For nearly thirty years, I’ve been advised to obtain a science or engineering degree. My advisers would say that business and social science students (such as myself) are a dime a dozen. They would go on to say that science and engineering credentials are highly desired even in tight job markets and more valuable as time went on, since new technologies were always being developed and people who could work with these technologies were always in demand. Managers and other business types, on the other hand, were quite often expendable.
Acting upon this advice, I gave engineering school a try for a year. Now there are two big-time engineering schools in Indiana. One is a public school in West Lafayette with a wide variety of academic programs other than engineering. The other is a private engineering-only school in Terre Haute. I was accepted to both, but made the mistake of enrolling in the nearby private school. Engineering school (in an engineering-only environment) wasn’t really my bag, but I didn’t realize it until it was too late. While I learned valuable lessons about myself from the experience, I felt drained and demoralized. That’s when an associate who had spent a great deal of time in the real world of engineering told me a story.
He said that upon gradution the graduates of the private school program, now poor from paying private school tuition for four years, went to work only to find that their bosses all graduated from the public engineering school. The graduates from the public engineering school started out higher on the food chain and seemed to advance faster. Why? Because students from the public school program were exposed to a wide variety of students from other disciplines and were able to use this exposure to develop better soft skills, such as public speaking and networking (that is, networking with people, not with computers). In other words, the public engineering school students were far less likely to become major spazzes than their colleagues at the cloistered private engineering school in Terre Haute, Indiana.
I’ve thought about that story many times over the years and once again tonight as I sat in my project management class. Most of the students in the class were engineering students of various Asian persuasions, while the minority was composed of rather waspy business students. I felt both jealous and in awe of my engineering student colleagues as I knew that not only were they about to receive valuable business training that I had spent the last three years of my life working to obtain, but they had extensive technical backgrounds from which to draw.
At the end of the evening, I came away with two overpowering thoughts. First, going beyond the cultural exchange aspects, I felt that it would be a great educational experience for all involved to have business students and engineering students mix. Even though I am burnt out on group projects, this course just screams out for one (or two or three, for that matter). But moreover, as a American business student, it was apparent to me that I need to broaden my skills in technological, quantitative and hard science fields. Times are tough and the reward of happy, gainful employment will go to those best prepared to meet the broadest array of challenges in the workplace of today and tomorrow. Whether or not I want it to be, it’s a global environment, and the best way to meet this world is to be as competitive as possible. Anyway, I’ve got a long road ahead of me, so I better get cracking.
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