D Lloyd wrote:

>.... I have found that my degree bears little relevance
>to what I do for my employer.
.........
>I'd say that you do not need a degree to be successful in any
>field......but a good degree will probably get you an interview. And,
>exceptional people will not stop at a degree, anyway, they will go on to a
>PhD.........
>

Interesting take on this discussion from several perspectives. I
read just this week in the paper that some high schools in the US
are now teaching courses in C programming and other IT subjects,
and many students are going straight into the workplace rather
than to college.

I guess this affords one means to deal with the current employee
crunch in america - unemployment rates ~4%. This probably makes good
sense if schools and colleges are simply intended as job training
sites for the benefit of the employers - and may work fine for some
narrow computer science areas.

I would also agree generally with the statement "... I have found that
my degree bears little relevance to what I do for my employer ..."
- I used to think this same way during my first job or so.

However, what is overlooked in this statement is that most college
[engineering] programs do not bill themselves as doing "job training"
but rather "student education". They try to give the students a
broad background so as to be able to tackle many types of problems,
not just one.

You certainly are not going to get this by taking 2 or 3 programming
courses in high school. You certainly are going to get this by solving
on-the-job problems, but it still might be better to have a broad
educational experience a springboard, rather than a narrow one.

Regarding the statement "...I'd say that you do not need a degree to be
successful in any field ...", this may be true for some areas but is
probably not very applicable to areas which are more mathematically-
based, EE being one of them.

Take one topic mentioned recently on another thread - DSP.

To "really" understand this, you need a set of increasingly-sophisticated
mathematical tools, starting with algebra, calculus, circuit theory,
diff-eq, fourier transforms, complex variables, multi-dimensional field
theory, other areas of arcane math, on and on. I can always just look
in a book, and pick out "someone else's" algorithm to use, but without
a solid background to understand the context of the problem, I'm doing
no more than cut-and-paste. This is not being an engineer.

How best to learn this stuff, except by going to college, and getting
a degree? Easier to learn higher math from an expert than any other way.

These comments may not apply to every area of endeavor, but I think the
better engineers today will have college degrees with a solid math
background rather than just 2 courses in high-school.

cheers,
- dan michaels
www.oricomtech.com
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