Art without engineering is dreaming. Engineering without art is calculating.
– Steven Roberts
“I want to be an engineer.” As an educator, scientist and most recently as an educational and college consultant, I have heard this steadfast phrase repeated by misguided teenagers more times over the last two decades than you can possibly imagine. In that time I have untangled this resounding statement with students, and a consistent pattern has emerged. Read more
The reality of making a four-year commitment to a university has never been more… intimidating. The costs and long-term obligations associated with college are not to be taken lightly and many students are not ready to dive into four years of intense – and specific – academic studies. In many cases teens have not come to terms with the college muse…yet.
“Teenagers have remarkable accelerators and very poor brakes.”
– Laurence Steinberg, author of Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence
Any truly insightful list of great engineering inventions must include the automotive disc brake. Towards the end of the 1960’s cars had become so wonderfully powerful that the gadgetry summoned to stop all that intoxicating momentum and aggression became quickly and deceptively inefficient. But the advent of the disc brake provided a life saving buffer between all that instantaneous acceleration and safely restraining all that treacherous momentum. Read more
We all know these things to be patently true. Unfortunately, they are all completely false and perpetuated myths. Except for the baking soda. Everyone knows that’s true. Read more