Do you think a bachelors degree will ever become necessary again to become a pilot at the airlines?

[X3 Skier]

I’m recalling what several of my profs back in the day once told me. Engineering research mostly looks at things that might be useful. Scientific research mostly looks at things that are interesting.

Not good or bad in either case, just different.

 

[Brad W]

That’s a cute phrase but mostly wrong, especially at a research institution. Being a professor or a research scientist (most of whom will teach at some point) at a research university is fundamentally a different kind of “doing”. They are doing research, very often sponsored by industry. They are doing the research that industry doesn’t have the time or willpower to do initially. It’s not inferior, it’s just different.

true enough...
and along those lines I don't see a career university student that goes straight into teaching to be necessarily a bad thing... because just like research is it's own thing, so is teaching.
I do believe however there needs to be a good dose of both sides of that coin considered, for an education to be quality. (education theory and real-world experience I mean...)

 

[Checkout_my_Six]

Y'all have gotten way off track....these people aren't pilots.

 

[35 AoA]

Undergrad was 12 years ago for me, no issues remembering. I had plenty of hands on work in both. My first undergraduate research project as a sophomore in my later graduate lab had me in the machine shop building wind tunnel setups some 10 hours a week for a whole semester. Invaluable experience. My entire academic career was a mixture of experimental and numerical/theoretical work. Like I said, you need a decent grasp on both to really be effective IMO.

But apparently I’m not convincing anyone that maybe in person learning actually has some real benefits for certain fields. Whatever.

Hah when I read this, I honestly forgot what my argument had even been and had to re-read it. I really don't disagree with you that having hands-on experience isn't of great importance to a future engineer. Of course it is. I just don't know if it is really important for a check in the box for a future airline pilot. But at the same time, getting an engineering degree just to become an airline pilot is kind of a weird life choice. I guess that is effectively one summary of my own life, but at one point in time, I envisioned myself going to test pilot school and later flying the space shuttle (where an engineering degree would have been a near requirement). I can barely add or subtract anymore

 

[Checkout_my_Six]

Hah when I read this, I honestly forgot what my argument had even been and had to re-read it. I really don't disagree with you that having hands-on experience isn't of great importance to a future engineer. Of course it is. I just don't know if it is really important for a check in the box for a future airline pilot. But at the same time, getting an engineering degree just to become an airline pilot is kind of a weird life choice. I guess that is effectively one summary of my own life, but at one point in time, I envisioned myself going to test pilot school and later flying the space shuttle (where an engineering degree would have been a near requirement). I can barely add or subtract anymore

I did that.....got an Aerospace Engineering degree. Then tried to fly C-130's, got selected to fly (had an A&P with CSEL with Inst), and was in a guard unit for 5-6 months. Almost made it to pilot training....then the doc's decided they didn't like childhood surgery on my ear. So, I was offered a non-flying position and declined.....and the rest is history.

As they say, engineering been berry berry good to me.

 

[Warmi]

Well, it was a long time ago, but I graduated from both of those schools. Did one of my undergrad degrees at GT then a masters at UCF, so I can discuss how they compared back then, at least. I'm a EE, not an ME, but I think the comparison holds for any engineering major.

The core concepts were comparable (physics is physics and one electron looks pretty much like another electron, after all), but the level of instruction was worlds apart. Too many of my UCF profs were recent PhDs who had no industry experience, but most of my GT profs were more experienced, had spent time in industry, and still consulted. (Example - I took all my E-Mag classes in the evening because a couple of guys from Bell Labs taught them after getting off work from the lab, and they were bloody good.)

Also, the student competition was much much stiffer at GT, with top students coming from all over world. Exams and grading were brutally hard to force a class curve, so to get A's you had to be among the very best competing against some very smart students. UCF was more of a commuter school at the time and didn't draw as many top-notch students. If you managed to squeeze a GPA of 3.5 out of GT, you probably could have gotten a 4.0 at UCF. GT had a tighter quality filter on its grads than UCF did.

Finally, the quality of resources (labs, equipment, computers, etc.) was much better at GT.

It's been a lot of years, so possibly things are closer now, but I'm doubtful. I hired quite a few grads from both schools during my career and there was some really good talent from both, but I was more likely to find it among GT grads.

Having interviewed and hired many recent graduates , it really does not seem to matter where they are coming from - at that stage they all are pretty clueless and what matters most is individual talent and personality.

 

[pfarber]

when I ran my ISP I interviewed some Penn State CompSci students for a tech position.

None of them knew what network routing was, class A B C, localnet or what 255.255.255.0 meant.

none of them knew the nuts and bolts of networks.. smtp, pop3, SNMP, ICMP, TCP, IP... only thing they reliably knew was what HTTP mean, but couldn't explain a TCP handshake.. Even now when I talk to my nephew he's so light on how things actually work yet he's tech support for a large local surveying firm.