Page:Engineering as a vocation (IA cu31924004245605).pdf/85

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ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
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concrete design. Always the same idea to get into line on some kind of work that is exciting public interest with the idea that bigger pay may be had. Few of the young fellows who take up a specialty are really imbued with a love for engineering work, but are going into it with the mistaken idea that it pays well, provided a fellow can select the most popular line.

In the larger schools, owing to the sizes of the classes it is impossible for any teacher to teach more than one subject, so the schools are full of specialists, each clamoring to be the head of a department and this, added to the will-o'-the-wisp search of parents for remunerative vocations for their offspring hurts the profession. The writer, in common with the majority of engineers who have had a fairly broad experience, believes the designations of Civil, Mechanical, Electrical and Mining Engineer should disappear in the curriculum of the schools and there should be given one general engineering course, with special courses which the graduates may take later. This general course could be so arranged as to afford considerable choice of subjects in the last year, thus enabling a student to specialize along certain lines only after he has completed the fundamentals of all engineering work, and has had sufficient vacation experience to enable him to choose intelligently among a lot of offered courses those which he feels sure will be of the greatest value to him immedi-