Learning To Engineer

I greatly appreciate “How Engineers Lose Touch” (by Eugene S. Ferguson) in the Winter 1993 issue of your magazine. I have never forgotten the frustration I experienced as an engineering student in the sixties when I discovered that many of my fellow students, who were doing much better than me academically, hadn’t the slightest idea which way to turn a nut, little intuition about how to put things together, and no feel for materials.

I have seen engineers who sit in their offices and issue drawings and instructions to the plant floor or field locations and make one error after another because they fail to see how a component is located or how it must function with other components or what maintenance problems it may cause. They won’t listen to the people who must build, install, or maintain it. One engineer told me he didn’t need to be there because he could see everything on his computer-aided-design screen.

I still think one prerequisite of a good engineer is a love of the hardware and a desire to have one’s hands on it. Hopefully Mr. Ferguson’s writings will prompt engineering schools to give more attention to the practical aspects of the engineer’s art.

Robert B. Stout
General Manager
Amtrak Beech Grove
Maintenance Facility
Beech Grove, Ind.