Paul Nicholson
New Member
You're all over the place in terms of your actual complaint here, but I have direct first hand knowledge that this is just plain wrong. Almost every engineering department at MIT has at least one, if not multiple, machine shops. Every department I know of had at least one course where you were made to actually build things, with the mechanical engineering department having multiple levels including design and fabrication competitions. Take, for example, 2.007, a robot design and fabrication competition required for all mechanical engineers, the motto of which, by the way is "no innovation without fabrication.". Personally, I built 2 wind tunnel models, a prototype combustion chamber and a UAV during my undergraduate time there.
Of course, the average graduate is not going to have the same ability in a shop as a machinist, and much of engineering these days does revolve around software (because the requirements of much of today's design make it impossible to do otherwise), but you've either had a bad bunch of students come through, or are very unaware of how teaching is done at top engineering schools.
