An engineer once told me that he needed to teach himself engineering in college. By that he meant that his professors would go through sample problems in lectures, demonstrating solution processes for different examples, but that didn’t teach him the underlying thinking that they were using to analyze problems in order to solve them. He had to extract from those examples the underlying principles that the instructors were using to guide their solutions. In other words, his professors did not teach how an engineer thinks, he had to figure that out himself.
