Re:Unimpressed by online classes, college students file laws...
by kyuudou on Monday May 04, 2020 @02:10PM
(#23071330)
Also, chemistry/biochemistry. How would the labs work? I mean, get real. For anything software, sure, that can be taught almost totally remotely. But most actual engineering disciplines just aren't going to have effective remote coursework with hands-on labs any time soon.
Re:Unimpressed by online classes, college students file laws...
by threwawasy1228 on Monday May 04, 2020 @02:29PM
(#23071540)
There is almost no demand for 'actual' engineering a ton of this is completely offshored into oblivion, my girlfriend has a degree in chemistry and now works in a bank. There is extremely little demand for everything outside of software.
Re:Unimpressed by online classes, college students file laws...
by blaser-waffle on Tuesday May 05, 2020 @02:57PM
(#23083483)
I don't buy that in the slightest. IT is, hands-down, the most commonly outsourced. The building engineers who inspected my foundation made me wait for 3 months because of demand.
Are the civil engineers running the local water treatment plant -- which can't seem to get enough qualified people -- going to hire people who don't meet the requirements to be called an "engineer" (unlike the US, these reqs are like doctors and lawyers).
I got my undergrad in Nuclear Engineering, and I learned to use Gamma Ray Spectrometers costing easily 30,000 dollars and did Plasma Physics experiments in a Vacuum Chamber setup of similar cost, all the while supervised by people who knew how to safely perform experiments with radioactive material and comply with relevant government regulations. And I was mainly about Computational Neutron Transport - I got what was considered a bare-minimum grounding in Experimental Nuclear Science. This is to say nothing of programs with research reactors students can use for experiments (whose ranks my alma mater sadly left just as I arrived).
This was basically true of all the non-CS engineering disciplines. Perhaps one could cobble together an equivalent to a Mechanical Engineering or Civil Engineering degree from my alma mater with CnC Routers at Hackerspaces and the like. But I really can't imagine that working for Nuclear, Aerospace, Biomedical, the Semiconductor side of EE...
Or rather, I can, but it would require an enormous investment into high-fidelity simulation of the relevant equipment. And that is a dangerous road. At the moment, we verify Engineers' ability to use equipment in a very robust way - having them actually use the equipment to perform engineering tasks and measurements. If you rely instead on training simulators you need to be extremely vigilant about their fidelity (and you will almost certainly fall back on minimum duration of instructor-monitored usage of real equipment, like the nuclear and aerospace industries require).