Since graduating earlier this month1, several people have mentioned to me that you should never stop learning. I don't object to this statement, but I find it somewhat puzzling. I went into aerospace engineering because I enjoy astronautics, and this field moves fast enough that the only alternative to maintaining technical competency is sliding into obsolescence. Naturally, that does not appeal to me.
But this biggest issue is that I don't think I really learned enough in college. I mentioned this in passing to one of my professors, who assured me that most students from our department pursue graduate studies. That helps, but not a lot, because there's more that a few areas that I want to learn more about. To better structure my thoughts on the subject, let's discuss some of the areas which we didn't really cover, but I had really hoped we would.
Nucleonics. Technically, this one is my own fault. I started at a school which offered a nuclear engineering minor, and I had the credit hours (thanks to AP) to pursue it. Unfortunately, I didn't really understand how the college course system worked, and blew those slots on entrepreneurship classes freshman year.2 Trying to work ahead in my science coursework would have probably been a better use of my time.
Heat Transfer, on the other hand, strikes me as a widely-applicable subject for aerospace engineers in general. It does not appear to be standard in undergraduate plans of study. You can probably take it as a technical elective, but those slots are limited, and instead you're more likely to push it to graduate school. Letting M.E.'s have all the fun seems a bit strange, but whatever, there's a lot of ground to cover and plenty of heat transfer books out there.
Launch Vehicle Dynamics is a little more specialized but still something would would expect to discuss. Aside from a few problems with extremely unrealistic assumptions, we didn't cover this in any real detail, not even in astronautics classes. This is probably an artifact of KU's program being particularly airplane-focused, and other schools may handle it differently.
Manned Spaceflight. Pretty much everything we covered was unmanned, though "everything" at my school consists of two (2) space systems classes. Manned spaceflight builds on unmanned spaceflight, but there's a lot of material there which we simply did not discuss. Last year's class got some of it because their AIAA design competition involved a crewed mission, but mine didn't. I'm hoping to get my hands on a relevant textbook in the near future.
Advanced Propulsion—specifically, nuclear-thermal propulsion, which motivated my desire to study nucleonics. In retrospect, this was probably a touch optimistic and is a much more common subject to find graduate students learning, but a more flexible plan-of-study might have made undergraduates taking additional rocket classes plausible.3
Computational fluid dynamics and compressible aerodynamics represent the latest additions to this list, and were ultimately my own decision. Both are offered in most curricula, but undergraduates usually don't have room in their schedules unless that is the particular area they intend to specialize in. Taking these classes would have necessarily entailed giving up other electives. I cannot help but wonder, though, whether their stripped-down components could have been included in a more versatile plan-of-study.
If I were to offer any overall theme to this post, it would probably be that underclassmen generally have insufficient information to make intelligent decisions about their education. All too many students end up in the wrong major for their interests, or in the right major at the wrong school, or even at the right school yet mess up their plans-of-study in the first few semesters.
I don't see any easy solution to this problem beyond better advising to underclassmen and prospective students. Perhaps the best we can do is better explain the challenges and minutiae of engineering education, and hope for the very best.
1That's three of my 2018 predictions satisfied, incidentally.
2To be clear, entrepreneurship was interesting and will probably still prove valuable, but nuclear engineering strikes me as a much better subject to study in a formal context.
3Note that whether additional classes are available depends on the school. It's worth looking into course listings and developing a preliminary plan of study before Decision Day.
If I were to offer any overall theme to this post, it would probably be that underclassmen generally have insufficient information to make intelligent decisions about their education. All too many students end up in the wrong major for their interests, or in the right major at the wrong school, or even at the right school yet mess up their plans-of-study in the first few semesters.
I don't see any easy solution to this problem beyond better advising to underclassmen and prospective students. Perhaps the best we can do is better explain the challenges and minutiae of engineering education, and hope for the very best.
1That's three of my 2018 predictions satisfied, incidentally.
2To be clear, entrepreneurship was interesting and will probably still prove valuable, but nuclear engineering strikes me as a much better subject to study in a formal context.
3Note that whether additional classes are available depends on the school. It's worth looking into course listings and developing a preliminary plan of study before Decision Day.
