Engineers' Creed of 1954 ------------------------ As a Professional Engineer, I dedicate my engineering knowledge and skill.. I pledge: to participate in none but honest enterprise, to place the honor and standing of the profession before personal advantage.. (and a lot of other good things..) (Adopted by the National Society of Professional Engineers in 1954.) Decades later in the U.S. ------------------------- Our tax dollars at work: Add up all the pretend engineers I've been exposed to over the years, including by way of documentaries, and divide by the number of those engineers.. and you get the engineer described below. What's the difference between an AA engineer and an actual engineer? An AA "engineer"-to-be gets herded through a university with abysmally low standards, "learns" solely by rote and mnemonic device, cannot perform any math that varies from the example problems in the text books, can do nothing but regurgitate information, gets hired by a firm that can get government contracts only if they fulfill Affirmative Action requirements, does not, and of course cannot, do any engineering whatsoever, collects an engineer's salary (provided by taxpayers), does nothing but data collection, inspections, the simplest of arithmetical computations and the memorization of other people's analyses, keeps the firm on safe ground for Affirmative Action by eventually being labeled a manager for young data collectors, and necessarily leaves actual analyses to the people who can produce things that at least resemble analyses. The very type of government contract firm or government agency that plays this game is the very type of firm or agency populated with pretenders who validate each other. The pretend position is assured.. ..while society foots the bill. The pretender spins a tale of a simplistic endeavor into something they hope will sound otherwise. But ask them to construct a solution for a very simple eighth-grade- level mixture problem involving just two unknowns and they absolutely cannot do it. Perhaps you recognize elements of someone you know in the preceding description. ------------------------------------ An actual engineer does engineering. And I'm the beneficiary of the marvelous products and services resulting from their partnerships with real industries. Six stories from my days at the University of Minnesota which shine a light on it all: U of M days <-- back one page home |