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hunter

(39,718 posts)
7. My dad's best friend and my wife's uncle were not academically inclined in high school...
Sat Feb 10, 2024, 12:10 PM
Feb 2024

... but they liked to tinker with machines. My wife's uncle was a car guy. His first job out of high school was working in a body shop. My dad's best friend was a car and television guy.

As young men they were hired by major corporations to maintain and repair machines. While they were working they were able to pursue their college educations. With the encouragement of their employers they had engineering masters degrees by the time they were forty. Whatever abstract facts they learned in the classroom became "application of principles" in a very natural way. In some sense their hands already knew these principles and their minds just needed a way to express them.

Is that even possible today? I remember as a kid noticing how my dad's best friend was always working or studying and he didn't have a lot of time for his family. His wife carried the entire burden of household chores and taking care of the children, especially in comparison to our family where my dad was always available to us when he got home from work and on weekends and holidays. My dad had graduated from college before he met my mom. He got his masters degree later, about the time me and my siblings could reliably get ourselves off to school in the morning and do most of the household chores.

I started college as an engineering major in the 'seventies, possibly to please my grandfather who was an aerospace engineer who hadn't really understood why his son, my dad, would choose to study art in college.

I didn't ever feel comfortable as an engineering student so I changed my major to biology at the end of my second year, greatly disappointing my grandfather since I was his only grandchild who seemed inclined to carry that legacy.

Rickover doesn't mention the greatest failure of engineering education in the 'fifties, which was it's hostility towards women. In the 'seventies this hostility was still overt. Engineering classes were mostly men. My first serious girlfriend was an engineer. She survived that grinder by being a tough girl. I'm not sure that kind of experience makes anyone a better person.

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