Developing science and engineering majors

Last month I participated in the San Diego Festival of Science & Engineering, which touched more than 50,000 K-12 students interested in technical careers. In some ways, it was like a personal homecoming since the key event was the annual Greater San Diego Science & Engineering Fair, where I got my start as a pre-teen computer scientist and served for 12 years as a judge.

The supply of science and engineering college graduates is crucial on multiple levels. These are the students who grow up to be founders of high-tech startups — whether young entrepreneurs before or during college (as in Gates, Zuckerberg, Wozniak) or those that start a company after a few years of industry experience (as I did). You also need the engineers and scientists that work for these startups.

To follow up on one of the talks, I found an excellent resource for preparing K-12 students for science careers. But sending children to STEM college majors is not enough, as two articles demonstrated. One, in the New York Times, was entitled “Why Science Majors Change Their Minds”. A sequel, “Why Engineering Majors Change Their Minds,” was published at the Forbes website.

The upshot of these recommendations? Engineering is hard, the grades are lower than for easy majors, and the competition is particularly ruthless at the top school. (Berkeley comes to mind as a place that particularly likes to wash out engineering majors). They also note the deferred gratification: several years of lower division prep followed by the interesting stuff as a junior or senior.

To address this, Berkeley had my niece take a freshman engineering seminar to give her the big picture of what she was studying. I recall that my favorite (STEM) course freshman year — when I was still intending to be a EE — was taking the sophomore intro circuits class my first semester at MIT from a great teacher who later went on to be a IEEE Fellow.

A friend's son is hoping to join a top engineering program in 16 months, and so I’ve been giving his parents suggestions of how to think about picking a college and a career. One is to consider the top engineering teaching schools, like Harvey Mudd, Cal Poly, Olin or the military academies. (Or, if he goes to a top engineering research school, to join a professor’s lab as soon as possible). Other ideas include getting a summer job that involves working alongside engineers. Or, to do as my daughter is doing, attend a summer engineering program for high school students such as UC’s Cosmos.

Certainly what top students (and would-be entrepreneurs) need is an understanding of the technology and a curiosity to think about what that technology can do. For example, some Harvey Mudd students used their understanding of 3D printing to create a startup that makes custom iPhone cases (that can be self-printed or shipped).

Still, even with well-laid plans, there are plenty of opportunities to go astray, for the reasons identified by the NYT and Forbes. My friends who succeeded in engineering found a good job out of college (or as a summer job during college) that validated their choice and allowed them to reap the rewards of their long hard work.

In this era where the “new normal” is 8+% unemployment overall and 12+% for recent graduates, it seems more important than ever to find schools that find high demand for their graduates in the marketplace. Yes, some of this is a self-fulfilling prophecy — top schools attract top students who place well — but as a parent (or student) we want the best path to success. It’s great for students to take a direct path into entrepreneurship, but no one’s ROI on college investment should assume that lightning will strike during a four year window.

Finally, I advise every engineering student to do a business or econ minor (or even double major) — which will pay dividends in companies both big and small. I was blissfully unaware of business as an undergraduate, and had to do remedial education in night school to have a clue as to how to run my company. For business, I would recommend marketing, accounting, finance and general management. For econ, I'd recommend micro, if possible skip macro, and take managerial topics such as industrial/organizational econ, decision theory, law and economics or even econometrics or game theory.

Engineering is "sexy" again?

At least Business Week pundit Vivek Wadhwa seems to think so. (Something about Wall Street jobs being in short supply nowadays).

Japan's engineering shortage

Saturday’s NY Times reported that Japan is now facing a shortage of engineering graduates.

Universities call it “rikei banare,” or “flight from science.” The decline is growing so drastic that industry has begun advertising campaigns intended to make engineering look sexy and cool, and companies are slowly starting to import foreign workers, or sending jobs to where the engineers are, in Vietnam and India.

It was engineering prowess that lifted this nation from postwar defeat to economic superpower. But according to educators, executives and young Japanese themselves, the young here are behaving more like Americans: choosing better-paying fields like finance and medicine, or more purely creative careers, like the arts, rather than following their salaryman fathers into the unglamorous world of manufacturing.

My friend Kaz Asakawa is quoted in this article:

The problem is likely to worsen because Japan has one of the lowest birthrates in the world. “Japan is sitting on a demographic time bomb,” said Kazuhiro Asakawa, a professor of business at Keio University. “An explosion is going to take place. They see it coming, but no one is doing enough about it.”

I suppose it’s good that the smart Japanese students want to be doctors. But finance? (As elsewhere, the willingness to pursue low-paying creative careers would be a function of personal and societal wealth that allow young people to live off the previous generation.) At least it’s not lawyers, who are a net drag on high tech companies.

The US has been facing this problem for more than a decade. How do we get more engineers?

• One way is to persuade high school guidance counselors to send colleges more students.
• Another is to relax immigration rules (such as the H-1b), which some (such as Norm Matloff) argue is just a way to reduce wages.
• A third is to argue — as Hal Salzman and Lindsay Lowell did in Nature earlier this month — that quality is more important than quantity — what matters is proportion of the very best technical talent.

Yet another solution is to hand out lottery tickets — incentive stock options — in hopes that the prospect of a big payout while motivate people to take the risk of working for startups. Certainly that is the philosophy around here in Silicon Valley, in other high tech regions like Seattle and San Diego, and also among MIT alumni. This afternoon I finished reading 17 semifinalists on our business plan contest, and certainly there is no shortage of engineers around here who want to start their own company.

But I have to remind myself there are still engineers (or CS types) that just want a job. These are people paid not in founder’s shares, or qualified options, but in salary. The problem is that (as with nurses and teachers), the economy needs a lot of engineers, so raising salaries across the board is a lot more expensive than paying high wages to a handful of NYSE traders or MLB players.

As I noted in researching entrepreneurship in the Asian PC industry a decade ago, two key factors are cultural attitudes towards startups and the access startups have to the domestic market. But since then I’ve realized that a third crucial factor is labor mobility by technical workers: engineers are willing to start (or join) new companies if they know they can always get a job if the startup fails, whereas historically in Japan and Korea the best jobs were available to those who joined MNCs and never left.

So increasing the attractiveness of engineering as a career both increases the supply of would-be entrepreneurs and the safety net for those who try to be entrepreneurs but fail — not to mention the supply of experienced engineers available to be raided.

Five business lessons for engineers

At this year's TI:GER workshop, the most directly relevant talk was that by Ikhlaq Sidhu of UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering. Dr. Sidhu is an adjunct professor in the industrial engineering department and Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology.

Like most of the speakers, he talked about what his school has done in technology management education — in this case, 900 students taking 9 courses and/or involved in the VentureLab program. (The previous speaker, Ted Sichelman of the Berkeley law school, had enumerated the various interdisciplinary technology efforts across seven colleges at Cal).

As Sidhu explained his program, one figure jumped out at me — the supporting cast of 600 Silicon Valley professionals that get involved in the center’s programs. With names like Judy Estrin (former CTO of Cisco), such a supply would be impossible to find (let alone engage) anywhere outside Berkeley or Stanford (or maybe MIT or Harvard).

However, what I found most remarkable (i.e. worth remarking on) in his talk was a recap from the presentation he developed for last year’s workshop. Specifically, he identified five skills that today’s engineers need:

1. To know what problem is worth solving
2. To know how to acquire resources
3. To be able to communicate
4. To know how to work within and build global virtual teams
5. To be leaders in a global economy — not commoditized contributors.

This list is now driving Berkeley’s vision of how it trains engineers.

I personally found the list compelling for three reasons. First, all five relate directly or indirectly to business issues, not the technical side of engineering. That these are hard problems is exactly why I became a business professor (rather than taking the shorter path into C.S.)

Second, the list resonates with my 15 years at Palomar Software. While global teams are recent (and a bit of a fad), the other four are the issues that my cofounder and I — two engineers in a garage — confronted when running our software company 20 years ago. Neil and I were both above average communicators, but the accuracy, precision and completeness of communication by our staff was an ongoing challenge. While Palomar eventually found problems worth solving (that were not commoditized until 2001), during the first 7 years our choices were severely constrained by lack of resources.

(In 2000-2002, when we were working with HP and its other onshore and offshore printer driver development partners, we had to confront the global teams issue, complete with 8 p.m. PST teleconferences to Bangalore).

Finally, commoditization is an issue that’s been a central theme of my Silicon Valley-oriented blog. If technology is a commodity, it will be done in India, China, or wherever the cheapest location is this year: the only economic reason to train and employ American engineers is to create value that can’t be created elsewhere.