Engineering is all about constraints and trade-offs. For any given problem, there’s an infinite universe of possible solutions. Some are elegant, simple, and inexpensive. Others are, well, less so. If your job is to manufacture things designed by engineers, you probably know what I’m talking about. It’s easy to design parts that are almost impossible to make, and an engineer might not fully understand the manufacturing technology.
That shouldn’t be surprising. Most university programs don’t teach the nitty-gritty details of how things are made, especially in rapidly evolving industries. I earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering in 2011. My thesis, titled “System Identification, State Estimation, and Control of Unmanned Aerial Robots,” sounds arcane and maybe impressive. But after graduating, I knew nothing about some pretty basic stuff, like how to design a printed circuit board or even how to source components. My classes didn’t teach me what a voltage regulator was or that I could buy one from DigiKey. It simply wasn’t part of the curriculum.
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