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ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION

of immediate financial return. Night schools, therefore, arrange courses of study to meet the needs of these strictly utilitarian pupils. The young man going to a regular resident engineering school makes a mistake in taking up a specialty. The man who later in life endeavors to study the things he feels he sorely needs, is of necessity the most narrow of specialists. Occasionally men take up one subject after another in special schools, gradually getting the equivalent of a fairly complete engineering education. The percentage, however, is small and the result of the widely advertised special courses in engineering subjects has been to crowd the ranks with partly trained men who keep down pay and lower the dignity of the calling. It is sometimes a serious question whether it is wise to give the few who are worthy a chance, when in the giving of it so many are injured.

There is a third way by which a man may obtain a fair engineering education, and that is by self-tutoring. The self-tutored man is one who endeavors to educate himself from books, without the assistance of teachers or correspondence schools. All honor to the man who succeeds in this stupendous undertaking which many start upon and few accomplish. It was the way in which 90 per cent. of the engineers were educated more than fifty years ago and a large percentage of engineers now living, who are past middle age,