I spent most of this weekend refreshing and learning a few things in UNIX, and I kept thinking about two points:

1. It’s great to know how to teach one’s self
2. It’s great that there’s this thing called the “internets” to help

Point #2 is something I want to revisit later. Using the internet as a learning tool has its pluses and minuses. The pluses are obvious. You can search for anything and often, thanks to today’s search technology, find exactly what you’re looking for at the end of that long tail. The minuses, though, I think are less obvious and something I’d like to dedicate a longer post to. The internet has a time problem. We’ll just leave it at that.

Point #1 is the real reason for this post. Continuous education and self teaching are vital to the success of any early entrepreneur. It’s impossible for you to know at the outset everything you’ll need to know to be successful. Your success will be defined by your ability to continuously learn (and adapt, and get lucky once or twice).

Now, I have struggled for the past two years to better understand the value of my engineering degree. I have yet to really use the subject matter knowledge acquired from four years of biomedical imaging engineering. My single summer internship studying brain waves was fascinating, but a lifetime of working in hospital basements is not exactly what I’ve planned for myself.

What I’ve come to believe, and this past weekend substantiates this, is that an engineering degree teaches you the fundamentals to be a better self educator and problem solver. No matter what you go on to do after college, these fundamentals will help guide the way you improve, break down problems, and work with a team towards a solution.

Here are the 5 reasons I think my engineering education was crucial to my early entrepreneurship path. There’s certainly more, and I’d love to hear what other people think:

1. Self Education

I’m not sure if it’s by design or due to the general ineptitude of most engineering professors, but engineering tends to be really poorly taught. I certainly don’t blame the professors. Most of them were hired to do research. They simply aren’t there to engage you in the content, and the textbooks certainly don’t help.

You have to engage yourself in engineering. You have to find the right combination of study groups, office hours, and practice problems that work for you. You learn to focus and compile. You learn by doing.

The way we refer to ‘studying’ before an engineering exam is probably a misnomer. More often, this time is spent practicing. Take that problem from Week 10 that you’re sure will be on the exam. Write out the solution step-by-step. Then, write it out again, but this time, change the numbers. Last, give yourself a final practice test by doing the problem without the book in front of you.

Even when you work out the answer to the equation, your job still isn’t done. Your next class will ask you to implement that solution with a program in Matlab. You’ll never know everything about Matlab and all of it’s functions so you better get used to digging around it’s help files and teaching yourself what you need to know along the way.

2. A Problem Solving Framework

I think the problem solving framework is best represented in an engineer’s final thesis or project.

My senior BME project team took on the following project: How could we create a portable set of underarm crutches to be used by sports trainers? We spent the first few months simply breaking down the problem. How small is portable? (Trainers typically carry duffle bags). How much weight must they support? (Accounting for the football team’s linemen, a lot). How much money do we have to build this prototype? (A little).

Once we knew the answers to these questions, we could think about solutions. Using our newly acquired Self Education skills we figured out the details for implementing.

(In case you’re wondering, we ended up building a crutch made of hinged aluminum segments with a wire running through the center that could be tightened and released to extend and fold the crutch. Cool stuff.)

3. Finishing spirit

It’s incredibly hard to get partial credit in engineering. Say you have a Java assignment that’s due at 9am on Friday morning. You could spend every waking hour from the Sunday night prior working on that assignment. You’ll make all kinds of mistakes, get sidetracked by random problems, but still find incremental improvements. What every engineering student knows, though, is if their program doesn’t run at 9am on Friday morning, it’s all for naught. Everything has to work when you hit ‘Enter’. I think it’s this feeling that keeps us up the night before. Success is relatively binary.

4. Side-by-side work

I can’t speak for every major, but one of the best things about BME was working side-by-side with professors and TAs during projects and labs. You can learn so much more than answers to problem sets this way. You see their passion and technique. How do they hold their instruments? How do they comment their code? It’s typically worth emulating.

I don’t think this extends outside of engineering all that often. Your poetry professors can’t write an example poem with you looking over their shoulder. Your ChemE professor can run that experiment though. Your CS professor can dazzle you with that on-the-spot ‘Hello world’ program in CS1007.

5. Teamwork

This was a bit of a late edition to the post. It’s also different than reason #4. Side-by-side work has more to do with emulating the best than working with a team of your peers.

I’m not entirely convinced that my engineering degree helped instill an appreciation for teamwork that I didn’t already have. Twenty years of team sports had already taught me most of what engineering school reinforced. If you haven’t had a similar experience, count this as an important reason #5.

I can remember a conversation my lab team once had with a graduate teaching assistant during some downtime in senior lab. He was a BME PhD student with a BS in MechE. He told us that if he had to do it all over again, he would have been a BME student from undergrad onwards. Obviously he just wished he could have spent another 4 years of his life talking about BME, I thought, but that wasn’t it. Instead, he told us that a BME degree would allow us to do anything. If you didn’t like medicine and biology, you could leverage your EE and CS classes. If you didn’t like those, you could leverage all of those math classes. If you didn’t like those, well, you could just fake it.

As I’m writing this now, I think his words ring true for practically any engineering major. Engineering isn’t about finding the right path over the course of a short, immature 4 year period of your life. Engineering is about learning how to learn, learning how to problem solve, and learning how to improve.

Thanks Columbia. (I never thought I’d say that before I finished paying the bill).

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