Page:Engineering as a vocation (IA cu31924004245605).pdf/103

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ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
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To ascertain just how well the teachers are doing their work permit the graduates to help improve conditions. The fifth year after graduation, thus allowing time for the clearing away of youthful bitterness and animosity, each graduate should be sent a blank to be carefully filled in, in which he is to reply categorically to a list of inquiries respecting the members of the teaching force at the school while he was there. This report to be confidential between the man who makes it and the President of the institution. The graduates can thus have full opportunity to help their Alma Mater and show-up the weak points of the teaching staff, and if the head of the institution is fit for his position he will know what to do, and how to do it. In studying such reports he is not dealing with immature graduates, but with men who are experiencing the hard knocks of life, after having supposedly been prepared for their life work at the school whose instructors they are invited to criticise.

The essential difference between engineering instruction in Germany and America is that the attempt is made in Germany to give a complete scientific course and train men in the application of science to industry. They graduate technicians there. Even with the amount of practical work now required, the graduate is a technically-trained scientist, who understands that his education is for power, and that it alone does not entitle him