Gene Frantz, a senior fellow at Texas Instruments Inc., grew up taking apart old appliances in his parents’ garage. But his daughter, Allison, also an electrical engineer, was never interested in such experimentation.
Tinkering with machines, taking them apart and putting them back together, used to be a major part of an engineer’s education. But today’s young engineering students seem more interested in figuring out the complexities of computer systems or wireless networks. That trend has challenged educators to make sure their course offerings keep up with technology, while still covering the engineering basics.
“Most universities still teach circuits as the first course,” said Frantz, who is on the advisory boards of several engineering schools. “Maybe we need to change the first course of the curriculum in engineering school to match the curiosity of what kids are playing with and start them from there.”
To that end, Georgia Tech’s electrical engineering department recently created an introductory course in digital signal processing.
Students who are offered such a course as freshmen are far more likely to stay in engineering, Frantz said. “Our creative kids are coming into engineering school with good math and science backgrounds, then finding they don’t get to do anything that has applications in their lives until their senior year, if they stick around,” he said.
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Allison Frantz was reluctant to take engineering when she enrolled at Texas A&M University.
“I just didn’t like the hardware side of things, and that’s what we were doing. I did like the logic courses and all the digital courses, but it was my third year before I started taking those,” she said. She earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering in December.
She said she committed to the field when she discovered how many ways she could use her degree. She recently began a job as an electrical engineer at Texas Instruments Inc.’s office in Stafford, Texas, near Houston.
“I like trying to solve problems, and there’s tons of problems to solve in electrical engineering,” she said.
When George Bell, director of network engineering for Cingular Wireless in Dallas, got his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1977, he didn’t have to think much about what he’d be doing with the degree.
“We were always taught that the bachelor’s degree was a more general degree, and if you wanted to get more specific, you had to get your master’s or you had to start on the ground floor in a major firm,” he said. “The kids today are coming out so well-trained that they’re snapped up by Cisco or Cingular as soon as possible.”
Computers have also given students an outlet for experimentation that older engineers didn’t have, said Dr. J. Richard Rinewalt, associate professor and chairman of Texas Christian University’s computer science department.
“Their knowledge of some aspects of computer science continues to amaze me, and they have done a lot on their own,” Rinewalt said. “There’s so much to learn in computer science that we can’t cover it all in the undergraduate curriculum, so it’s important for students to do the extracurricular stuff.”
Gene Frantz said schools have to teach students about new technology and adopt it in the classroom if they want to keep students interested in engineering’s basics.
“I find it intriguing that most engineering schools are the last to adopt technology to help teach technology,” he said. “They’re still using projectors and chalkboards–no, wait, it’s whiteboards we’ve progressed to now.”