Trevin Cooper

To whom it may concern,

As a former student of Jerry’s I can sincerely say that his classes prepared me for my career in a critical way that my college education did not. I now work in the aerospace industry at a company pushing the very forefront of human space exploration. I am surrounded by some of the most brilliant minds in the country and I now find myself daily relying on the methods, skills, and models that I learned from Jerry’s program far more than I do my college education. There is a hole in our education system and I believe that Jerry’s proposal offers a path to fill it in a really unique way. Not by simply bridging gaps in knowledge, but in fostering a spirit of self discovery.

I graduated from Texas A&M in 2018, an ABET accredited school that is well known for its excellent engineering program. It was a phenomenal education program and I really would not have asked for a different academic experience, but there is one astonishing blindspot in the program that stands out to me in hindsight: I very nearly graduated from one of the top engineering schools in the country without ever designing or building a circuit board. Many of my classmates did so, and were subsequently hired into roles where that was their primary job expectation, leaving them scrambling and wondering how all the math and physics that filled their undergraduate notebooks fit into this strange world of manufacturing tolerances, reliability concerns, procurement lead times, project schedules, and cost reduction methods. I do not think my alma mater is unique in this.

I use this example because I think it highlights the underlying problem well. It’s just a circuit board—surely running copper connections between components on a board can’t be that hard. And in theory, it is not—but theory always breaks down and there are oh so many ways to fail. You can put a component in a region of the board and discover that the mechanical engineer had already designed the chassis to mount to the board there. You can fail to give the signal currents on digital lines a good return path causing the board to radiate noise and desensitize the wireless receiver. You can fail to design in sufficient ESD protection, effectively killing the circuit as soon as a user touches it, or find that an amplifier becomes unstable in a certain temperature region due to insufficient capacitance on the input. I have personally made each of these mistakes in my post college career and wish only I had been able to make them in an undergraduate program rather than in a professional engineering environment when the company’s schedule and financial prospects are on the line.

This is, I think, the key skill that Jerry’s program taught me. Schools are great at teaching the “what” of engineering. The math, science, and physics that all of engineering is built upon. But I do not think they are prepared to teach the “how” of engineering, all those things that engineers do to actually go from an idea to something real. I learned this in part from Jerry’s classes and in part from real project experience.

I also think it’s important to emphasize that this cannot be addressed simply by increasing the laboratory exposure of students, as the issue is not just a lack of “hands on” experience. I remember working late in the lab as an undergraduate and wondering why it was important that I complete the exercises given. Why did it matter if I could design an amplifier with high linearity—hadn’t a thousand people done that? I look back on that now and see that the amplifier should have only been a means to the end. Say, perhaps, that my goal were to design a wireless push-to-talk radio and therefore needed to digitally process the user’s voice without distortion. It then would have been much more clear to me why the linear amplifier mattered. Furthermore, it could have been a real amplifier constrained by the real limits of engineering (what parts can I purchase, how fast can I get them, are they compatible with each other, can I change the power system to use something different) instead of artificial limits provided by the professor (make it have 20dB of gain because I said so and because I happen to know it’s achievable with the parts I’ve given you).

I hope that these examples highlight the gap that I think the BUILD program can fulfill. Jerry has provided me with a level of intuition about engineering that is rare among college graduates and a precious resource for America in the race to maintain technical prowess in the world. I am thankful for it, and I know that he can make an enormous difference by offering a similar program to others.

Best,

Trevin C.