chapter 3 General electric's advanced course

One of the primary attractions for Evans when seeking employment there was GE’s famed Advanced Course, an elite training program for promising engineers. Washington University in St. Louis had developed a tradition of its top engineering graduates applying for entry into the program, and Evans followed in the footsteps of several distinguished predecessors. In 1941, he was one of two Washington University graduates to be accepted into the program’s A Class, alongside N.A. Schuster. That year’s cohort included single representatives from Ivy League institutions such as Yale, Princeton, and Brown, as well as renowned technology institutes like MIT, Caltech, Rensselaer, and Carnegie Tech.

The educational approach of GE’s Advanced Course would have a profound impact on Evans’ views of engineering and learning. The program’s grand overseer in 1941 was Alexander Stevenson, Jr., an accomplished engineer whose earlier work had led GE to manufacture electric refrigerators. Stevenson articulated the purpose of the Advanced Course in a 1935 paper, describing a need for engineers with deeper analytical skills:

“Most (engineering graduates) had no mathematical training beyond calculus, and those who had studied differential equations had not learned how to make use of them in the analysis of physical problems. There were coming to the company many excellent, ingenious engineers, but … courses in many colleges were being taught routine rule-of-thumb methods of design, and there was insufficient emphasis on thinking problems through by the use of fundamental principles.”

The true architect of the Advanced Course, however, was Robert E. Doherty, a nationally respected educator who had designed the program in 1922. By 1941, Doherty was the president of Carnegie Institute of Technology, and his vision for engineering education was deeply embedded in the course’s philosophy. Evans kept in his Advanced Course notebook a copy of Doherty’s address to students, which emphasized the importance of true understanding over rote memorization:

“So, I urge you to take the initiative and learn to use your heads. In the first place, dig yourself out of confusion. Insist on understanding! Do away with superficiality! Stop memorizing words and formulas that you don’t understand, merely for a grade.

Don’t go on cultivating a habit that will cripple your mind for the rest of your days—the habit of superficiality, the habit of playing on words that carry no meaning. You know when you understand and when you don’t; when you grasp a point that is clear and clean-cut and when, instead, it is blurred and confused.

With all the emphasis in me, I repeat: insist on understanding! Then, under the guidance of the faculty in your regular class programs, but under your own initiative, you will be in a position to go forward more effectively with the acquaintance of a genuine education gauged to the demands of the changing world in which you will live.”