I agree.
Being a student in electromechanical engineering myself (though in Belgium, so it's only ~900€/annum), I really don't think what I'm learning is that valuable. I find myself getting much more value in the last two Munro videos than in any course I have/had. With everything I'm learning trough following Tesla closely, I find that universities are lame (or maybe it's just the one I'm going to haha).
The idea of an "Elon-style first principles makeover" hypes me.
The point of going to university for engineering *is* to learn the first principles and the systems of formal logic that empower you to make deductions from the principles. Formal university education is not the only way to learn that stuff, but almost everyone would struggle majorly without the social environment and structure of a college. Few can be effective autodidacts right from the start, and odds are you aren't among them. When you get into industry you can often witness this in the difference between technicians and engineers, at least the good engineers, who tend to be the ones who paid attention in class and truly learned the material instead of just copying off others' work and using test banks for short-term cramming in order to earn the credential and thereby fake their way into a job, Like all intelligent social species, humans by default learn by rote copying of what others are doing. Learning theory and then how to apply it to practical problems is vastly more work and is much slower initially when the immediate need could usually be satisfied more quickly by asking someone experienced how they did it. If your goal is to be a mediocre engineer, this could be a viable educational strategy.
Without developing a deep understanding of the underlying principles, any attempt to see further than others around you is basically shooting in the dark. At best, you'll succeed by getting lucky. More likely, your idea will suck and you won't even understand why it's not working. (Unsurprisingly, this is why companies where managers and bean counters think they know better than the engineers so often fail.) You also won't have any good way of distinguishing between good advice from other engineers and terrible advice. For instance, how do you
really know that Munro is giving good advice? Could you, if pressed, write a step-by-step proof starting with atomic physics to demonstrate why his ideas are correct? Could you identify when he's made a mistake and articulate why? (FYI, I've observed him make a few, although most of the time he's right.) If you're familiar with Plato's Cave allegory, you'll be like one of the cave dwellers interpreting the movement of the shadows on the wall instead of being enlightened by stepping outside and seeing the true nature of the sun.
As Musk's track record and Tony Seba's research have shown us, truly radical disruptive improvements usually come from convergence--strange combinations of technologies from seemingly disparate fields. Without understanding the deep unifying physical laws, design patterns etc. you will have a hell of a time succeeding at this because it'll take you waaay longer to soak up new information from other fields outside your area of expertise. The fact that Elon looks at knowledge as a semantic tree like this is how, to everyone's astonishment, he is able to learn from so many other fields and integrate that knowledge into innovations no one else thought possible.
I would advise you to be patient and focus on your education while *also* getting started on practical projects, watching Munro Live and the like. I strongly advise signing up for at least one advanced pure math class based on learning how to write rigorous proofs of theorems. And possibly, your particular university is lame, in which case you need to transfer ASAP. Win the long game.
interestingengineering.com
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Dezmond Oliver
