COLUMN: Beyond the textbook
ENGINEERING IS inherently creative. Unfortunately, that's easy to forget. People tend to take engineering for granted, driving over bridges without ever considering the amazing structures they're crossing.
What's really a shame, though, is that engineers, and particularly engineering students, tend to do the same thing. If anybody should be interested in engineering, it should be us.
Rather, engineering seems a drudge, a series of problem sets to complete, an endless procession of formulas and rules.
Those formulas have to be there, of course. We can't build a bridge without knowing how much load it can bear.
Almost all engineering courses at Rice focus on formulas and calculations. In many cases, that's the way it has to be. An engineer must know how to calculate stresses or pipe flow.
There's a lot more to engineering than that, though. A computer can do structural analysis better than even the most focused student. What it can't do is dream up a new way to build something.
Consider T. Y. Lin's bridge in Minnesota. He could have chosen to build a textbook concrete overpass. Instead, he created a soaring, airy arch, a gateway spanning the river. He dreamed up a whole new way of using steel, using cables to make it stand up to loads better. His solution is elegant in both an aesthetic sense and an engineering one.
Were it not for great engineers like Lin, we never would have advanced past logs laid over rivers. All the great bridges we admire today were radical in their time.
We have to find a place in the curriculum for that kind of creativity. Great engineering takes not only a grasp of the fundamentals but also a sense of how structures work, a feeling for what can be done and what can't.
This can't be taught, but it can be encouraged. Just like architects study great buildings of the past, engineering students should be exposed to the great engineers and their works. Just as architecture students know Le Corbusier, civil enginnering students should know Robert Maillart.
Equally, any engineer should be able to look at a bridge and see how it works. You can't expect an undergraduate to precisely analyze the Golden Gate, but even with a very modest technical background, one can understand why it looks the way it does.
Students should be exposed to this sort of thing before -- not after -- their structural analysis classes. This sort of qualitative background makes the quantitative calculations much more intuitive, even easier. Formulas can be looked up in a book, but there's no substitute for understanding.
An engineering education isn't easy. It shouldn't be. But being reminded occasionally what it's all about -- that all these calculations do have a purpose -- makes it a good deal easier.
Rice needs to re-examine the curriculum, weed out unnecessary busywork and memorization and add some more exposure to the discipline and its creations.
The engineering work load can be oppressive. It not only stretches students to their limits but also leaves them with little time to broaden their horizons. I don't want to think about how many lectures I've missed because I had a problem set due.
Happily, some of the engineering faculty agrees with me. Civil engineering may soon add a freshman seminar, and "Lego Lab" is definitely a step in the right direction.
But it's up to the students as well. We have to find time sometimes to go to lectures, to read, to learn things that aren't in our textbooks. It's our responsibility as future engineers.
And that brings us back to T. Y. Lin. One of the greatest engineers of our time will come to Rice next Friday as part of the Ryon Symposium.
His talk is part of a day of seminars on the future of engineering -- in other words, the world in which we'll practice. It's a chance we shouldn't miss.
There's more to engineering than we can find in our textbooks. Let's not forget that.
Christof Spieler is a civil engineering major and a junior at Sid Richardson College.
This item appeared in the Features section of the March 22, 1996 issue.
Copyright © 1996 The Rice Thresher. All Rights
Reserved.
This document may be distributed
electronically, provided that it is distributed in its entirety
and includes this notice. However, it cannot be reprinted
without the express written permission of:
The Rice
Thresher, Rice University, 6100 Main, Houston, TX 77005-1892, USA.
The Thresher Online Project -- ethresh@rice.edu