Evaluation Engineering - 3

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25%
Predicted worldwide installed
capacity increase for MEMS
and sensor fabs through 2023

4.7 MILLION
Forecast installed wafers
per month by 2023
Source: SEMI

3.8%
Increase in September
North American PCB
shipments year-to-year

7%
Year-to-date PCB sales growth
Source: IPC

3.4%
Global increase in
semiconductor sales monthto-month in September

106.7 BILLION
Worldwide semiconductor
sales in Q3 2019

Storytelling, art boost STEM
In a 2012 post, I wrote about a request
from Silicon Valley entrepreneur
Santosh Jayaram for more English majors.1
Resources like reusable code are simplifying
the engineering portion of new product introductions. The challenge, he said, lies in
encouraging investment in your idea and in
marketing the resulting product to prospective customers-efforts that require storytelling skills. More recently, Charles Duhigg
in The New Yorker points out that product
proposals at Amazon must be written out
as six-page narratives, because CEO Jeff
Bezos believes storytelling encourages critical thinking. 2
And now, Heather Long at The Washington
Post addresses the issue. 3 She cites Nobel
Prize winner Robert Shiller's new book
Narrative Economics, which contends that
the stories people tell each other have profound implications for the economy.
Should students be advised to major in
English and the humanities rather than
STEM subjects? Not necessarily. In 2014,
Laszlo Bock, at the time in charge of hiring at Google, said he preferred a B student
in computer science to an A+ student in
English.4 And Long in her Washington Post
story acknowledges that entry-level STEM
graduates command higher salaries than
recent graduates with English degrees.
However, Long cites research by David J.
Deming and Kadeem L. Noray of Harvard
showing that the STEM pay premium fades
quickly. "We find that the initially high economic return to applied STEM degrees declines by more than 50% in the first decade
of working life," they write. 5
And Long points out a surprising statistic:
"Contrary to popular belief, English majors
ages 25 to 29 had a lower unemployment
rate in 2017 than math and computer science
majors," she writes.
Perhaps that's because the percentage of
the number of majors in English has declined
by 25.5% from 2009 to 2017, she says, citing
data from the National Center for Education
Statistics. Over that same period, the number

of math, engineering, and computer-science
majors increased by 55.2%, 67.8%, and 88%,
respectively. English majors may be filling
an underserved niche, whereas STEM majors may face a glut of competition at home
and abroad.
Of course, STEM subjects and the humanities aren't mutually exclusive. STEAM, for
example, adds an A for Art. Going a step
further, STREAM ads an R for wRiting.
Many colleges and universities, including
the Rhode Island School of Design, support
STEAM initiatives with interesting results.
An article from earlier this year describes the
efforts of a Brown/RISD Dual Degree student
majoring in industrial design who created
Musical Prosthetics, wearable sculptures
infused with sensors that create sounds in
response to body movement.6
STEAM initiatives can begin early in life.
The Boston Children's Museum, for example,
offers programs that let children tinker with
circuits and art materials.
Not everyone supports STEAM. A blog
post at the National Inventors Hall of Fame
cites some critics claiming that art detracts
from the core STEM subject matter. The organization itself says it avoids the debate-
what's important is giving children hands-on
experiences that let them learn important
concepts.7
REFERENCES

1. "Got English majors?" EE-Evaluation Engineering
Online, Nov. 1, 2012.
2. Duhigg, Charles, "Is Amazon Unstoppable?" The
New Yorker, October 10, 2019.
3. Long, Heather, "The world's top economists just
made the case for why we still need English majors,"
The Washington Post, Oct. 19, 2019.
4. "Google's Bock advises B in computer science beats
A+ in English," EE-Evaluation Engineering Online,
April 21, 2014.
5. Deming, David J., and Noray, Kadeem L., "STEM
Careers and the Changing Skill Requirements of
Work," National Bureau of Economic Research, Issued
September 2018, Revised June 2019.
6. Albanese, Robert, "Invested in Design for the
Greater Good," Rhode Island School of Design, March
5, 2019.
7. "The STEM vs. STEAM Debate," Blog Post,
National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Source: SIA

DECEMBER 2019 EVALUATIONENGINEERING.COM

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Evaluation Engineering

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