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by political12345
1420 days ago
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How much can you be certain that your Boeing job was not the reason for your high performance, and that you are not just projecting your current self and state on mind onto your past? You are nothing like yoursef 40 year ago, to say something useless your atoms have changed 5 times over, and to say something useful you have definitely rewired your brain in many more ways. Anecdotal stories like yours are valuable, but only to you, that's why people do studies as you are of course very well aware. It could well be that the number one predictor for success is "intelligence" whatever that means, I offer the definition "to be able to absorb new information quickly and retain it and connect it to existing information to form new insights" so maybe Caltech was just a place where all such people went to and the teachers were like that so it felt "smart" and the format of the exam (open book) basically didmt really help but only enabled i.e did
not actively stop the flourisment of intelligence
in the students? Caltech might be good but there are many good places (Oxford, Cambridge, MIT e.g) so my untested theory could explain all of their successes. And then you went to Boeing and actually did things and that showed you how to be an enginner who made planes and your high intelligence allowed you to absorb that info quicker again and your are just projecting this future expert on a college intelligent but not expert self?
Just my 2 cents |
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Because I started there as a newbie along with the formula pluggers. I could see what I could do vs what they could do. For example, one task required coming up with the spinning moment of inertia of the jackscrew assembly. A plugger sat a couple rows away, and looked at it, and asked "what book did you get that formula out of?" I said it wasn't in a book, so I used calculus. He just stared at me. He was a nice enough fellow, but didn't seem real interested in engineering, and would try to get by doing as little as possible.
I discovered that an undergraduate degree at Caltech conferred math skills that other universities put off until masters. Because I'd fix the math work of some of them, too. Over time, I was trusted more and more with more advanced work. The pluggers weren't.
I was an average student at Caltech.
I have little idea how Caltech compares today. But I've run into the formula pluggers in diverse engineering areas ever since. They would have all flunked out of Caltech.
I'm not sure why you question the notion that being able to understand where formulas come from is far more valuable than just memorizing them.
I'm sure there are other great universities that educate engineers that actually understand what they're doing rather than plugging in a formula. But I have no personal experience with them.