The Independent Thinker

One of the memories that I believe will follow me for the rest of my engineering career is an event that happened during a past co-op. My senior engineer asked me to do a basic thermal analysis and, being a diligent mechanical engineer, I scratched them out and brought them to his desk. He picked up the paper with the equations and glanced over it. Suddenly, he threw them on the desk and glared at me."Don't give me any of these damn Communist units," he told me shortly.

Yes, I had committed the cardinal sin of an American engineer; I had performed a calculation using the metric system instead of the Imperial System. We Stevens students are coming of age in our profession in a confusing atmosphere. We give our body weight in pounds, yet the acceleration due to gravity is 9.81 m/s2. The temperature in a reactor is several hundred Kelvin, but the temperature on Castle Point is about 62ø Fahrenheit. We are, in short, developing two conflicting sets of technical instincts and I'm concerned that it will not serve us well in our professional lives.

In another example of conflicting messages, we are perpetually encouraged to be international/global technical experts. We have the benefit of faculty members from fine institutions across the world. The student body is deeply involved with water issues in the Dominican Republic and material contamination issues in China. Yet we will leave Stevens and enter domestic industries where the concept of a meter is as alien as a engineering project that comes in under budget. We will be trained as technical experts in a system of measurement that is not useful to any of our international partners. It is not a language barrier that will impede collaboration with our Russian, Italian or Japanese counterparts; it is our numbers themselves.

This is not only an isolationist approach to technical design. The measurement dichotomy can have some costly repercussions. In the 90s, NASA lost a multi-million dollar mission to the surface of Mars because part of the software was calculating in Imperial units and part in metric. As long as American engineers are straddling two measurement systems (or, worse, stay with the Imperial System) we are leaving ourselves open to catastrophic failures and not reaching our full technical potential.