Combining Theory and Practice in the Right Proportions

For many years, the local public has had the notion that university engineering graduates are strong in theory because that is what we teach here. Polytechnic engineering students, however, are practice oriented because they are given more opportunities to use their hands in the classroom. When the NTU engineering schools were set up in 1984 the press emphasised that their graduates are better at hands-on engineering whereas NUS engineering graduates shun practical work because they are trained to do research. The question then is: Can an engineer function properly as an armchair expert? Hercule Poirot, the famous Belgian detective in Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries, is a classic example of an armchair detective who solves mysteries by simply sitting and thinking in his armchair instead of combing for physical evidence. This surely is an extreme case of employing theory to the exclusion of all else. It might work in fiction, but certainly not in real life as I shall attempt to explain in this paper.