[starpilot]

This is universal to STEM degrees I think. In mechanical engineering classes you analyze a beam, in real life you analyze an assembly with 50 components that have undergone 100 revisions with 20 different materials and loading from 4 directions that vary with time. Oh, and you have 4 sensors to give you information to analyze critical stresses. But one of them is broken, and Bob who can fix it is on PTO until next Monday, so...

Internships are supposed to fill this gap but it'd be nice if all students could get a taste of real world systems and data. For tech, maybe if they could partner with the IT department at the school to get them exposed to real, messy data. Maybe there are some teaching datasets with over a billion rows that people could play around with.

[MR4D]

> get them exposed to real, messy data

This times 1,000.

The biggest surprise to me when I got out of school was how messy things were - data, systems, management, priorities...everything.

When I went back to grad school, we had arguments about the assumptions. It was a total 180 from undergrad, and much more useful. So when I came out of grad school, I was able to deal with the ambiguities - maybe even thrived because I understood them.

[Breza]

I majored in nonprofit management and every class had a required field work component with an area charity. I learned so much from the combination of intense coursework and real world experience. Now that I'm the head of data science at a corporation, I wish such integration existed in this field.

[mcrad]

> This is universal to STEM degrees I think. In mechanical engineering classes you analyze a beam, in real life you ...

Hard to believe this. Don't these degrees require rigorous laboratory assignments where the student learns to differentiate best case scenario with real world uncertainties? STEM is not just some IT certification

[Underqualified]

As a mechanical engineer : No, my education didn't.

The problem is that most real world problems take too much time to really solve to fit in any modern ciriculum.

[mcrad]

Hmmm. We had a whole course on measurement systems that get to the heart of understanding that source of your data and inevitable bias/error is more important than just crunching the data as given. For example, from a typical four year degree.

[starpilot]

Not really. MechE courses are really theoretical, and the labs are focused on just being enough to demo the theories. Most of my professors had never worked in industry, they had been in academia their entire lives. Even they wouldn't know how to bridge the gap.

In an ideal world, we'd have separate tracks for people entering industry versus academia/research, but that's a long way off.

[mcrad]

That's insane. ME degrees that I know seem to be defined by industry (ie. application of theory). Nobody pursues that degree to stay in academia/research. Anyway you can always pursue an advanced degree if you want to stay in academia. Don't get it twisted though - STEM is not a vocation as per your suggestion that "people entering industry" deserve a special path.