When Graduation’s Over, Learning Begins: Lessons for STEM Students and Professionals

Introduction

I graduated from college with a liberal arts degree. I was always fascinated with history but soon discovered there weren’t many jobs available for history majors. Desperate for work, I was eventually hired by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as an apprentice mechanic. At the time, it felt like an embarrassing step backward for a college grad to earn a living turning wrenches. I was an historian trying to learn how to run a lathe, weld aluminum, bend tubing, and calibrate torque wrenches.

During my four-year apprenticeship program at NASA, I was rotated among various buildings and shops to learn a variety of skills from the different tradesmen I was assigned to. After each tour of duty, I would meet with the area supervisor who would then give me an appraisal of my work and my progress in becoming a journeyman. During the course of one interview, I mentioned that I had a college degree from Georgetown University where I had studied the liberal arts with a major in history. I thought my background might impress him, but this manager looked directly at me and said, I’m really sorry to hear that. Taken aback, I asked why, and he responded, Well, for this job you don’t need a college education and I feel bad that you spent so many years and so much money earning a degree only to get a job where you don’t need it. This wasn’t the last time at NASA, where almost everyone held advanced technical degrees, that my liberal arts background was met with a bewildering look or occasionally, even ridicule.

A few years later, now a journeyman mechanic, I assembled scientific hardware for experiments that flew aboard the Space Shuttle. I enjoyed working with my hands and my fellow technicians, but I wanted more and enrolled in night school to get an engineering degree. After eight long years, I finally succeeded.

At NASA, I had the good fortune to have participated in almost every role on a project team. From the mechanic fabricating and assembling hardware, to the mechanical engineer designing components, to the systems engineer making it all fit and work together, to the deputy project manager organizing schedules, to the project manager making decisions. I had the unique opportunity to see engineering and project management from several different roles and vantage points. Reflecting back after more than 38 years at NASA, an organization almost completely devoted to technical precision and expertise, I realized the genuine benefits of my liberal arts background. My history degree that once seemed a pointless and expensive effort allowed me to view things objectively and permitted me to think differently, to understand there may be a wider and more complex range of issues behind most engineering and management decisions.

I firmly believe liberal arts made me a better engineer and, as my career evolved more from technical engineering and into managing projects and people, I used my liberal arts degree much more than I used my engineering degree. Actually, after spending a good bit of my career feeling somewhat embarrassed having a history degree, I now consider my background in liberal arts to have been a significant blessing.

I discovered that a more diverse background allows an engineer to approach problems from a different standpoint. It provides an ability to look at design with a more broad or comprehensive perspective considering such issues as maintainability, manufacturability, ergonomics, and design aesthetics rather than concentrating primarily on dimensions, material selection, and functionality. It equips one with an ability to explain complicated designs, decisions, or situations more clearly, particularly in written memos and e-mails. Awareness of the liberal arts, and for me a strong background in history, allowed an understanding and appreciation of the human element that is intricately involved in every engineering design. Unlike mechanisms, electronic circuits, and software algorithms that we find so compelling and personally fulfilling, each human is uniquely different, and significantly more complicated than engineering hardware.

Later in my NASA career, I became the head for training and knowledge management. In this role, I convened a meeting at the Astronauts’ Beach House at the Kennedy Space Center. The Beach House had been used by all of the flight crews from Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and then the Space Shuttle program. It was here that the astronauts and their families and friends gathered for one last barbeque before their flight. It was a tradition for each crew to select a bottle of wine to share when they returned from their mission and place it in a wine cabinet.

I invited several prominent engineering educators from some of the world’s best schools to discuss how NASA can better train our newly hired engineers. We called it the Fifth Year Program because the critical question I asked our team of experts was: If you had an extra year at your school to train your engineers, what subjects would you cover?

For three days, we discussed this and then mapped out a new curriculum we would introduce at NASA. All of us agreed that engineers leave school, after four very intense years, well versed in math and science and engineering principles. The unanimous consensus of these educators, if given an additional fifth year of study, would be to focus on teaching their students better communication skills, decision-making skills, and a more thorough understanding of the ethical responsibilities of their profession. Learning these skills would not only make them better engineers, better leaders, better team members but would also make them better people.

This book is a summary of what I learned at the Astronaut Beach House during those hot and muggy summer days, as well as what I learned after more than 38 years of working among NASA’s talented and accomplished technical workforce. In a nutshell, this book focuses on everything they didn’t teach you as you earned your STEM degree. Or, perhaps better: everything they didn’t have time to teach you in undergraduate school.

When our forum ended, we toured the beach house and came upon the wine cabinet displaying all the bottles of wine drunk by teams of astronauts in toasts to each other and their successful missions. Two bottles remained on the shelf unopened, one from the Space Shuttle Challenger’s crew and another from Columbia’s. It’s a sobering moment looking at those two bottles and realize these 14 friends, all comrades on an exciting yet dangerous journey to space, never got a chance to laugh and raise a glass in a toast to their mission’s success. They all died tragically, not through any fault of their own, they perished because the engineers and managers, that despite having exceptional skills in mathematics, mechanics, electronics, and computer programming, made catastrophic communication, decision, leadership and ethical mistakes.

When I returned to my office at NASA Headquarters in Washington D.C., my team began developing and implementing our Fifth Year Program. The focus of this book is to describe the additional topics we added to our curriculum and share how we developed some very smart newly hired engineers into some of the best all-around engineers in the world.

Earning an undergraduate engineering degree demands an intense amount of focus, work and personal time management and, even upon graduation, the engineering profession requires a commitment to continual technical learning in order to keep pace with the constant advances in science and engineering. Therefore, the logical question becomes, As an engineer, with a limited amount of time on my hands, do I really need to know about literature, philosophy and the other liberal arts? Will reading a thousand pages of Moby Dick make me a better engineer? What insights does Plato or Socrates have to building a bridge or designing an integrated circuit? How can studying history or astronomy or language make my job easier? These aren’t new questions.

It is the hope of this book, and it was the purpose of my career at NASA, to expand and help cultivate the minds of many brilliant engineers, scientists, and technicians. To help them see beyond the equations and the formulas, the design requirements, and the countless, yet critical, system checks that the liberal arts can help them become more successful in their technical careers as well as add a complimentary, and beneficial, aspect to their own complex personalities.

Engineering school was the proverbial learning through a firehose experience and, upon graduation, you were placed among kindred engineers, all having a very similar educational experience. In school, our professors had little time, and we had little patience, to study the liberal arts, so it is the purpose of this book to challenge and, hopefully, open your mind to becoming a more well-rounded person and, thus, a better engineer by learning about communication and critical thinking skills, as well as understanding the potent power you possess as an engineer and the personal ethics that must be attentive to such power.

In conclusion, why should an engineer read a 1,000 pages of Moby Dick? Because it will help you understand human nature, it will help you understand the world and the audience for whom you design your circuit boards and your skyscrapers. Herman Melville’s classic novel will help demonstrate that the real world isn’t always numbers and balanced equations and that, even an engineer, must be cognizant of personal, irrational obsessions, be wary of the attraction of strong personalities, and understand how to avoid monumental mistakes by developing critical thinking skills. And it will allow you to appreciate the craftsmanship of a brilliant wordsmith who is able to design his masterpiece with the perfect selection of words that guide the reader’s interests and emotions page after page.

Reading the classics like Moby Dick just might inspire you to author an e-mail to the chief engineer that demonstrates, not only your technical expertise but also your proficiency to convey that expertise, or a PowerPoint presentation that captivates your audience by thoroughly and skillfully laying out your story, or a white paper for an engineering journal that is erudite as well as comprehensible.

It has been my experience, and pleasure, to work with and learn from numerous scientists, technicians, mathematicians, architects, civil engineers, and so on and in many ways I think we are all kindred spirits—we all want to make our world a better place through technology. The creativity and innovation of STEM professionals are directly responsible for the advancements in technology that fuel our modern-day world and economy and, I believe, the lessons learned in this book apply to all my STEM colleagues.

Although I am an engineer (or engineer-historian?), I originally wrote this book with a technical audience in mind; after all, those are the type of folks I had spent 38 years working with at NASA. In retrospect, and after speaking to a few colleagues who have reviewed this manuscript for me, I believe there’s a good bit of value within these pages for many college graduates, despite their major. Feeling free and understanding the importance of speaking up, developing the ability to communicate effectively, developing critical thinking skills, and understanding the necessity for ethical behavior in the workplace are, actually, universal goals and not limited to just science, technology, engineering, and math majors.

This book is made up of four brief chapters (How We’re Made, Communications, Critical Thinking, and Engineering Ethics) that include numerous case studies, some involving engineering topics, some not. I have purposely kept the four initial chapters short and concise hoping that the reader will learn the most from the following case studies. Upon reflecting on each case study, it the author’s hope that the reader will be able to delineate several lessons from the first four chapters, as each case study holds several examples concerning personality, communications, critical thinking, and ethics.

CHAPTER 1

How We’re Made

Typical Design Specifications of an Engineer

A doctor, a priest, and an engineer went golfing. When they came upon the seventh hole, they noticed the two men in front of them were causing a commotion by randomly hitting their golf balls all over the course. As they came upon the two men, the doctor asked if they were OK. The men apologized for causing a disturbance and replied that they were fire-fighters who had become blinded while saving a puppy from a burning house. They said the country club had awarded them lifetime privileges for their heroism. The doctor replied, That is amazing, I know some of the best ophthalmologists in the world, I will see if there is something we can do to help you see again. The priest said, Such unselfish acts of bravery! I will ask my congregation to keep you in their prayers so God can heal you! Finally, the engineer said, Why don’t you fellas play at night?

This joke pretty much sums up how many people view an engineer: someone who is logical, practical, and goal-oriented to such a degree to be considered somewhat compassionless.

Engineers are generally described, or perhaps stereotyped as:

•Eternally curious, always intrigued to discover how something works

•Relying almost exclusively on logic sometimes to the detriment of emotions and sentimentality

•Making both personal and professional decisions using a cost/benefit analysis. Will the benefits outweigh the costs?

•Possessing an ability to focus and concentrate intently on a topic or problem they find puzzling or interesting

•Preferring order and structure

For most, math is their first language. Math makes an engineer comfortable because it is logical, orderly, absolute, and irrefutable. Math is the international language that everyone, no matter where they’re from, understands. Engineers like black and white, they are very uncomfortable when things appear to be gray. There’s no debating math.

The famous aerospace engineer, Theodore von Karmon, known as the father of supersonic flight once said, Scientists study the world as it is, engineers create the world that has never been. An engineer takes the laws of physics and using the language of mathematics and his or her own imagination creates useful products and systems. In many