Sayfadaki görseller
PDF
ePub

REPORT OF COMMITTEE ON REQUIREMENTS FOR GRADUATION.

The chairman, Dean Wm. G. Raymond, stated that the report of the committee was presented last year and its discussion made a special order for this meeting. In order to insure discussion a number of members were asked to speak and four-one for each branch of engineering reported on-were ready to take up the discussion. Dean Turneaure would speak for the civil engineers, Professor Hibbard for mechanical engineers, Professor Freedman for electrical engineers and Professor Munroe for mining engineers. Each was introduced in turn and spoke as follows:

DEAN F. E. TURNEAURE: I have not prepared a written discussion but I have a copy of the report with me and have made note of a few points. In a school of civil engineering where there is a large number of students, the problem of handling large numbers is likely to modify the curriculum. That is a problem we have been studying to some extent during the past few years and one of the methods of improving the work which we have adopted is this: We have reduced to some extent the required work of the senior year and to some extent in the junior year, thus giving more time for electives, not with the idea of making a man & specialist and turning him out as an engineer of this or that kind, but primarily with the idea of encouraging the students to divide themselves into smaller groups in their advanced work and thereby get a better quality of instruction.

It is the quality of instruction rather than the kind of instruction that we think is improved by this method. In civil engineering we have reduced to some extent the required work in railroad engineering and in structural engineering. For the smaller school this general scheme would not be so satisfactory. It is satisfactory in a large school if among the relatively large number of teachers there is a fair proportion of high-grade men. Under such conditions a large school ought to be able to teach advanced work, such as might be included in elective studies, to better advantage than a small one.

For a number of years undoubtedly most of the engineering schools will have to teach language. Two or three have placed their requirements so high so that they consider they do not need to teach language, either English or foreign language. Certainly in the state schools that are and must remain closely allied to the high schools of the state, the problem is not so much to give a professional education, such as we would prefer to give, but to give an education to the students who come to us which at the end of four years will turn out the best sort of men. It will be some time before the state schools as a rule can cut out language.

I think for civil engineers the subjects of steam engineering and electrical engineering should be required more generally than some of the advanced work in civil engineering. And I note that the course as laid out does include a certain amount of this work. Just what work in mechanical engineering is meant does not appear on the diagram, although presumably it is something besides machine design as the subject of machines is separately stated.

The subject called "architecture" I presume means elementary work in building construction. This work is especially desirable for civil engineers and for chemical engineers, and also, to a less degree, for other engineers, but not, perhaps, sufficiently so to allow it to take the place of more important subjects.

PROFESSOR H. WADE HIBBARD: I have brought along a number of copies of a series of suggestions regarding summer vacation shopwork, which I believe that the committee has not considered as a part of the requirements for graduation in mechanical engineering. I will say that in Sibley College for a number of years we have given more or less encouragement to students taking summer shop-work in commercial shops, and my relations with certain lines of shops has enabled me to get a good many students into desirable positions. Thus far about sixty to eighty have been going to these shops in the summer. This summer I believe the number was about eighty and to each one of these students suggestions were given. As I had some copies of these suggestions left I thought I would distribute them as some might find them of interest.

In this shop-work, an attempt has been made in the past to make it a requirement for men in that particular line of work, but the regulations of the university authorities, or past custom or what not, have stood in the way of requiring work not done directly under the university officers being required for graduation. We are now working towards that end and hope to get the consent of the university to allowing this summer's shopwork to be substituted for some of the Sibley shopwork, and a little later we are going to make a still

further move to have this summer shop-work required at least in certain courses, and I hope to be able to present a paper next year on the requirement of this subject for graduation. I thought you would like to know what we are hoping to accomplish in the way of commercial shop-work.

There is another exceedingly important subject which I believe has not been touched upon at all in this course, viz., the human side of shop-work, giving some courses in the university along the line of the management of shops and along the line of shop organization, which might perhaps be included under that last title of shopwork. I have inferred that title of "shop-work" covers work in the college shop and not the theory of shop management or shop organization. I will say that this year for the first time a course is given in Sibley College on the theory of shop management and shop organization.

Last week and the week before I was at a convention of the two railway mechanical societies at Manhattan Beach, where very great attention was given to the subject of the human side, the man side, of shop management; not only taking up the subjects of tools and the getting of honorable work in shop design for power stations, etc., but taking up the side of the man and managing him, the man who is to manage the others. I believe that this has been a subject which has been most unfortunately neglected by many of our engineering schools and I hope that it will be considered more important in the future than it has been in the past, so that we may have proper attention given to that side of our engineering courses.

PROFESSOR W. H. FREEDMAN: I have been unable to make the detailed study necessary to present anything in the nature of an elaborate paper on this subject, but have, however, carefully gone over the Report and made some notes in the limited time at my disposal. I can perhaps without taking up much time consider in detail from an electrical engineer's standpoint the points that I have noted. I assume the requirements for graduation to be such as to require the minimum number of hours for which it would be proper for an engineering college or university to give a bachelor of science in engineering degree. I agree with Professor Turneaure, that at present there are very few colleges in this country that can entirely omit language work. If it is possible to obtain foreign languages for entrance requirements, they should be omitted in order to gain time for the technical work. English should be the last thing dropped from our language requirements, and enough time should be devoted to it to insure the use of good English.

Then, as to the question of mathematics, the electrical engineer should be taken not only through differential and integral calculus, but should have a short course in complex quantities to enable him to deal with alternating currents more easily. If certain questions in alternating currents, dynamo design, transitory and cyclic phenomena are gone into he will require, besides vector analysis, an insight into differential equations, harmonic analyses and Fourier's series.

As to the question of mechanics, I think the electrical engineer should have something on stresses and strains and on elasticity, as these are important in his dynamo

« ÖncekiDevam »