Why Would Anyone Go To Engineering School?

Why Would Anyone Go To Engineering School?
Remarks by Roberto C. Goizueta
Yale Faculty of Engineering New Haven, Connecticut
February 22, 1996
Thank you, Rick ... and good afternoon, everyone.
(Your introduction was so flowery and so Veracious that it almost sounded like a eulogy. For a second, I felt as if I should have done the honorable thing and died first!)
It's always wonderful to beback at Yale.
And it is a high honor indeed for me to be asked to deliver the inaugural Sheffield Lecture, at Yale's College of Engineering.
When you are privileged to lead an institution such as The Coca-Cola Company, awards and honors occasionally come your way.
But to be honored as a Sheffield Fellow by your alma mater ... That is special.
It somehow makes up for all those late nights ...digging frantically through Perry's Chemical Engineering Handbook ... subsisting on terrible coffee ... and cramming for the next day's Thermodynamics test.
When most alumni come back to campus, they look for the Yale Bowl, or maybe stop by Mory's, to make them feel at home.
But I always find it reassuring to see the Sheffield Chemistry Lab, still standing there ... to terrify Chem-E students offuture generations.
I'm very proud of my Chem-E degree from Yale. And I'm very proud of the work Dean Bromley has done in this decade ... as Yale has restored a proper emphasis to engineering.
I think Dr. Bromley is to be commended for not only getting more Yale students into engineering but -- as he says -- getting more engineering into Yale students.

Engineering at Yale is something broaderthan engineering at any technical institute. The beauty of a formal education in engineering at Yale is that you get the discipline of an engineering curriculum, but you also are provided with the opportunity to stretch your mind in other directions. Such is the academic environment at Yale.
I will admit: I'm not sure how much I was thinking about stretching my mind when I signed up for"Geography Of The Tropics" as one of my electives. To be honest, I was probably thinking, "I'm from the Tropics ... so how hard can this be?"
But my entire education, as a Yale engineer, taught me much more than engineering. And I don't think the importance of that can be overstated ... because virtually nothing that I do today is, in the strictest or purest sense, engineering.

That prompts aquestion: "Why Would Anyone Go To Engineering School?"
And if your answer is, "To learn engineering" ... you are in for a surprise ... and you are going to be a bit disappointed.
I say this because five or ten years from now, you will realize how little you remember of the formulas and the problems that so much intrigue you, or vex you, today.
What you will remember is something far more important. Youwill remember how to solve problems. You will remember how to think. You will remember how to learn.
Engineering is a discipline like no other. It even has an unusual name ... "Engineering."
No other academic course is referred to in verb form. You study Chemistry ... not "Chemistry-ing." You study English ... not "English-ing." You study Economics ... not "Eco-nom-ing."
But you studyengineering. By its very nature, engineering is uniquely action-oriented. And that action ... is learning.
At its heart, engineering really is the science of learning. When you study engineering, you are studying how to think. And that thinking...just like any scientific discipline... takes a very precise form.

As engineers, we think in four steps.
-- First, we assess the big picture. We takeinventory of the
situation.

-- Second, we burrow into the details. We deconstruct the problem before us ... break it down into its parts, so we can study and solve each one.

-- Third, we follow up. We ask questions. We challenge assumptions.

-- And then, finally, we put ourselves in the mind of someone else ... the user of the machine, or product, or process in question. We see if our...