[OJFord]

> Engineering is split. What’s the argument against doing it for medicine other than tradition?

One might argue medicine is a split-off piece from natural sciences.

A counter-argument might be that while the natural sciences are almost always split, where they aren't, such as at Cambridge, medicine is still of course separate.

I think the real reason is probably just that there's more value to most medicos in a whole-body understanding than there is to most engineers in a multi-disciplinary understanding.

I'd quite like to need to routinely design electronic circuits, CAD/CAM packaging for them with certain mechanical constraints, and develop software to run on them in my work, but I don't; that'd need to be a very small company working on a physical product for that not to be at least two people's jobs.

[rjsw]

I feel that mechanical engineers should have a bit of understanding about what is going on behind the scenes when they click on things in a CAD package.

From talking to recent students and current professors, I'm not sure they are learning this as part of a degree course.

[OJFord]

By 'behind the scenes' do you mean the physical objects that they're modelling, or how the software works?

[rjsw]

I mean the kind of data structures that the software is operating on, in particular the ones that can end up in an exported file.