Season 5: Episode 15 Transcript
"I'm good at math…"
Lee Coffin:
From Hanover New Hampshire, I'm Lee Coffin, Dartmouth's Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid. Welcome to Admissions Beat.
A couple weeks ago we talked with Cecilia Gaposchkin from Dartmouth's history department about the value of the liberal arts. And in her words, "A degree in the liberal arts is a degree in thinking." And that got me thinking that we ought to have a conversation about engineering because so many applicants, so many kids in high school are thinking about engineering. In a lot of places like Dartmouth, engineering is part of our liberal arts curriculum.
In other places, it's a stand-alone school or maybe the entire school. So, this week we welcome Stu Schmill from MIT to help us think about engineering as a course of study and for high school juniors who are going to put together an application next year to a school with an engineering program or perhaps a school of engineering. We'll give you some tips on whether or not that makes sense for you based on your characteristics and credentials. And if it does make sense, how do you do it? So, when we come back, we'll say hi to Stu and we'll dig into all things engineering. We'll be right back.
(music)
So, Stu Schmill, welcome back to Admissions Beat. Nice to see you.
Stuart Schmill:
Thank you, Lee. Great to be back.
Lee Coffin:
For listeners, Stu is Dean of Admissions and Student Financial Services at MIT. And while we're not showcasing admission to MIT in this episode, I thought, who better to be the spokesperson for engineering than the guy sitting at MIT? And I've been asking my guests this season to look back in time and share your admissions stories. So, I've never heard you talk about that actually. So, I know you went to MIT, but I don't know where you went to high school or how you ended up at MIT. So, what's the Stu Schmill admissions story circa 1980 something?
Stuart Schmill:
I guess I started high school in the decade before the 80s.
Lee Coffin:
Oh, you old man.
Stuart Schmill:
Yeah. So, I grew up in New York City in Queens, New York. And I went to my local public high school there, Benjamin N. Cardoza High School in Bayside Queens. And although I lived out in Little Neck and I liked math and science and I didn't really know what I wanted to do, and I had also taken some computer programming back then, and that was basic in Fortran, those are the popular languages, I applied to three schools. And again, because I really had liked math and science, I was thinking I'd want to major in something related to math and science.
I really didn't know what, and I will say I wasn't really all that thoughtful about my college search back then. I had never visited any colleges and my parents had not gone to college, so there wasn't really a lot of discussion, although I had two older sisters who did go to college. But I applied to three schools that were math and science focused, MIT, RPI and the local state university out in Stony Brook, and all three great schools, and then got into MIT and just figured well, I got into MIT, I suppose I should probably go there. Thankfully the money worked out because that was a big issue.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Well, I'm struck by a couple things too as you share that with us. So many times on this podcast when I asked this question, one of the admission officers or deans says, "I was first gen I was as well." And it's interesting to me that so many of us who have this career, we're the first in our family to go to college. And I know it's not necessarily an engineering specific observation, but it is interesting to me that you're another one.
Stuart Schmill:
Yeah. I think some of it is that I remember really not having a lot of information about what college was all about. And I made my decision based on not a lot of information and all of the things that I think students today think about: what are the dorms? How's the food? Who are my fellow students going to be? That's actually a really important question. It's probably the number one thing I suggest that students try to figure out when making college selections is, who are your fellow students going to be?
Because those are the folks you're going to spend most of your time with. Not the faculty, it's not the dining hall, it's your fellow students. But I knew none of that about any of the schools I was applying to, I knew none of it. So, I just got picked and didn't know any better. So, I went to MIT and wound up having a really good experience. But I think that's one of the things I like about my current job is being able to help students who are in the position I was in try to think about what the right questions are.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Well, that's exactly what we're going to do today.
Stuart Schmill:
Yeah. Good, good, good. So, let me tell you a little bit about my engineering journey, my college journey too.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah.
Stuart Schmill:
I thought I was going to major in computer science when I got to MIT because I had done some programming and this was 1982. And so, home computers were just starting to become popular. And I got here, actually I am speaking to you from MIT right now. I got here and I took a class in computer science, it was like an introductory seminar. I thought I was pretty good in high school, I thought I knew what I was doing. And I took this class and I honestly thought it was being taught in a foreign language. I don't mean computer language, I knew nothing about what was going on and I looked around and everybody else seemed to know what the professor was asking them to do.
Lee Coffin:
Well, and you bring up a really important topic because my guess is coming out of Cardoza, you were a really strong student and you then arrive in a student body where everybody is a strong student. But it's interesting that doubt you had as you looked around saying, "Why am I lost at something I thought I was good at?"
Stuart Schmill:
Yeah. It was a profound feeling. And so, that made me nervous. I actually dropped that class because there was really no point.
Lee Coffin:
When you say it felt like it was another language, was it content that just hadn't been…
Stuart Schmill:
I had never seen the content before. It was moving so fast and—put some of it on me— I suppose. I'd never really raised my hand and said, "Hey, I don't know what's going on, can somebody help me?" I didn't feel comfortable doing that. I looked around and I just thought everybody else knew what was going on. That may not have actually been true, other people might've been feeling the same thing, but it just felt that way to me. And to be fair, I didn't raise my hand and say, "Hey, can somebody help me?"
This was also 1982 and the support services weren't in place back then as they are now. Now, there's just such a greater awareness of this, I think largely because people like you and me work at places like MIT now. We remember what it was like and we want to help other students to overcome some of these feelings.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. But that's good news you could use, as we like to say on this pod, around first gen students having the agency to raise your hand. And to not feel like, uh-oh, I'm in the wrong place, you're in the right place but go see the professor. And recalibrate as you need to but don't doubt why you're there. But yeah, I think that's a really common thing. Okay, so you popped out of Comp Sci and then what?
Stuart Schmill:
So then, I happened to take a class, the next semester I took an introductory class in mechanical engineering. Because I had liked physics and particularly mechanics, which I had taken in high school and then took again when I got to MIT. And so, I took mechanical engineering and the professor was really great. I remember one project where he had us design a bicycle, but to try to make some improvements to current designs. I forgot what the constraints were, maybe to make them stiffer. And I remember the critique he gave of the bicycle that I had designed as being really excellent in theory and impossible to actually ride.
Lee Coffin:
Very interesting.
Stuart Schmill:
It was a really good lesson because I basically started doing calculations to figure out how to design this bicycle. I came up with something that I thought was really interesting and good, and then he pointed out all the reasons why it did what I thought it would do, but you couldn't ride it, it was just not a practical thing.
Lee Coffin:
The theory worked, but the practice didn't.
Stuart Schmill:
Exactly, right. And in many ways the MIT education is, and I think a lot of engineering programs are designed to blend theory and practice together. And there's some maybe that emphasize some over the other. I think there are a lot of engineering programs that emphasize practice even over theory. And MIT is a place where actually we're very theory-heavy, even though you also have to get the practice down right. And oftentimes it's that the amount of theory in a program that determines what kind of preparation you really need to enter.
So, for example at MIT, you really need to have calculus before starting our program. That's not true at a lot of other places. And I hope we're going to dig into this a little bit more about what students actually need versus what they think they need. But I think this notion of engineering is a blend of theory and practice of analysis and practicality. You have to blend those things together, which I think makes it really interesting. So, after that class I thought, and honestly the professor was so kind and welcoming. You look back on it and you think, "Boy, what a weird reason to choose a course of study, there was a nice person teaching it."
Lee Coffin:
There's a degree of serendipity in all of this, like how you end up, where you end up. My major was similarly spawned out of the first semester, freshman year course where the professor dazzled me and I took the one and I took another one, and all of a sudden, I was like, "Oh, I'm a history major." So, we're talking about engineering, you've given us some early framing, but what engineering ABCs, what is engineering?
Stuart Schmill:
Engineering is problem solving. That's all it is.
Lee Coffin:
That's a very simple sentence, engineering is problem solving. In my intro I described the liberal arts as a degree in thinking. I think you could say the same thing about engineering.
Stuart Schmill:
Honestly, I think an engineering degree, I've sometimes described it as the liberal arts for the 21st century.
Lee Coffin:
Oh, interesting.
Stuart Schmill:
Because first of all, you learn how to think, you learn how to solve problems. It's not the actual problems that you learn how to solve that matter, it's your way of thinking that you come away with. And frankly, if you graduate with a degree in engineering, you can go on and do anything you want to. And I know students who graduate from MIT go on and do all kinds of things, things you wouldn't expect. They start working in college admissions, for example.
Lee Coffin:
No, you're right. You've been trained how to think and how to be analytical, you learn how to be creative.
Stuart Schmill:
Creative. And here's one that I think often gets lost is you learn how to tune in to what people need.
Lee Coffin:
Oh, that's really interesting. Tell me more about that.
Stuart Schmill:
Well, one of the most valuable lessons that any engineer can learn is to frame the problem right. So, how many times, Lee, have we been sitting in meetings and people are coming up with all kinds of ideas, and then somebody will raise their hand—and often it's me in meetings I'm in—and I'll ask the question, what problem are we trying to solve? One of the things that happens a lot are people coming up with solutions and then they have to go search for a problem to use it on. But really the design process needs to start with figuring out what the problem is, and that requires a lot of human interaction.
Lee Coffin:
And through that framing, is that how you see it as the liberal arts for the 21st century?
Stuart Schmill:
Yes.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Interesting.
Stuart Schmill:
Yeah. I think there's a term STEM, science, technology, engineering, and math. And I use the term only because it's a very common term out there. I really don't like it because it implies that STEM is its own category separate from other things. In recent years, you may hear sometimes STEAM, science, technology, engineering, arts and math. There's a more recent framing is STEMM, science, technology, engineering, math and medicine. So, there are a few differences, but the thing that I don't like about the term, even though again, I use it, but I don't like because it categorizes people.
"I'm a STEM person. Oh, I'm not a STEM person." Now, you can't dissociate STEM from the humanities and the arts and the social sciences. You cannot separate those things, you need to have those. And at MIT and I know in a lot of other places, if you're going to study science or engineering, you also have to study humanities, arts, social sciences. How many times have we seen technologies been developed and then just thrown out into society? Think about, well, fossil fuels, lead paint, Facebook as examples. And then you realize, oh my gosh, there are major negative societal consequences of at least all three of those things that I've talked about.
If you're just thinking about the technology, think about the iPhone which has universally been lauded as one of the most amazing pieces of technology. But it also may be one of the most destructive things for society, I think we may come to find that to be true. Technology being divorced from the humanities and from society is dangerous. So, you really need to blend the two things. And so, I don't like this notion of the separation of STEM from other courses of study. And I think in addition to it actually not being true, it often I think limits people.
Because you wind up, I hear this so often—"Oh, well I'm not really a STEM person" or "I am not good in math." So, people think of themselves as either being good in math or not good in math. I think I probably even said it at the beginning of this conversation.
Lee Coffin:
You did, I wrote it down.
Stuart Schmill:
Yeah. How I viewed…
Lee Coffin:
That "I was good at math and science"…
Stuart Schmill:
Right. Do you ever hear people say that about reading? "I'm not good at reading." It's just a skill and math ought to be more like that, it's just another skill that you can develop.
Lee Coffin:
That's true. It's a very fundamental skill.
Stuart Schmill:
Yes. But anybody can learn it and people take themselves out of it by thinking, oh, I'm not good at that.
Lee Coffin:
So, let's go to 11th grade. And you've got juniors close to finishing 11th grade and their searches are underway. And some of them are saying, "I think I'm good at math and science." Stu Schmill all these years later, "I'm good." Is that the right way to be thinking about it? I'm good at math and science, therefore I should start to consider engineering? Or is that too limiting?
Stuart Schmill:
I think it's too limiting. Although I don't mind people thinking that they're good at something, what I don't like is the reverse.
Lee Coffin:
I'm not…
Stuart Schmill:
The students who think I'm not good at it and therefore…
Lee Coffin:
So, they take themselves out of the story.
Stuart Schmill:
They take themselves out of the story, because I think that there are a lot of students who actually would love engineering if they knew what it really was. Which is really all about solving problems, designing things in some cases, whether it's computer program or a robot or a device, but it could be designing a process or an approach. These are all technologies and really you just need to want to figure out what are the problems that are out there in the world that you want to solve. And if that's what you're interested in, then you could be an engineer.
And I don't think we do a good job of explaining that in high school or even earlier than high school. And I think sometimes kids take themselves off track even earlier than high school.
Lee Coffin:
Well, and I think there's a common sense, maybe even belief that you have to start with mathematics. If that isn't a core signature of your scholastic persona, I think a lot of people do say, "oh, that's not me." Or they have that quant depth and so, "oh, I should be an engineer." But I think what you're encouraging juniors to do is think about their capacity to solve problems. And if that's part of their ambition, engineering should be part of what they consider.
Stuart Schmill:
Yes. And let me address maths more specifically.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah.
Stuart Schmill:
It is foundational and used, and I think that depending on the program gets used more intensely earlier on in programs than others. So, there are a lot of schools in the country— around the world for that matter—but certainly in the country, engineering programs with varying levels of requirements, pre-entry. Not all, probably only a handful (MIT is one of them), but handful where they actually, you have to have had calculus before entering. But most don't require that and they'll teach you. Then I just want people to think about that because that shouldn't be the limiting factor to take themselves out of it.
Lee Coffin:
That's provocative. So, for the kid that is good at math, let's start with that one. So, they're good at math, maybe they're good at math and science. When I worked at Tufts, the academic dean at the engineering school used to go to open houses and she had this wonderful exotic accent and she'd say, "Do you love physics or chemistry?" Made it sound so romantic, but her framing was you have to have math, that's non-negotiable. But physics and chemistry she said, one leads in one way and one leads in the other. The physics-oriented people like you were mechanical engineering, maybe computer science, electrical, are sitting there as home base versus chemistry is pointing it towards bio-med chemical.
Does that make sense as a way of counseling? Because she would say it every time and I loved it when she did it because I'd watch the high school kids in the room go, "Oh yes, I'm good at math and I love chemistry and I should be thinking about engineering through that conceptualization."
Stuart Schmill:
Yeah. There are a lot of different paths through engineering. So, there's the more traditional, mechanical or electrical computer engineering. And mechanical is a base where you can jump off and do aeronautics and astronautics, you can build planes and spaceships and things like that. But there's also chemical engineering; there's biological engineering which is similar to, but not always the same as biomedical. Because biomedical can really just be an application of mechanical engineering if you're building devices to be used in medicine.
Lee Coffin:
What would be an example of biomed?
Stuart Schmill:
Well, like a stent, things like that. Actual devices that get used in surgeries or in medicine. But then there's also using biological systems as engineering. You can use biological systems to solve problems. And there are different things around, say, drug delivery that combine different facets of engineering. So you may have a mechanical device that delivers a drug, but then how the drug interacts with different molecules in the body. Environmental engineering, a lot of students these days are interested in trying to mitigate the effects of climate change, and there are just many ways into that. It's again, all solving problems.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. But what's so interesting Stu, as you lay that out, is back to your engineering is liberal arts for the 21st century, you're describing an organically interdisciplinary course of study, it's not just mathematics.
Stuart Schmill:
Absolutely right. Yeah, mathematics is really just a tool. And so, you don't have to love it and frankly with the power of computers these days, you're not really sitting down and working out too many equations on your own here anymore. Again, it depends on the pathway that you're going forward. If you want to ultimately become an academic and develop new processes where you could be a lot more math heavy if you want to, but most really aren't, and you're just really using math as a tool.
Lee Coffin:
Okay. So, math is a tool and it's foundational. So, if you're a junior in high school—we had episode a week or two ago about picking your courses for senior year. What should a pre-engineering student be thinking about by way of a junior, senior year curriculum mathematics?
Stuart Schmill:
I think to the extent that your high school offers the math sequence, I would try to go as far as you can with that math sequence. Often, I get the question about calculus versus statistics. They're both useful frankly, if you want to major in engineering, calculus is probably more useful so I would recommend that if you have to make a choice.
Lee Coffin:
And AB calc, or is BC calc or is one is BC preferable?
Stuart Schmill:
I think what's preferable there is which class you and maybe you plus your teachers think is going to be the best class for you. Some students really thrive on the faster pace of BC calculus and some students don't. Some students thrive when they're just more in control because the pace of AB is a little bit slower. You don't learn as many subjects, but you learn the subjects you learned at the same level of depth, just the pacing is different in AB. And that's a different answer for different students. And I think often when I get that question, people are asking me for MIT which is better?
And frankly for MIT, if you have a choice between AB and BC, we prefer students that take BC because the pace of MIT is even faster than the BC calculus pace, in fact it's twice as fast.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. And that's always such an important part of the curricular conversation, whether if you're a history major in English, the senior courses that approximate the pace of what we teach on our campus is what we're hoping to see.
Stuart Schmill:
But I think when students are picking their classes, they still should make the best choice for them because for a lot of students, maybe MIT is not the right place either. And so, there are a lot of places in the country to go to school. Not everybody is going to thrive in environments like MIT or Dartmouth. And so, students want to figure out what's the best environment for them. So, course selection in high school should be made with that in mind. Which class am I most likely to do well in? Okay, you're not going to apply to MIT, you're going to apply to another school, that's fine.
Lee Coffin:
So, I think the guidance you're offering is, I'm listening to this, I'm pretending I'm a dad listening to this thing. So, my child is thinking about engineering and the advice I'm getting here is push towards the most advanced math course available and appropriate.
Stuart Schmill:
And appropriate.
Lee Coffin:
Consider the pace and curriculum of the college or institute as well because every engineering school is going to set itself up the same way. So, BC calc may be recommended for you, but at another place they may say, no, you can start our curriculum with some foundational piece. But what you said is math is a tool that can be learned.
Stuart Schmill:
Right. There are engineering programs where you don't have to have had calculus in high school.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. How do you find that?
Stuart Schmill:
Well, there are lists. BigFuture is one of the go-tos for me. You can list out a whole set of colleges that offer certain academic programs and it'll give you a list with certain criteria. And then there may be no substitute for going to the websites of each of those colleges or at least some sampling of them. But that's the way to do it. When my kids were applying to college, that's pretty much what we did. They thought, oh, here are some different things I think I'm interested in. And then that BigFuture created a whole big long list and just went to the websites.
What are the requirements here? What are the expectations? And so, my older daughter who ultimately did not major in engineering but thought she might've wanted to when she was in high school and she was on a robotics team and did a lot of creative stuff like that. She didn't want to take AP physics and she wanted to take AP psychology instead. She did take calculus and stats, so she took both of those. But she went to one school, which I won't name, but said, well, for us, and it was not MIT, but it said for us, if you don't take AP physics and your school offers it, then you're probably not going to get into our engineering program.
Her reaction to that was, okay, then I just won't apply to you. It wasn't, oh, I better take AP physics. And I prefer that kind of decision making. I think students ought to take what they want to take and then line up the colleges from there, not contort what you want to do in high school and then fit to the colleges. Because you got to listen to your inner voices on what you really want and what you don't want.
Lee Coffin:
Right. No, I love that example because if she's looking at her senior of high school and thinking, "Yeah, I don't want to take AP physics." Well, a college that's going to have a pretty heavy physics component in its engineering curriculum is not going to be your happy place.
Stuart Schmill:
Yeah.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. So, let's talk about science a little bit because it says we're on physics. So, math is foundational. Is the other junior way of understanding a possible engineering app to think about the bio physics chem sequence, maybe computer science.
Stuart Schmill:
We like to see—not usually, although there are exceptions because there are always exceptions, students are prevented from taking one thing or another for various reasons-but we usually like to see the big three of physics, chemistry, and biology, which most students seem to take in high school. There may be reasons why students wouldn't have taken one thing or the other. And I'm also not talking at the AP level, I'm just saying baseline we like students to have some exposure to that. Students, again, who are thinking they might want to go into engineering often do want to take some kind of AP science.
Not all of them, but okay, so now which one? Is it physics, chemistry, biology? We are pretty agnostic about that. It's really the students should follow whatever they're interested in. And again, it's important to remember that there are schools when you apply to the school where you have to apply to the engineering school. There are also schools where you just apply to the whole university and then you can pick engineering afterwards. So, MIT is like that and I know there are other schools like that that you don't have to decide early on if you want to major in engineering or apply to an engineering school.
But even in those places, you don't actually have to pick your major, which discipline you're going to follow until once you get there and you can explore a little bit. So, you don't have to have it all figured out.
Lee Coffin:
So, what if you're me? You're the history/English kid who's thinking, "but I like solving problems so this podcast is making me think maybe I should look at engineering." What should somebody with that more humanities, social science framework do by way of prerequisites or the same thing we're saying for the engineers?
Stuart Schmill:
Yeah, right. So, I'm actually less worried about the prerequisites in high school classes. But I might recommend some kind of activities that expose you to different kinds of engineering disciplines. And that could be do an internship at some local engineering company, it's one way to learn about it. It could be to join some student club or activity like a robotics club or team or science Olympiad where there can be elements of problem solving there where you can learn a little bit more about it. Those are some options as a way to learn about, is this something that might interest me?
Lee Coffin:
What about testing? So again, from a junior in high school, where does the SAT fit into an engineering application?
Stuart Schmill:
It will vary depending on the school. Some schools, MIT being one of them, do require either the SAT or the ACT as part of the application. Some schools don't require them. If you want to apply, let's say to the University of California system, they won't even look at your scores. So, you could apply to Berkeley, engineering at Berkeley or UCLA or any of the California system and you don't need to worry about scores at all. If you think you might want to apply to a school that at least accepts scores, it's probably worth taking them.
I think it's important to know that test scores are not the be-all and end-all. No school that I know of makes admissions decisions solely based on test scores in either direction. In other words, a good test score is not going to get you in, even if a bad one is not going to be the sole reason why you're left out. And I think most probably, we do think about the math portion a little bit more heavily than the verbal or the evidence-based reading and writing. And otherwise, my general advice to students is take the test, prepare for it a little bit, take the test, see how you do, and maybe take it again after you take it and see.
I think the best preparation is Khan Academy. They have very good SAT prep that's completely free and it's worth spending a little bit of time preparing because it can help you a little bit. And it also helps you,just magically helps, build your mathematical skills anyway.
Lee Coffin:
So, the math, we decouple the scores, is my advice always. But in this engineering context, to me, that's not such a surprising discovery to hear you say, Yeah, the math score is going to carry a bit more water on an engineering application. But how about like MIT we reactivated our testing and talked about testing in context. So, how might a math score be contextualized from a local perspective?
Stuart Schmill:
Yeah. So, testing just actually—I'll broaden this because it's true about testing, but it's true about everything—that we understand where students are coming from, what their opportunities have been. With testing, we know that there's some communities where kids start practicing for standardized tests in seventh grade and they just start cranking away. And then there are some communities where testing is not a topic of conversation until senior year students are getting ready to apply and they're like, "Oh, I've got to take this test."
Lee Coffin:
That's nuts.
Stuart Schmill:
Yeah. So, we don't expect the same scores because we understand there's differences. But that's true also, even everything I was saying about curriculum. For MIT, we look to see that students have BC calculus if it's offered, but there are a lot of students who come into MIT with only AB calculus. Why? Because that's what all their schools offered. And that's fine, because again, we don't want to limit students based on what their opportunities have been. So, we take all that into account.
Lee Coffin:
I've heard high school kids, even ones like you say, "I am good at math and science" who are a little intimidated by engineering, it seems hard.
Stuart Schmill:
Yup.
Lee Coffin:
Yup.
Stuart Schmill:
Well, it does. I think it gets back to this notion about math, right? Because I think of all of the subjects that you take in high school math, or even forget high school, before you get to high school, elementary school and middle school kids start sorting themselves into, "I'm good at math, I'm not good at math." And I think that's a real big problem. It's one of the biggest sources of inequality in this country, is the math tracks. And I think that's why engineering seems intimidating. I'll also say that it seems intimidating because I think kids think engineering is just one big giant math test for four years.
And they don't really know that what engineering is, it's getting out into the field talking to people, helping to solve problems. That's really what engineering is. But I think most kids don't know that, they don't see that. I think engineering can also seem intimidating because of the stereotype and which it's because it's been true historically that it is a white male dominated field. I see evidence all-around of how inclusive it can be. At MIT, we're about half and half men and women in our engineering programs.
We have a large population of students of color. And so, I can see the rich diversity that the engineering fields can hold, but it hasn't traditionally been true. And I think in people's minds it doesn't feel true. I think there are those barriers, is engineering really for me? And I'd love to see us break those barriers down.
Lee Coffin:
So, that gets me to my last question, which is the persona of an engineer. Over the years, I've noticed a lot of the engineers will say things like, "I love to tinker, or I love to take things apart. When I was a kid, I took apart the air conditioner to see how it worked, and then I put it back together again and it still worked." I'm like, "I couldn't have done that." Or they love Legos and there's these, as I'm saying this, if students are saying, "Hey, you just described me," what are the other clues that a student or a parent might have about like, oh, these are the ingredients?
Chess, I've heard, is areally one of the activities where that analytical part of your brain that allows you to move the pieces around a chessboard, that that's also engineering-adjacent.
Stuart Schmill:
Yup. Music is also, and a lot of students are very good in debate. Again, there's an analytic nature to that. And yeah, the tinkering, we see a lot of that students have interest in it. There's probably less of it now than there used to be, just because things are generally harder to take apart and see what's going on. And there used to be, now it's all computer chips and it's not as mechanical as it used to be. A car is a good example of that; it's all wires now. And I think for those students who have expressed those interests, engineering is a very natural fit.
But it's not only those students who've done that, and number one, there are a lot of students who haven't had the opportunities to take things apart. There just hasn't been part of what's in their zone of thought, like, oh, you could do that, number one. And as I said earlier, I think about students, engineers who are out in the field, even trying to develop low-tech solutions to problems that people really have. Everybody thinks of high-tech when you think of a journey, but some of the more valuable things are just very simple, low -tech technology kinds of solutions that can work in low energy kinds of places.Places where you don't have access n necessarily to energy. Much of the developing world, high tech's not going to help you, you can't plug something in. You need a low-tech solution here and the only way you can develop those is by getting on the ground, talking to people and trying to figure out how you can help them. I think of engineering as really helping people by helping think through solutions.
Lee Coffin:
I love that. I said that was my last question, but I guess I have another observation. Which is, part of the application is also the storytelling that a student brings into the file in addition to the grades and the numbers, is that point of view, that narrative. And I think you just said it, "share the ways in which you want to find solutions" would be my other advice around someone thinking about engineering and how to animate that in a way that helps you as the admission officer say, "Yup, you're a good fit for what we do here."
Stuart Schmill:
Yes, absolutely right. Yup, very well said.
Lee Coffin:
Well, Stu, as always, appreciate you joining me on Admissions Beat to talk about engineering in this example. And I've heard you do it, and you're always so eloquent and provocative. So, thanks for bringing that to Admissions Beat.
Stuart Schmill:
My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Lee. I appreciate it.
Lee Coffin:
Of course, always. For now, this is Lee Coffin from Dartmouth College. I'll see you next week for our season finale. See you then.