| > 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? 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. |
Wasn't your point that Caltech would have taught them not to be formula-pluggers?