STUDENT PROFILES
Kyle Lawton '09
Concentration
Engineering SciencesExtra Credit
Kyle is a member of the RoboCup Football Team at Harvard.Quotable
"Engineers are problem solvers and a problem can not be solved if you do not fully understand the context in which the question is asked."There is one question that every Harvard engineering student has been asked at some point or another: “So you are studying engineering… why are you at Harvard?”
While there could be some permutations on the way that this is phrased, the general message remains the same. Many people do not associate a top notch engineering education with a liberal arts setting. I personally think that this sentiment is extremely misguided. Engineers, by nature, are problem solvers who have to consider many different fields of study on a daily basis. They have to combine theory from chemistry, physics and even biology to create functional devices that have a use in the current political and economic situation while not causing some sort of sociological disturbance. Engineers who do not have the benefit of an environment rich in all of these factors will be depraved of the opportunity to truly understand the impact and practicality of any designs they would create.
While I do not doubt the value of a highly specialized institutions focused on engineering, in an increasingly interconnected world, it is necessary for engineers to be able to relate to other people who have different backgrounds than themselves. No matter how great of an idea that you have, if you can not explain its significance to others, it will never be produced. When you attend a liberal arts college such as Harvard, you are surrounded by people who plan to enter the business world and can work with you to see the non-engineering flaws in your design.
Another possibility is your device has some offensive social component that you may not find problematic, but someone in the social sciences would immediately be able to point to as a source of difficulty. If you are in an isolated group, solely working on the mechanics of a design and not including any other factors, you will not have the scope to create a product that will succeed in the larger market.
Another extremely important benefit of a liberal arts background for an engineer is inspiration. A liberal arts college is in many ways like a miniature country. There are all sorts of people with many different types of interests. Being immersed in this setting can show an engineer the problems that different types of people face on a daily basis. This can be the inspiration that an engineer needs in order to create a product. They notice that there is not an efficient way for government students to highlight the relevant portions of a long law or maybe they overhear a chemistry student complaining about not having an effective way of measuring some compound.
This is what inspires engineers. It is very unlikely that young children read an old engineering textbook about beam bending and realize that they want to study how beams bend. It is much more likely that they saw something in the media or popular culture that inspired them to become an engineer.
Be it a documentary about the oil crisis in the world or the lack of computer access in impoverished areas, there are many places for children to gain an interest in engineering. It is this path that leads engineers to want to understand how beams bend in order to solve the problems in their environment.
Once again, I would like to stress the point that engineers are problem solvers and a problem can not be solved if you do not fully understand the context in which the question is asked. For this reason and the others above, I firmly believe that a liberal arts setting is not only sufficient, but extremely beneficial to the education of engineers.