The New Breed of Engineer
A changing world urgently needs him and Thayer School aims to produce him—
DEAN OF THE THAYER SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING
THE aim of engineers and engineering has been the same throughout the centuries: the enhancement of man's material resources with concern for management and economy. What has changed in the last 2,000 years is the manner in which engineers go about their business. The changes have been coming more and more rapidly, and within our lifetime they have been almost overwhelming. Factors contributing to such rapid changes include:
The pressures of war, Hot and Cold. These pressures have enhanced international competition and put the engineer on the firing line.
Research is now big business. Students prepare for a career in research confident that there will be a demand for their services. Twenty-five years ago such an attitude was unknown. Now government and industrial laboratories compete for the best talent on our campuses and promise them a permissive atmosphere in which to pursue their own research interests.
American industry can now be said tobe mature. There are no national needs which can be met only by the forceddraft creation of new industries, as is the case in developing nations. In our country the problem is to keep our industry viable and to avoid introducing new industry at such a rate that we bankrupt the existing system.
The changed level of engineers now inindustry. Twenty-five years ago a Ph.D. was a rarity. Today Ph.D.'s are moving into positions of management in many of our industries. They will begin to demand a higher level of performance from the engineers who work for them. The new ideas in science and in management come tumbling out so rapidly that those men whose education stopped at the Bachelor of Engineering level are having great difficulty in keeping up.
The new approach to management. The attitude of the new managers is more forward looking. They have been educated to expect change and to move forward to meet it.
A change in the national attitude concerning what makes our economy tick. This has developed since the depression of 1929. Now that numerous controls have been instituted for maintaining a certain stability, a new view seems to have been adopted to the effect that the success of our economy depends markedly upon the development of new processes, procedures, services, and industries. If we have another depression, there will be many who will blame engineers and engineering managers for not having developed the new products and services needed to spark the economy.
Many new developments. In less than ten years we have gone seriously into a space race, and as recently as 1958 we wondered when nuclear power would in fact become competitive. Today we see nuclear power plants springing up all over the place and we hear claims of even greater cost reductions in the price of nuclear power.
New instruments have been developed. We now cut metals with beams of light. We send signals millions of miles out into space and control robots which take photographs for us and transmit the information back to earth. We create new materials ranging from man-made diamonds to elements in a degree of purity unheard of before. We design whole aircraft, transformers, motors, and various devices on computers. We use computers to do engineering drafting, to schedule engineering effort, and finally, as on our campus, we use computers to instruct other computers.
The pressures to continue creatingthese new aids to production will continue, if for no other reason that that the world's population is growing at a rate that promises to doom a large portion to poverty despite the best efforts of engineers in creating the devices and systems to alleviate poverty.
Developing nations are expecting toparticipate in the benefits of industrialization. Some of the most modern plants in the world will probably be erected in Africa and Asia.
All these forces and many more are causing changes in the way engineering is practiced and in what engineers are expected to accomplish. On the whole, engineers have taken all this in stride, perhaps too much so. Some engineering accomplishments have been so unspectacular as to evade the notice of almost everyone, including most engineers. The enormous uniformity of standards for materials and for sizes of devices, for instance, catalogued and readily available for facilitating production and cutting costs, has been our secret weapon; so secret that these standards are scarcely mentioned to some engineering students.
And the computer, of course, has changed the way engineers go about their work. Today routine design has been relegated to the computer. Large volume of production, possible in almost anything we build because of our country's size and the growth of international trade, has meant large savings in labor through standardized work methods. The fact that engineers use the systems approach, which in itself is being continually improved upon, has also contributed to the emergence of engineering's being as much concerned with planning as it is with doing.
WITH this review of the forces and the changes in engineering as a basis, we can consider what the future may bring. First, let us consider the new areas of engineering practice which are already on the horizon and which certainly will be expanded in the future.
Engineers in increasing number are becoming involved in medicine, not only in the design of prosthetic devices, such as artificial limbs and heart pacers, but also in therapy, through artificial kidneys, artificial lungs, artificial pumps for blood, and instruments for diagnosis. Soon engineers, with the aid of computers, will be able to program the preliminary analysis of most illnesses, and fewer patients will receive a diagnosis which overlooks some important possibilities. The research now going on in biological systems, particularly the portions of living systems which process information, leads us to expect that we shall learn soon how to extend the senses.
The crowded nature of our cities and the impossibility of continuing to build superhighways will soon force the development of new forms of transportation. I hope, but I dare not prophesy, that the new forms of transportation will be safer than the present ones. We certainly cannot go on killing at the rate of 100 people per day and we shall not do so once we return to decent mass transportation systems.
Engineers will continue to find their employment and opportunities in the distribution and generation of energy. Nuclear power plants will be more numerous. Even more important will be the growth of gigantic power grids connecting every city and community to every other one. It will not be long before the power grids extend over the entire United States and Canada to Alaska, and perhaps directly across the straits to Russia, and from Russia on to Europe and to Asia. When this occurs, it seems to me that the unit of international currency will no longer be gold but more likely will be the kilowatt hour. The true wealth of a nation after all is reckoned in terms of the sources of energy available to it, not gold.
We can expect engineering practice to extend to greater extremes of temperature, that is, up to temperatures of plasma, which enable us to cut stainless steel as though it were butter, and down to temperatures within a few thousands of a degree of absolute zero, enabling us to have magnetic systems and super-conducting systems, almost noiseless com- munication systems, and so on. Engineers will be employed in data retrieval systems. Huge libraries will be organized in such a way as to permit inquiry by computers and transmission of entire volumes by television-like systems. Libraries have been doubling in size about every dozen years. We have reached the point where we can no longer continue this process.
The growth of population has produced problems of air pollution and water pollution which engineers must resolve. Although there is a great deal of talk these days about making fresh water from the sea, an economic study of the matter indicates that clearly we should begin to reclaim our water on a larger and larger scale.
These are just a few suggestions concerning new areas for engineering practice. I have barely scratched the subject, but even with so brief a review it is clear that engineers will be needed in the future and their work will involve new and challenging ideas. To meet these challenges we shall need a new breed of engineer. Now to a consideration of how he should be educated.
FIRST I must observe that these topics are distinguished by their complexity and by the way they cut across so many disciplines. It is for this reason that I suggest that the new breed of engineer will require a longer period of education than his predecessor. Within a decade I expect the master's degree to be the minimum degree acceptable for professional practice and the doctor's degree to be the requirement for high-level practice. With time-sharing on large-scale computers now being extended for widespread and relatively inexpensive use in large metropolitan areas, and with cathode-ray oscilloscopes benefiting engineers in more remote locations, more and more routine tasks now given to young engineers, holders of the bachelor's degree, will be relegated to the computer — with fewer errors. Computers will do many, many tasks; Professor Coons at M.I.T. has demonstrated the practical nature of using the computer as an aid in engineering drafting and his ideas are already in industrial use.
There will be computer routines for the programming of engineering works through the use of decision theory and for optimization. Indeed there are already available some new programs that will optimize an entire oil refinery or a chemical plant. One of these programs, known as PACER, was developed by Professor Paul Shannon of Thayer School and is now being used in many industries. It is among the first of many such master executive routines which call up as subroutines as many as 100 specialized programs. Taken all together, these routines in the hands of a skillful man can outproduce hundreds of engineers.
This is why I believe that in the future engineers will be much better trained. We simply will not be able to afford to turn over to men whose training is too narrow the use of these enormously complex and powerful devices. These engineers will have more at their disposal than do the chief engineers of many companies today. The men in charge of these activities certainly will have been educated to the level of Doctor of Engineering, if not beyond. There will be need for more technicians and there also will be need for many men whose education consists of about two years of engineering material.
Now how will we educate the men who are to take on these tasks? First of all, I suggest that we must recognize that these men will hold enormous power, that they will shape our lives even more than engineers have in the past. They will need to be able to think abstractly and they must handle value judgments, for on their decisions will hang a great deal of money. I suggest, therefore, that we shall expect these men to take about eight years for their formal education, and we shall expect the first four years of that education to be devoted to a liberal education and to a scientific education- first-class education in modern physics, mathematics, life sciences, chemistry, and some of the so-called engineering sciences.
This preliminary education must be topped off with something which I think will be a mixture of our present Ph.D. programs and programs leading to the degree of Master of Business Administration. Since these men will have stronger mathematics backgrounds than the present students in M.B.A. programs, I can anticipate that special curricula will be required for them, unless of course the schools of business administration continue on their present course, which is to demand more mathematics preparation of their incoming students. At any rate, the present Ph.D. programs will have to give way to, or at least accept in parallel, programs which are more professional in character and which are aimed at high-level accomplishment in design using these modern aids.
We shall not be content to let these men have a background in economics which includes only one course at the undergraduate level, or, as in the case of many graduates of our more modern schools, no courses at all. We shall expect them to have had courses in operations research, to understand some of the techniques of modern management, particularly the logistical problems concerned with the management of capital. The computer and this background will enable these men to consider in their designs not only the costs but the problems of construction and maintenance; that is, enable them to take a systems approach.
Today in the design of buildings, if I may judge from the writings of the great Italian designer Pierre Luigi Nervi, too few engineers begin their designs by considering the problem of the contractor who will erect the building. Too few men, according to Nervi, know enough mathematics to do the design of the structure in such a way as to preserve the appearance, the economy, safety, and possibilities of fabrication all at once. This ideal concerning engineering practice as held out by Nervi in the field of building design must carry over to other equipment. The education of the new breed of engineer and the support we are going to give him in the future will make it possible to include all these factors at once, to use the systems approach even when designing the small components.
WHAT does this mean for engineering education? One thing we must admit at the outset is that today's engineering schools are not yet ready for this kind of education. There are too few engineers who understand it and those who do are busy in practice. But the demands are here and soon we shall see another wave of reform sweeping over our engineering schools. The reforms that came after World War II consisted primarily of throwing out outmoded courses in engineering technology and substituting courses in the sciences. Even in those schools which seem to be having difficulty gaining accreditation these days, the level of scientific instruction is considerably higher than it was in the accredited schools of twenty years ago.
Unfortunately, with the advent of the swing to science in our engineering schools, there has been an influx of engineering teachers who have no experience with engineering. This wouldn't be so bad were it not for the fact that they seem to think that research is the end product of engineering and under the policy of "publish or perish" there has grown up in many of our major universities a faculty of engineering which does not care about engineering in the large. These faculties will need to be replaced, or at least augmented, by men who understand how to integrate cost considerations with engineering design. We educators will not be able to leave the matter to industry. The pace of change is too rapid and the opportunities for men to learn all the things they ought to know about engineering are still too limited. There will be increased postbaccalaureate and even post-doctoral education. It will be more and more the habit for men to take time off from engineering practice and return to school to learn new subjects.
Recognition of these trends in engineering has caused some schools to introduce new kinds of courses. These are courses which include the realities of engineering and bring to the student's attention those factors which the professors in the sciences would consider unimportant but which we, as practicing engineers, know either make or break a project. At Dartmouth we believe that engineers have a responsibility to recognize needs, to propose means for satisfying them, to decide upon the criteria which should be used to make these decisions, and to generate alternative ways of meeting the needs. They must have the responsibility to prove that their ideas are sound and economically viable.
Because few engineers have the opportunity to see how all these facets of engineering fit together, we developed a course aimed solely at showing students how these ideas fit together. One year, for example, we took 67 students to a center for crippled children. We told the students they had ten weeks to decide upon something which ought to be built to help the youngsters. We gave them a budget and technical assistance, but they had to decide what it was that needed to be built. They had to justify that what they decided was needed and could in fact be built, and then they had to demonstrate that the designs they proposed made economic sense. We told them to help the children at a price that could be afforded. In this way we introduced our students to the task of deciding what needs to be done, deciding upon criteria, and taking into account limited resources in both time and knowledge; and we gave them an experience in generating alternative ideas, and in seeing that alternative ways must be devised if the optimum one is to be found.
We try to give our students an image of engineers as people who recognize human needs and respond to them. Again, this is not something that can be put across by words. It is in the actual doing of the work that the idea becomes clear. Imagine, if you can, the fervor with which these young men attacked the problem of designing a communication device for a young boy of ten who has no vocal cords. No teachers ever were more rewarded than we were when we saw the sparkle in our students' eyes as they described how the crippled youngster found he could communicate with their device. This was a taste of engineering at its best.
The world of engineering is going to be a more exciting one in the future. It will be more intellectually demanding, and it will be more rewarding. The central role of engineers in keeping our economy alive and moving will receive more and more recognition as engineers make more and more of the decisions concerning the investment in our economy. It will be necessary for more engineers to enter politics and it will be necessary for more people to know about engineering, even though they do not practice it. Ultimately, it will be recognized that a liberal education requires a knowledge of engineering, for engineers not only make our world and shape the lives of all in it, but by their methods of analysis and design, they create new philosophies and new understandings, and they raise and solve new ethical problems.
A student in the plasma research laboratory studies wave modes.
It takes patience to align a small specimen in a dialometer.
Thayer School (foreground) and neighbor-ing Tuck School as viewed from the air.
Students use equipment in the metallurgical laboratories: at left, a high speed camera; at right, an X-ray detraction camera.
Students use equipment in the metallurgical laboratories: at left, a high speed camera; at right, an X-ray detraction camera.
