Navigating Ambiguity

Imagine that you graduate as an engineer a few years from now, and have taken your first job as a civil engineer for a great company in Ann Arbor.  You are part of a team doing structural design for the world’s tallest building, to be built in Shanghai. Your boss comes into your office and says. “Evan, I want you to use equation number 16 from Chapter 6 your CEE 312 textbook to calculate the size and spacing of the main columns in the building core.”

Seem unlikely?  It is.  If it was really as simple as pulling formulas out of a book, nobody would be that interested in paying you to do it.

Frequently you have to create your own approach to problem solving, on the fly.  Of course, many problems can be solved by application of known solutions.  But even in such cases it’s seldom that the solution approach is obvious.  You have to look at an ambiguous situation (design the columns to hold up the building); consider alternate designs to address it and recognize some key criteria for assessing those designs (will the columns buckle? will they bend too much from the wind load?); reach for tools that can quantify those criteria (Euler’s formula? finite element analysis?); assess their appropriateness and uncertainty (is an expression for critical buckling load reliable in my situation? did the finite element analysis converge?); and then reach a conclusion about how that analysis informs the problem at hand.  Even when the solution can be found using known ideas, nobody knows what chapter, or chapters, the solution is hiding in, because real problems come without a chapter number.

Solving real problems requires judgment.  It requires making decisions.  And it requires living with the uncertainty that perhaps you don’t have the best answer.

A good university curriculum will challenge you to develop such judgment and make such decisions.  In your classes you should look for and embrace problems that do not have a clear answer, but in which multiple approaches are possible and the result has to be justified and defended.  As a rule, new university students do not enjoy this ambiguity.  We give you ambiguous problems that we did not teach you how to solve, and still your grade depends on the result!  But one role of the university curriculum is to teach you, through experience, how to critically assess problems and build solutions that were previously unknown.

Committing to a decision is hard, and not all judgments are good.  Even so, you should embrace the opportunity when we give you problems that you do now know how to solve, because learning to solve the (apparently) unsolvable is the essence of creative engineering.

Navigating the University of Michigan

Today, first year engineering students begin orientation at the University of Michigan, in one of those rites-of-passage for young adults transitioning from high school to college.   The format is fairly common across American universities: students flocking with excitement to campus, sleeping a few nights in a residence hall, meeting finally with advisors, selecting a set of  fall term courses, and generally learning how to navigate their new environment.  For students at Michigan the details of this navigation are, of course, unique: what’s the Arb? what’s Michigan time? what’s a “Big Blue”? where is CC Little, or, for that matter, who was C. C. Little?   These details of college life are important, of course, but they are eventually conquered as students become used to their new home.

Yet there is another channel to navigate that requires more investment, but which is more important to students’ receiving long-term value from their time at the UM.   Students must also learn to navigate the intellectual culture.

The University of Michigan is one of a small number of selective research universities.  As well described by Jonathan Cole in The Great American University, these schools have a unique character based on core values of free inquiry, the tolerance of challenge to ideas, open communication, and the preparation of the next generation of thinkers. These values are reflected in an educational environment and curriculum in which achievement is less about learning specific facts and rather more about learning the techniques of knowledge application and creation.  It is this curriculum that undergraduates must learn to navigate during their 4 years of study.

Engineering students sometimes think they are here to learn the formulas, to learn information.  But in fact our curriculum aspires to help students learn to analyze systems, synthesize knowledge, to make judgments, and to reach decisions based on this analysis, synthesis and judgment.

Just as new students must be oriented to the buses and extracurricular opportunities at the UM, it is also essential that they be oriented to the core academic values that will undergird their educational experience.