ECE 3400, Cornell University, Fall 2017

Martin’s Somewhat Heretical Thoughts for Cornell Engineering Students

Informal post by Director Martin Gomez, Nov 17th, 2017

[Comment by Prof. Clifford Pollock: When you read this, please keep in mind his is one person’s perspective, and that other companies and employers might see things a little differently. Nevertheless, this post has a lot of valuable feedback!]

• Learn how to make measurements. The terms accuracy, precision, and resolution all matter, and it’s truly appalling how bad many engineers are at this. We live or die by our measurements. It’s said that “one measurement is worth a thousand opinions.” That’s true, but only if it’s one good measurement. Hint: if you can’t put error bars around your measurement, it’s not useful. Those courses are monumentally boring – if not the experiment itself, at least the writeup – but they matter. An engineering career sometimes feels like one long long lab course!
• Take a course in signal processing, even if you’re not an EE. Every engineering discipline relies on measurements, data, i.e. signals. You should know how to extract signal from noise. Everybody needs to know what a Fourier transform is. On the other hand, feel free to ignore Laplace transforms…you will probably never encounter another one after you graduate as long as you steer clear of a handful of fields.
• Learn probability and statistics for the above reason.
• Learn how to use MATLAB or its equivalent. I don’t care what branch of engineering you study, you need a tool like that. Excel is for accountants.
• You have to learn how to write a computer program, I don’t care in what language, and to do so about as easily as you dial your mother. Which you should do, often.
• Assume that anything you don’t learn in school, you’re going to end up learning on your own. Or worse, you’re going to end up NOT learning on your own, screwing up your assignment, and requiring a bail-out by somebody who DID learn it. As a junior in 1981, I hated my Heat Transfer course, drowned in a sea of non-dimensional numbers I didn’t understand, and got a C+ or some such. Then in 2005, I was designing a UAV that had a nasty thermal problem…we buried a hot exhaust pipe inches away from a composite fuselage. I had to crack that horrible book and learn it on my own so that I could design a solution. That job should’ve gone to a thermal analyst, but we didn’t have one, so it defaulted upwards to the Chief Engineer…me.
• Learn how to write. Read books. The best ideas will not be implemented if you can’t convince people they’re good. Hint: if you do not have a list of favorite books, you’re not reading enough. Read novels even while you’re in school.
• Practice public speaking. It’s not enough to be right…you have to convince people you’re right.
• I don’t care if you know how to use CATIA, SolidWorks, AutoCad, or their electrical equivalent. I care that you know how to design things. If you don’t know a particular tool, we’ll send you to a training class once you get to industry. If you can’t design it with a paper and pencil, you can’t design it with a computer, either. You will, however, make mistakes faster. Be an engineer, not a tool user. I can’t emphasize this enough: your tools will not think for you. If you can’t do it with a paper and pencil, I probably won’t trust the answer that came out of your computer.
• I don’t care about your GPA. I care that you learned engineering. If you got your A by studying every previous exam your professor issued, leveraging off of your friends’ work, or memorization, I will detect it in the interview. If you earned your low GPA by drinking your way through school, I will detect that too.
• I don’t place much value on the multi-semester long race cars, solar cars, human-powered whatever, etc. The opportunity cost is too high. You’re in school to take classes. You’re going to spend the next 40 years designing things in industry…getting a one- or two-semester head start isn’t that important to me. Why? Because school is a zero-sum game. What did you NOT do in order to design your solar-powered race car? If you don’t learn about heat transfer, math methods, electromagnetics, classical mechanics, etc. in school, are you going to learn them in industry? On your own? When there’s no exam or grade hanging over your head to make you study? Unlikely.
• Don’t decide too early that “I will never need to know that.” The purpose of your education is to enable you to learn everything else you’re going to need to know from graduation until you die. Don’t leave out any building blocks, because you can’t possibly know what you’re going to build on top of them.
• Learn how to do math in your head. If you can’t approximate the right answer, you won’t know if what comes out of your computer is right. You should be able to add, subtract, multiply, divide, square root, and square numbers in your head and be within 10-20% i.e enough to tell if your computer’s answer was off by an order of magnitude.
• The fundamentals really matter, and never stop mattering. Newton’s Laws, Ohm’s Law, Kirchoff’s Laws, conservation of energy, mass, momentum…honestly, a lot of what we need in an engineering career is learned in a good high school physics class! You’d be surprised at how much is lost when we focus only on computer aided design, computational fluid dynamics, simulation, FPGAs, 3D printing, etc…people still screw up basic physics, and then things break.
• Learn a foreign language. The Artsies can’t graduate without one, and neither should we. Not every good idea comes at you in English.