Re: Scientist & Engineers.
What is the difference, how does their education differ?
When I was at university, back in the early 70s, in the UK only graduate degrees on Art and Science, B.A., M.A. and B.Sc., M.Sc. were given. There were however polytechnics which offered two year courses and graduated engineers (along with electricians and plumbers, etc.) A person with a B.Sc. could work as an engineer and often had a higher rank and pay than the engineer from the polytechnic. During the 80s polytechnics merged to universities or they became a university and people graduated with those arts or sciences degrees. At the turn of the century universities started courses for degrees specifically in engineering like B.Eng. and M.Eng.
My acoustics degree is an M.A. That is because it was part of the architecture department which gave degrees in Arts. My B.Sc. and M.A degrees are from Imperial College. It is called a college but in fact it is a global top ranking university.
Meanwhile, we used to call anyone with a degree who worked at an R&D facility or do R&D at a university a scientist. However, as engineering definition and courses have changed as I explained above, who knows what has changed in their world.
Titles, eh?
The USA had specific engineering degrees many decades before the 70’s, and the architecture schools had specific architecture degrees. (I have two of the former, and almost one of the latter.)
But engineering degrees require general physics plus the physics relevant to the engineering discipline, and also considerably more math than most practicing engineers ever need to use, even without computers.
What they lack from general liberal-arts education is language and history.
Any engineer who can’t keep up with a science discussion at the level of this forum either didn’t pay attention or went into something else and forgot their training.
Engineers do focus on the practical application of science, and not all scientists do (nor should they—something like a tenth of research really should be basic research with no specific application outcome expected). Industry scientists and engineers are often indistinguishable, by my observation, and I, as an engineer, often had to (and occasionally still have to) explain the science of a topic to scientists.
But you can’t compare the 8-10 years of collegiate study attained by a person with a doctorate with a basic 4-year degree earned by a back-room pool engineer.
(At no modern time in the USA could a person with a two-year degree claim to have received an engineering degree, or even be able to get credit for it in a professional licensure application. Up until the 60’s and 70’s, a non-degreed person could get licensed with sufficient specific approved experience, but whatever sub-professional degree they had wouldn’t count towards it. Anybody can claim to be a scientist, but the claim of the title “engineer” is covered by practice laws in the USA, as a matter—supposedly—of public safety. Because I’ve worked in and for the public sector, licensure is unavoidably required for me, and I’m still licensed in five states.)
On the point of doctorates: engineering schools have practice degrees and research degrees, even post-master’s. A Doctor of Engineering would struggle to get a tenured academic position, but would wear it proudly in their industry cv. Academics would be expected to have a Ph.D. The difference is the thesis. I see the distinction between medical clinical practitioners—MD’s—and medical researchers with Ph.D.’s the same way, except that laws prohibit the latter from clinical practice that requires prescribing meds.
Very little that is discussed in this forum requires much formal scientific or engineering training beyond high school. I don’t see integrals being shown as equations, nor do I see statistical discussions of things like, say, statistical heteroskedasticity. Any engineer should know what the occasional differential equation means, and any engineer should understand basic parametric applied statistics, but I’ve seen that only rarely here. Most stuff here doesn’t go beyond the technical requirements of, say, amateur radio. And 12-year-olds pass those tests. Let’s not overblow the science horn. I’m not saying many contributors here don’t have a deep well of such, but they know they have to simplify it for this forum.
Rick “so much argument with so little at stake” Denney