The argument in this article appears robust when one considers the increasing technological edge of science in our community, an edge which will eventually give dominance to economies that focus on new and improving manufacturing technologies – clearly, this overlaps strongly with engineering. There is without a doubt a need to recognize the new paradigm, as has been done overseas, that science and engineering need to come closer together, not further apart as has been advocated by many. Science brings many skills and fundamental views that are in fact critical to creating and developing the new technologies in particular but it also lacks some of the robust practicality that engineering brings, in part by the nature of demand imposed on engineering courses more directly buy industry. It is also not surprising that the areas of science attracting more funding have overwhelmingly engineering drivers and solving engineering problems even if they deny it (e.g. nanoscience and quantum science). Getting them to work together, and in some cases merging, has been something a few of us have been championing for many years because it better reflects our changing society and provides a better environment for employment for all. This extends much further and more obviously for some when the biomedical fields are considered – by contrast it amazes me to learn that anyone can still do a chemistry or biology degree with absolutely no physics or maths let alone engineering at high school or even in undergraduate; this is an anachronism in today’s world and may explain why some of the life sciences in particular where increasingly more physics and maths are needed (or at least enabling the necessary communications with those that are trained in these areas), may be struggling and why perhaps something like biomedical engineering appears to be growing.
Of course the counter argument to the above is to recognize that Australia overall may not be contributing to the technological manufacturing world at the level one would expect for a country such as ours to justify the employment of so-called STEM graduates (or at least the SM part – the others can probably reach out to traditional engineering jobs in mining where traditional types of innovation are more likely to be bought off the shelf from overseas than made here, for example). With the growing body of STEMs coming from Asian Universities which are entering the top 100 institutions, we may even reach a point where we don’t need train anyone locally as we can get them all here on working visas in any case. So it seems an important focus will increasingly be taking local students through to postgraduate training with an emphasis on creating new industries in Australia. This connection to high technology industry in some way or another has to be far more valuable to Australia in the long run – it is after all the basis for which we and others have established core facilities such as state of the art optical fibre fabrication in at least two domains in Australia so that critical mass towards these goals can be attained.
The argument in this article appears robust when one considers the increasing technological edge of science in our community, an edge which will eventually give dominance to economies that focus on new and improving manufacturing technologies – clearly, this overlaps strongly with engineering. There is without a doubt a need to recognize the new paradigm, as has been done overseas, that science and engineering need to come closer together, not further apart as has been advocated by many. Science brings many skills and fundamental views that are in fact critical to creating and developing the new technologies in particular but it also lacks some of the robust practicality that engineering brings, in part by the nature of demand imposed on engineering courses more directly buy industry. It is also not surprising that the areas of science attracting more funding have overwhelmingly engineering drivers and solving engineering problems even if they deny it (e.g. nanoscience and quantum science). Getting them to work together, and in some cases merging, has been something a few of us have been championing for many years because it better reflects our changing society and provides a better environment for employment for all. This extends much further and more obviously for some when the biomedical fields are considered – by contrast it amazes me to learn that anyone can still do a chemistry or biology degree with absolutely no physics or maths let alone engineering at high school or even in undergraduate; this is an anachronism in today’s world and may explain why some of the life sciences in particular where increasingly more physics and maths are needed (or at least enabling the necessary communications with those that are trained in these areas), may be struggling and why perhaps something like biomedical engineering appears to be growing.
Of course the counter argument to the above is to recognize that Australia overall may not be contributing to the technological manufacturing world at the level one would expect for a country such as ours to justify the employment of so-called STEM graduates (or at least the SM part – the others can probably reach out to traditional engineering jobs in mining where traditional types of innovation are more likely to be bought off the shelf from overseas than made here, for example). With the growing body of STEMs coming from Asian Universities which are entering the top 100 institutions, we may even reach a point where we don’t need train anyone locally as we can get them all here on working visas in any case. So it seems an important focus will increasingly be taking local students through to postgraduate training with an emphasis on creating new industries in Australia. This connection to high technology industry in some way or another has to be far more valuable to Australia in the long run – it is after all the basis for which we and others have established core facilities such as state of the art optical fibre fabrication in at least two domains in Australia so that critical mass towards these goals can be attained.