Seeing a lot of fresh faces on campus its a delight that so many people taking up engineering and sciences as the career stream they’d love to specialize in. A whole lot of IIT-JEE cleared entrants walked into campus on the very first day with the spark in their eyes and a desire to make something out of their lives, build their dream projects or their passion towards pursuing their subjects. It’s been one semester since these young creative minds have been in campus and I could notice the spark in their eyes slowly dying out and most of them just treating their engineering as just another extension to the painful class XI and XII courses and grilling coaching centers.
A few days back I got a chance to talk to a few of the students who just entered their engineering education. Casually questioning them about what they are doing these days, I got an astounding answer Nothing , I was dumbstruck for a while. Here were the students, ideally considered the cream of the entire country, brought together in set of 120 students per discipline to deal with the most pressing problems humanity has and all they were worried about was placements and getting a job? Seriously?
The main problem I noticed is the MINDSET. What’s never taught in engineering is how each discipline can really complement each other and help each other function correctly. Engineering subjects are taught as a course rather than something that makes the other live it, eat it and breathe it.
Engineering isn’t about the little piece of paper that you get at the end of slogging for four long years, its about the passion and the desire to solve a problem, building teams and leveraging each others expertise to really go ahead and build the solution. There’s a million problems out there that need to be solved, what can you do to solve them ? That counts. It doesn’t matter if you have a degree or not, if you are solving problems by getting together and building solutions for hundreds and thousands of people to use, that’s true engineering.
What’s really important is making one understand their role and how if they perform their role, they are contributing to the overall development of humanity. Even something like a computer requires the work of many disciplines to make it happen. Starting from the software, which a software engineer builds, How could this person write their software if they aren’t provided with the hardware systems ? Well, lets bring in a few electronics and computer engineers to fix this problem, Once the circuits are built, it’s time to fabricate them, but oh oh ! There’s no one to fabricate them yet ? Lets pull in a few mechanical engineers and electronics engineers to build the device which fabricates the printed circuit boards needed for the computer, but wait, these guys don’t have any material to build them ? Lets go to the metallurgical and materials engineers to mine for the best materials like steel, industrial quality cutting precision tools, So they’ve mined the earth with huge mechanical tools and processed them with the help of chemical engineers to build finished materials which are then shipped out to the engineers to build the machines and their instrumntation from. Using these devices, now we’re ready to fabricate the hardware onto which the software developers can finally write their software code. Phew, that’s too many engineers involved into building one single product.
Engineering is not just about the high paying jobs, it’s just not about the piece of paper telling that you’re a B.E/B.Tech, It’s not about what your neighbours say, its about YOU ! It’s about how YOU look at a problem (opportunity?), take ownership of it and build a solution for that problem (challenge ?). What an engineering university has to teach it’s students is not completely to just solve the math, not read fifty textbooks but instead apply the math, apply the learning, build the right team, look for problems and solve them to impact at least a single individualy postivitely ! Anyone who can do this or at least put a genuine effort towards this, is an engineer. (atleast in my perspective)
Sadly this is missing and that’s why we lose creative young students and turn a university into a stage of life where people look forward to a job than to solve a problem.
PS: This article has been written not to hurt or target anyone. It’s just the author’s personal view and the pain that one feels when he sees promising young engineers lose their passion. It’s a ranting effort to make one understand what’s really expected of engineers and why we should meet those expectations.