Whathappensif
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Graduates these days...
Anyone else think that graduates these days are usually too focused in their knowledge? I'm talking about bachelors', masters and PhD graduates.
By focused I mean if you ask a civil engineer a bit about electronic engineering, they will shrug their shoulders and say it is not
my area. Or a chemist about physics. Sometimes it is even more specific than that...ask a computational chemist about synthetic organic chemistry and
they'd shake their head.
I can't speak for graduates from non-scientific fields but I've often had conversations with lawyers or doctors, and if you stray from their specialty
(like property law or say neurosurgery) they quickly shut down the conversation by saying it is not their area of expertise. However for this I can
understand there may be liability issues giving wrong advice so they are cautious.
Finding high quality, motivated graduates with broad general knowledge and genuine interest, as well as being unafraid to be wrong sometimes by
straying into fields they weren't trained in, seems to be getting harder.
Do you agree or disagree?
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Tsjerk
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What are you to these graduates? I think that is relevant when judging their responses.
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Whathappensif
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I was one too. I am acutely aware there are limits to my general scientific knowledge and am working to expand it at all times, almost irrespective of
the field.
I just feel the education system is geared towards producing specialised workers that are afraid to experiment and explore to learn new stuff.
[Edited on 15-7-2020 by Whathappensif]
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Ubya
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same here, i had chemical physics professors laugh because they didn't remember anything about organic synthesys mechanisms.
i think it's simply the result of where the research is going, you can't reasonably know a broad spectrum of arguments at a high enough level to
matter.
i'm studying right now for a master degree in organic chemistry, and i must be honest, i'm not good with math, thermodynamics equations make my head
hurt. my girlfriend instead hates organic chemistry, she is studying for her master degree in chemical physics, and she loves equations and formulas,
but give her a synthetic path and she will be lost.
i agree we need more general knowlege, but you can't expect that from the school system, my master degree lasts 2 years, during these 2 years i have
to prepare 12 exams and work on my experimental thesis that usually lasts 1 year. cramming more classes in the same amount of time is not really
possible, and adding one year to the degree would mean that you graduate at 25 years old if you don't lose any years, add a PhD and you can maybe find
work at 27-30 years old
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feel free to correct my grammar, or any mistakes i make
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Whathappensif
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There's an interesting TED talk about how the schooling system kills creativity because (amongst other reasons) people are trained that there is only
a "right answer" and other ones are wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY
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karlos³
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What happened to the good old polymath nowadays? 
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Refinery
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On the other hand it is a fact that modern world needs experts that master a very narrow area of knowledge very well. The state of the art science is
getting so exceedingly sophisticated that it is impossible to manage anything in wider scale. For example, there are I don't even know how many
variations of different leukemia forms discovered and they all respond well to a very special kind of drugs and treatment patterns, while just a
decade ago it was common to just pump the patients full of immunosuppressants and irradiate the shit out of them, and some have survived. This is a
bit of exaggeration, yes, but you know the point in here. The tiers of sophistication are usually exponential, and from crude extraction phase you'll
get many orders of magnitude of work before you get a working product. I don't even try to consider how many steps you'll need to turn bulk rare earth
metal ore extract into a smartphone component, including development.
Even in chemistry, many syntheses require so many steps and long and complicated processes that need very high level of optimization to give decent
yields. Now if there are chemists specialized in all of those steps, a mass production of high quality and quantity becomes possible.
The Mauser Kar98K required at least 560 different steps of manufacture. Make a workstation for each of those step, and train a machinist to do that
very specific step well and routine, and you can equip an army.
I've faced the issue with scale of economies myself. Steps to make some very basic stuff like Sodium metal are not that special at all themselves, but
to turn them into other compounds and so on, repeating these steps many times, you quickly see that you'll have to do in order of hundred of different
steps to get to your desired goal. Even when you had the skill, where you get the time? Hundred hours is a small time in this process, and god help
you if you get total loss in one of the more advanced steps due to anomaly, like breakage of reaction vessel, you'll have to start all over again.
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outer_limits
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Today's world have a tendency to specialize.
For example - 20 years ago IT engineer was responsible of system administration, networks, programming and hardware management/fixing.
Today, as a software engineer I know barely basics of administration and networks, but I have strong knowledge of programming, databases and other
related stuff. And of course - the project domain which I have to learn in each of the project that I'm involved into.
Few years ago I was member of the team which have been working on ventillation system calculation software. So it was necessary to use some advanced
mathemathics and physics. Then I switched to banking and finances, then to travel... All of them required some narrow area of knowledge
[Edited on 15-7-2020 by outer_limits]
[Edited on 15-7-2020 by outer_limits]
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DraconicAcid
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I was talking to an organic prof recently, when the subject of tungsten came up. He said his bike was made out of tungsten. I told him that, surely,
he meant titanium. His reply- "Oh, yeah...one of those metals that I never use...."
Please remember: "Filtrate" is not a verb.
Write up your lab reports the way your instructor wants them, not the way your ex-instructor wants them.
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karlos³
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Quote: Originally posted by DraconicAcid  | | I was talking to an organic prof recently, when the subject of tungsten came up. He said his bike was made out of tungsten. I told him that, surely,
he meant titanium. His reply- "Oh, yeah...one of those metals that I never use...." |
Ouch! 
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Refinery
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Boy I have always wanted a tungsten bike.
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karlos³
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Might be a niche market... we could sell them as ultra expensive heavy-weight training bikes? 
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DraconicAcid
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Many times I have amused myself by picturing said organic prof trying to haul a tungsten bike up a hill.
Please remember: "Filtrate" is not a verb.
Write up your lab reports the way your instructor wants them, not the way your ex-instructor wants them.
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Whathappensif
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This caption is begging for an illustration:
"The laughter at Prof. Wolf Ramstein joining the university football team stopped abruptly, after he barreled through five quarterbacks in a row. His
secret, of course, were his newly-invented tungsten underpants."
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