Most engineering students are surprised to learn that practicing engineers spend approximately half of their time writing and virtually no time doing advanced calculus. A typical engineer spends approximately half of his or her time writing. A fundamental challenge in engineering education is to help the students make the transition from analysis to synthesis. First year students are immersed in the scientific and mathematical canon. Engineering analysis begins in the sophomore year.
Students find the reward structure of analysis reassuring.
As the sophomore year progresses, the students need to apply more complex analyses to solve problems as they incorporate diverse physical phenomena. Engineering modelling, synthesis, and design are introduced in the junior year. Modelling and synthesis problems are open-ended. Modelling is the process of simplifying a real phenomena so that it yields a mathematically tractable problem while representing reality closely enough to yield useful predictions. It is more meaningful to describe models as either adequate or inadequate.