Page 181 - Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century

Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11338.html

164 EDUCATING THE ENGINEER OF 2020

The other frontier has to do with larger and larger systems of great
complexity and, generally, of great importance to society. This is the
world of energy, environment, food, manufacturing, product develop-
ment, logistics, and communications. This frontier addresses some of
the most daunting challenges to the future of the world. If we do our
jobs right, these challenges will also resonate with our students.

NEW SYSTEMS ENGINEERING
I first heard the term “systems engineering” as a graduate student in
a seminar about the Vanguard missile—the United States’ first, ill-fated
attempt to counter Sputnik by putting a grapefruit-sized satellite into
space. An embarrassing number of Vanguards started to climb and then
blew up. Khrushchev found this very funny. In fact, the Vanguard rocket
was assembled from excellent components, but they had been designed
with no knowledge of the components with which they would inter-
face. As a result, heat, electrical fields, and so on, played havoc with
them. The fix was to engineer the system. I found this very interesting
. . . and then, like most students of that era, I pursued a career in engi-
neering science.
But back to the present. Many of our colleagues believe that we
must develop a new field of systems engineering and that it should play
a central role in engineering education in the decades ahead. In 1998,
MIT established an Engineering Systems Division, which reflected a
growing awareness of the rising social and intellectual importance of
complex engineered systems. At the time, a large number of faculty
members in the School of Engineering and other schools at MIT were
already engaged in research on engineering systems . . . and MIT had
launched some very important educational initiatives at both the
master’s and doctoral levels.
The Engineering Systems Division is intended to provide a focus
for these activities by giving them greater administrative and program-
matic coherence and stimulating further development. MIT, of course,
is famous for establishing “engineering science,” which revolutionized
engineering in the post-World War II era. In fact, in my view, the piv-
otal moment in MIT’s history was when President Karl Compton real-
ized that we could not be great in engineering if we did not also have
great science. This realization started the institution on a path that led
to the engineering science revolution.

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