back at this in a year when I'm working for some company and think...boy, was I wrong, and who was I to question the university's way? But when I went into my internship experience last summer, finding it to be an experience vastly different from almost everything I'd done in school, and only having made a modest improvement upon that now in my senior year...I find myself questioning...why in the world is that? I have to hope that's only natural.
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