Feb. 19-25 is National Engineers Week, and what better time is there for Stanford engineers to reexamine their field?

It’s an exciting time to be an engineer. Engineers are discovering broader applications of their work, especially as the lines that separate engineering from the pure sciences begin to blur. In particular, given their access to high-quality technical training and close links with industry leaders, engineering majors at Stanford benefit from the increasingly interdisciplinary approach to engineering.

But amid all this excitement, engineers face more challenges in their jobs. Not all of these challenges have to do with the technical aspects of the discipline. As the engineering field grows larger, engineers need to concern themselves not only with mass balances and partial differential equations, but also with the broader national and global implications of their actions.

As a group, engineers have higher starting salaries than most other majors and may face greater pressures to secure high-paying jobs at the end of their undergraduate or graduate careers. Also, engineering students are not being exposed to a diversity of service opportunities, due to their heavy course load.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with being technically adept and commanding a high pay; after all, a laborer is worthy of his hire. However, we are concerned that there is a lack of support for engineers who wish to explore social work or other pursuits that lie beyond traditional engineering careers.

More needs to be done to integrate Stanford’s prospective engineers into a larger student community and into the global community as well.

Fewer requirements, greater flexibility

By nature, engineering is a highly specialized discipline that has a tendency to become cloistered and parochial. Engineering departments routinely demand more than 100 units of coursework to satisfy curricular requirements. Many of these requirements are in math and science classes; other than one Technology in Society requirement, most engineers are not required by their majors to take classes outside their discipline.

Engineers need to be encouraged to enroll in courses outside of their major, but the solution is not to make those classes part of the already onerous major requirements. Instead, Stanford’s engineering curricula need to be made more flexible. Students need to be encouraged to cross-register in non-technical classes. They need to be supported in their ventures into a liberal arts education.

More support for overseas programs

Engineers also need to be encouraged to participate in overseas programs, if they are to become connected to a larger world. In general, there are some “engineer-friendly” programs in the Bing Overseas Studies Program, but most programs are impossible to fit into an engineers’ schedule. Wherever possible, classes should be offered more than once a year, to accommodate a variety of four-year plans.

Increased opportunities for

service-in-the-major

The School of Engineering should work to devote more resources to encourage engineers to participate in a variety of socially responsible activities. This could be introduced as part of a service-in-the-major initiative that the Board first proposed in a previous editorial (“Keeping the dream alive once the Bubble pops,” Feb. 16).

Admittedly, there are more service opportunities for students in the Civil and Environmental Engineering department than in other engineering departments. Nevertheless, we feel a need for engineers to get more involved. There are many opportunities—such as teaching math and science to underprivileged children—that prospective engineers can participate in.

Service opportunities can be hard to come by for engineers who also need to contend with weekly problem sets that can take up to 20 hours a week to complete. That is why the individual engineering departments must not impose community service as an additional curricular requirement on top of an already heavy course load. Instead, departments must provide a great deal of support for engineering majors in encouraging them to explore service-learning opportunities.

Engineers do great work that can sometimes go unnoticed. This week, engineers should take some time to reflect on their endeavors and to think about how they can contribute in meaningful ways to society.