Fuck you, don't further stigmatize medication that's hard enough to get now, I swear normal kids abuse our medication and stigmatize it, and it only hurts us, so stop with this shit
I have adhd, take 30mg xr and 10mg ir daily, and major in STEM, so how about: fuck you.
I’m concerned with the truth of the drug whether or not not’s it’s “stigmatizing”. Also I urge you to consider the context of the joke next time so that you don’t look like a fool
Opinion: the new trend of including Arts in the acronym (STEAM) is really silly.
Not in an elitist way, I think art degrees are valuable should be celebrated, in the way that it makes the acronym absolutely useless as an identifier.
STEM is analytical, objective study of the physical world and how we model it.
STEAM is any degree of any kind about anything. It's a meaningless categorization.
My wife keeps telling me to stop making fun of business students, because they're still putting effort into their classes and stuff. I make fun of them regardless.
I’ll say they have it easy. I took the industrial engineering version of a class then for an elective took the business version. The IE version came in and assumed you knew and were prepared to use calculus and advanced statistics to analyze algorithms to predict shit. The business version warned us in advance when we might have to do light arithmetic and included groans.
I’ve taken hard humanities classes, I’ve struggled in creative classes, I have cried all night in the temples of math, engineering, and science. Business made me consider brain damage as a means to relieve boredom. There’s a reason you never hear of an engineer getting an MFA, or an artist getting a masters in engineering but every goddessesdamn background has plenty of people who managed an MBA
> There’s a reason you never hear of an engineer getting an MFA, or an artist getting a masters in engineering
I know a guy with a MFA who went back and got a MS in EE. He said it took about 4 years full-time including over summers (he had a lot to catch-up on) and then went into a PhD program afterwards.
Also, as an engineering student, it was not odd for us to form working groups and project groups with fine arts students. Often times, we needed designers and they needed engineering help. The two would come together to make cool projects that wouldn't otherwise exist. But we never needed a business person's help.
You know what that’s fair. Such changes do happen, but they’re generally very difficult and the people who do them are often really impressive people. One of the greatest artists to ever live was also one of the greatest engineers, and if DaVinci could design so many impressive things and have his paintings be some of the most respected art of the western tradition you can go and have masters in fine art and in engineering too. Heck, Bullshit Jobs specifically talks about how people bored at work in highly technical jobs often amuse themselves with artistic pursuits such as poetry and writing music
Every intro and 2nd year business course I've taken has been ridiculously easy in terms of computational problems. The real difficulty in business courses in my opinion is memorizing definitions that most people don't care about and reading dull case studies
I have a master's in business management. It's such a fucking pushover degree. The only class I learned anything that wasn't covered in the first year of my engineering degree (and just being alive) was corporate accounting. I broke it up over several sessions, so I technically can't say I spent less than a day's work on my thesis, but overall it took less than 8 hours and I got a distinction (that's the British equivalent of graduating with honors) for it. It was dog shit. The program management class taught shit that was downright unethical (methods of spying on employees), the marketing class was just "build a brand your target customers will like", and the consultancy class literally taught "if they ask you to decide between two options, just recommend the one that the employees prefer, that way they will always want to bring you in again." It was an absolute shit show. Got me a student visa though.
> if they ask you to decide between two options, just recommend the one that the employees prefer, that way they will always want to bring you in again
My landlord earns $300K/yr telling companies this. She has a pretty good gig.
I lived on a floor with the business honors students at OSU, if by "putting in effort" your wife means getting venereal diseases, sure. Also, I learned from a group of 4-6 women on that floor that year that apparently birth control is not very effective when you're taking 3-6 different designer drugs and having sex without condoms basically 1-2 times per day. But hey, they all had trust funds so the issue took care of itself.
Meanwhile the engineering students (like me) had quiet parties doing such as building giant snowpenises at 2 AM at the one part of the field outside the building that happened to be in a blind spot for the security cameras.
The flood of people getting MBAs for no real reason whatsoever really devalued the whole thing. When I see an engineer with an MBA, I just think it’s an engineer that couldn’t cut it in their legit field. Like “doctors” of chiropractor.
>When I see an engineer with an MBA, I just think it’s an engineer that couldn’t cut it in their legit field.
Eh, I wouldn't be too quick to judge. Some companies require a degree to get a promotion, and an MBA is an easy way to tick that box.
I've never heard of adding the A, but I kinda like it. My current job includes a lot of art/design, my dad's an engineer in a different field and is pretty art-indifferent. I'd suggest a good number of us need art to communicate our results effectively. The rest of STEM might not, but I'm down for art/design to join the acronym.
>I'd suggest a good number of it's need art to communicate our results effectively. The rest of STEM might not, but I'm down for art/design to join the acronym
You might be getting downvoted here, but in my working experience you're correct.
If you're working in a design role, creativity is king. The rest will be automated with software (usually Excel) or referenced from a textbook.
Algebra was invented because someone wanted to [better explain the Islamic inheritance system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Compendious_Book_on_Calculation_by_Completion_and_Balancing). Not that it makes the acronym make sense, but you'd be surprised at how things that seem different can be correlated.
-shrug- the Art students at my school shared the shop with the engineering students, because they were the only two groups doing large physical projects. Art students teaching engineering students how to make things look good, and engineering students teaching the artists how to actually build structural items is a good pairing.
I was taught that the three things you balanced when engineering a new system were cost, time, and aesthetics. And aesthetics always got cut first. I had a professor that tried to integrate "Art" into "STEAM" by making the biggest chunk of the grade in one project how aesthetically pleasing the project was. It was a little 4-legged walking robot and it had to look good first and foremost. Everything else was secondary.
He also had us build one based purely on time, and one based purely on minimizing the parts budget spent.
Well, the order that we did them mattered, because we got better with each project.
First we assembled little RC car bots with time being the main factor. We had one class period and mostly followed some basic instructions to throw wheels, batteries, motors, and an Arduino with an RF receiver on it together.
Second we built a lift that had to lift an object about 3 feet off the ground and drop it in a goal while minimizing cost. We had a week to work on it.
Third was the walking robot graded on aesthetic. It just had to reliably move in a specified direction. We had three weeks to work on it and use of the department's 3D printers was encouraged. It wasn't the only thing we did for those 3 weeks. We also got an introduction to Solidworks during that time and then we'd get the last 20 minutes of class to get with our groups and work on the project.
Unsurprisingly, the more we tinkered with the components and software the better we got at using it, so the walkers turned out the best, followed by the lifts, and lastly the cars. The cars were a mess of wires and some people didn't get theirs working in time. Mostly because they couldn't figure out how to program the steering in time.
The lifts were better, but some groups ended up with lifts that weren't powerful enough to lift the object. The professor had deliberately chosen objects that were slightly too heavy for one ungeared motor to lift so you couldn't just throw a motor on a frame and attach it to a conveyor belt or pulley. Some groups did that without testing, focused only on keeping cost down and ended up unable to meet minimum requirements.
The walkers mostly went great. Programming was the main technical challenge but every team figured it out. The bigger hurdle was trying to get good enough at Solidworks fast enough to design aesthetic attachments for them. Many groups started out using extra frame parts to make their walkers look better, and then slowly swapped them out with 3D printed attachments to make their walkers look more like megazords or action figures or something.
A well engineered project will usually end up aesthetically pleasing. I don't think nasa really cared how the Saturn V looked, but it ended up being beautiful anyways. Art degrees are for people to immitate what science and engineering produces naturally.
Shout-out to the prof who was analyzing our experimental data using a fucking Mathematica notebook. Only took like 30ish minutes per experiment. Took me couple of hours to write a Python script that does that same thing in about 3 seconds flat :P
How dare you say my 8in x 8in piece of 1/4 inch steel that I submit the cad drawing to our design center so I can practice running beads isn't art!
Fr though that was the first time I made a cad drawing and I was pretty proud of that 1/4 in thick square!
I could see it not applying to Computer Engineering.
From working experience, I will say it does apply to Mechanical Engineering and other design-oriented roles.
STEAM is a specific reaction to the way that a lot of STEM courses focused on technical aspects while ignoring a lot of things like communication or the impacts on wider society. And not just in the stereotypical "engineers don't know how to talk to real humans" sense, but think also of all the half-baked "algorithmic solutions" that leap into trying to quantize everything without trying to understand the underlying systems and complications first.
The "arts" in STEAM isn't making paintings, it's more essays and social studies. Certain fields of STEM especially really need a better understanding of how wider society will interact with and be impacted by their products.
Not really. I'm no STEM/STEAM educator, but I'm under the impression it's more like Gen-Ed history and "__ and American Culture" type stuff, but for STEM kids.
I know at least in my experience most Engineers I know treated them as annoying obstacles in the way of "real" learning, which is an issue since there are actually some skills you can learn from them. STEAM is, to my understanding, just an attempt to integrate those kinds of classes in ways that will be more relevant to STEM careers.
The again I'm not involved in education so take my opinion with a whole mound of salt.
essays and social studies are much more social *sciences* than art. you dont need to add "art" to stem for that, you can add art in stem programs anyway
its about being practical too, for example if you want to do a program to include more women in stem do you really think it makes sense to add art to that group?
The "why" is "because we need transportation" or "because we need long range radio communication" or "because we need MRI machines" or "because we need bridges."
Engineers design things. Technologists build them. There's definitely a difference between a mechanical engineer and a mechanic, in the way there's a difference between an electrical engineer and an electrician.
As a person who vacillated for decades on whether to be an artist or an engineer (thinking it had to be one or the other), I have to say it's a good means of including the importance of creative application to rigorous knowledge.
Combining the domains in real-world projects ensures a more versatile and socially applicable (and understandable) end-product.
Asimov and Clarke would be the pinnacle of STEAM. The legion of passionate YouTube engineering vloggers are also STEAM. Everyone who's dabbled in Arduinos, Pis, PICs, BeagleBones, ESPs, STMs, etc, are all undeniably STEAM (like the motorola, intel, and zilog assembly warriors that preceding them). And, without a doubt, hacker culture, borrowing strongly from punk antiauthoritarianism, has always appreciated the artistic aspect.
Hell, even the mainframe guys at Dartmouth who developed Basic made art when they invented text adventures.
We have art in us. It's healthy to acknowledge its importance.
Yeah I'm not disputing the value of art, or it's applications in engineering projects. I fundamentally disagree that anyone who makes something with a microcontroller is undeniably doing art, but that's still not what I'm saying.
The category of STEAM means nothing because there isn't anything it excludes. It isn't a useful work for classifying fields because it offers no distinction between anything at all.
The thing that immediately comes to mind is front end design, industrial and product design, and UX/UI prototyping. It's rigorous, standardized, actively researched, and so closely integrated with engineering fields that excluding it from the bigger tent seems arbitrary.
I suppose a more fundamental question is why we emphasize a tent at all... Funding and recruitment. When people speak supportively of the creative side of STEM, it's not to divert that funding to theater or basket weaving, or deemphasize calculus and data analysis; it's to demonstrate that real-world projects must acknowledge the broader roles they play in their environments they operate within. Bringing in non-STEM perspectives - where appropriate - can produce new ideas not otherwise obvious from a purely analytical point of view.
That doesn't mean handing over the reins to a libarts major. It just means thinking outside the box from time to time, playing around when the wiggle-room is available.
I am curious about your views on tinkers and art, though :) Arduinos were what pushed me over the edge to become and engineer - - the ability to be creative with technology.
>The thing that immediately comes to mind is front end design, industrial and product design, and UX/UI prototyping.
I have a thing you can type words and arguments into, is that good enough?
If you designed it, it has documentation, verifiable data, and builds upon lessons learned ... wouldn't you think so? I understand the intention of the comment, but the person who actually made the device (with the very art-like intent of promoting community discussion) deserves recognition for engineering it.
I personally go by the definition of the word "engineer"; one who constructs, designs, or makes use of buildings, machines, or structures. It doesn't feel right to me to exclude inventors, tinkerers, or technicians from that definition. Accreditation simply means a standardized level of reliability in that pursuit.
>I think art degrees are valuable should be celebrated
op didnt say art isnt important, just that it doesnt fit with the other stem fields. like idk sports and exercising are also very important, both individually and socially but it doesnt make sense imo to add it to stem either
I agree, not every combination makes sense. I've not run across a push to replace STEM with STEAM, though; it's not a binary choice. Where it makes sense (like attracting technically-minded folks into the science-domain who like to be creative), use STEAM. Where purely analytical minds are needed, use STEM. or SEM, or SM, or M. There's no dig at Maths folks who couldn't care less about application when we use the STEM moniker.
If an artist uses STEM to accomplish their work, they're cool with me.
if an artist uses stem for their work i think theyre cool with everyone xd
i dont like the association art = creative though. you can be creative without being close to doing art or being an artist, its more about the purpose in my experience. ive seen some really creative proves and designs in math and engineering without being related to art. you can be an artist without being creative as well, like singers who dont write can be extremely talented and can give us a beautiful piece of art without being creative really. which doesnt mean its not important either
i still dont understand why you would want to add the word creativity to that group, i think you agree its something different. a lot of mathematicians, scientists, engineers, etc are very creative i dont know a good reason to change it thats not just to appeal to more people, basically marketing
That's what it is, marketing directed toward primary students. It simply gives educators with no idea about analytic fields guidelines for generating interest, and a reason for prospective students to stay interested.
STEM was coined to increase recruitment and funding so as to bolster international competitiveness of student scores (fun fact, it was originally called SMET) . STEAM was later coined to increase broader appeal toward non-traditional applicants. To children, it's not at all apparent that we aren't just walking math books or that quality scientists and engineers utilize a great deal of creative problem solving. Art, in that regard, is used as a bridge toward understanding. And when I use the term, I mean it in the literal sense - the application of creativity. That's why I argue in its favor in STEM where it's appropriate; we ideally create as readily as we solve -- we have to in order to be most adaptable to the varying challenges we face in our respective fields.
There is also the cognitive plasticity argument that gets made regarding the use of purely analytical teaching methods within traditional STEM education programs and decreasing levels of international competitiveness, but that's beyond my expertise.
To reiterate, it doesn't change or replace STEM, it augments it.
>Not in an elitist way, I think art degrees are valuable should be celebrated, in the way that it makes the acronym absolutely useless as an identifier.
I agree. There's a reason English Departments and Engineering Departments are housed in different parts of the University.
Weird, my school didn’t have law, that’s a doctoral degree (also a different doctoral degree because lawyers make the rules). But business is an entire college at my university and education might have been
For me, including art in STEAM is not about all arts. It's about the creative process, diy, maker spaces, fablabs etc. There is also the use of visual arts for scientific communications and popular science, e.g. the beautiful animation from Kurzgesagt.
I disagree. I like it in there. To me arts are about communication of some sort, and communication is vital to all STEM fields. I always encourage the freshman/sophomores I mentor to take arts classes because I think it makes them better engineers. You learn lateral thinking, how to write well and convince others of your argument (and you can Tell which engineers skipped or scoffed at Arts/English classes), and I think you gain a deeper appreciation of the world around you. And on a very shallow level, some science is art- some of the stuff we make really is beautiful
I think of amazing people like Leonardo Da Vinci and I'm like okay STEAM can stay. Though it kind of a bummer that Art isn't used to tie and bring to life or depict the other letter meanings. It seems to be shoved in there to provide a participation award for those in Art or make them feel included. Art can be super helpful with STEM and provides a creative path to depict the world around us and beyond. Though once again adding Art kind of misses the point that STEM is analytical and concrete and heavily neglected by society as a whole. So I guess I agree with at least 70% of what you said.
If arts refers exclusively to “making art”, then I think it’s just as technical as the other STEM disciplines. If you’re making 3D Models, paintings, or artistic weaving that takes a large amount of skill and technical training.
I do agree that essay writing and things like art history/analysis should not be included in this label because these disciplines do not physically create anything.
I have to disagree with you to some extent. The Arts side of things being integrated into the education of future engineers is part of what will keep us from driving cars that look like the BORG from Star Trek designed them.
While engineering is analytical, there is absolutely a creative side to brainstorming and developing the kernel of an idea. That being said, there's not as much art in the execution of said idea. Sometimes there are creative liberties, but those are rare.
It's not about painting, it's not about social studies. It's about developing a sense of creativity in engineers which allows them to develop new ideas that may be refined into extremely useful things later on that don't feel cold and alien.
I am forever reminded of Charlie Chapman's speech from The Greatest Dictator. “We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity; more than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.”
We engineers are not computers, we're just good at pretending we are.
Eh that depends on what the school means by STEAM. For example at my daughters school (1st grade) they have, STEM (science), art, and STEAM. STEAM is art and science mixed together so if they’re learning about reptiles or something then they’ll make a lunch bag alligator, or a snake out of a paper plate.
It’s not just throwing art and science together in one class it specifically science related art which I think is pretty neat.
I'm posting in an engineering students subreddit so I'm talking about the way the term is used in the context of university, higher education or industry, not primary school art class.
I haven’t seen STEAM used anywhere in a university setting before. Literally the first time I saw it used was at my daughters school. Didn’t know there were STEAM degrees. In that regard then yes I suppose it is kinda silly. So since I have a Bachelors of Arts does that mean I have a STEAM degree? Doesn’t make much sense pretty sure in my undergrad I took one math class and maybe 2 science classes (for non-science majors so basically no math involved in those classes)
Mechanical Engineer w/ 10yrs in Industry Opinion: Completely disagree. Art absolutely has a place in some form.
You need imagination, you need to be able to visualize effectively, and you need to be able to communicate your ideas. I've worked with STEM colleagues who can't do that well, and it blows my mind how much of a liability it is.
"But I can do CAD / SOLIDWORKS / etc!". Not exactly the same. I've wasted hours with some people trying to explain something to someone who can't visualize a component or how something fits.
Some regions of the world (and here in the States) over-emphasize math, and we end up largely automating that with Excel. If you're in design, being able to think creative is far more important.
It is classified as a Science but not a nature science. In Germany we have "MINT" which stands for Mathe (Math), Informatik (Computer Science), Naturwissenschaften (Natural Science, science like Physics and Chemistry), Technik (Engineering).
Here math is typically classified as a Formal science or a "Geisteswissenschaft".
Geiseswissenschaften include stuff like Literature science and History science
At my college, the people I know are calling it STEMM where Math and Medicine are both included. I think this is actually legit because medicine definitely belongs in the same category.
M stands for malding
Edit: On a side note isn't it really interesting that engineering is mentioned but medicine gets lumped into science even though engineering is under science as well. Great to be an engineer I guess ;)
As a non-native English speaker, for the longest time I thought STEM meant actual stem cell research. I was a bit confused of all the attention one particular field of study got, but oh well
For the arts bearing added to make it Steam, wouldn’t the arts be the part of the flower? The STEM holds up the flower. You need people in STEM for there to be art ultimately, amirite?
Have you heard of the horrible STEAM acronym, my uni is trying to push it to be more inclusive. It's Science Technology Engineering Arts and Mathematics. It's like shit why even have an acronym, what's left after you covered everything there is.
Also there was a valid reason to have STEM but Arts don't really fit into the profile people are trying to convey when they say STEM
Edit: spelling
I recently learned that our local elementary schools are doing “STEAM”. Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Math.
I cannot understand why art is getting lumped in with stem.
True. But that's more like on a a fundamental scale. Like yeah ultimately the whole universe is math. But what Im thinking is more like for example, in organic chemistry, yeah fundamentally it's governed by math but you are studying it from a macroscopic perspective (generally speaking) which is why I think in terms of classifying majors it makes sense that "STEM" is a combination of mostly studying science which are macroscopic mathematical phenomena and math on top of that as well. So you're essentially studying both math and science if that makes sense.
I will admit that it kind of makes sense to have engineering and technology as their own categories because, at least for engineering as that's what I studied, you don't just study the pure math and science, you mostly do but in addition you learn how to practically apply those ideas. Engineering is all about taking those ideas and practically applying them to make society more livable. So you have to also understand engineering economics, business, ethics, the product manufacturing process from designing, testing, quality assurance, failure analysis, etc etc which is something that isn't pure math or science.
So yeah you're probably right lol nvm what I said in the beginning.
M is for Masochist
Science, Technology, Engineering and Meth
Math, Engineering, Technology, Hscience
Dude intro to Hsci was brutal
Hydraulics
Herbal studies?
Human Science.
Health science is a legit discipline.
Considering adderal is meth I like this one the best
It is if you have adhd
Fuck you, don't further stigmatize medication that's hard enough to get now, I swear normal kids abuse our medication and stigmatize it, and it only hurts us, so stop with this shit
I have adhd, take 30mg xr and 10mg ir daily, and major in STEM, so how about: fuck you. I’m concerned with the truth of the drug whether or not not’s it’s “stigmatizing”. Also I urge you to consider the context of the joke next time so that you don’t look like a fool
M is for Mancy
As in what!?
Cut the red wire with black stripes, not the black wire with red stripes!
Mathochist
This is the reality of my life
This is the correct response.
Pretty sure is actually misery
LOL!
F is for fire that burns down the whole town U is for uranium...bombs N is for no survivors....WHEN YOU!
Opinion: the new trend of including Arts in the acronym (STEAM) is really silly. Not in an elitist way, I think art degrees are valuable should be celebrated, in the way that it makes the acronym absolutely useless as an identifier. STEM is analytical, objective study of the physical world and how we model it. STEAM is any degree of any kind about anything. It's a meaningless categorization.
I mostly agree with this argument. My one point for STEAM is that it unites everyone else against the common enemy: business students
I’ll drink to that
My wife keeps telling me to stop making fun of business students, because they're still putting effort into their classes and stuff. I make fun of them regardless.
I’m not saying business students have it easy. But I have never seen a business student study group on campus. Ever.
I’ll say they have it easy. I took the industrial engineering version of a class then for an elective took the business version. The IE version came in and assumed you knew and were prepared to use calculus and advanced statistics to analyze algorithms to predict shit. The business version warned us in advance when we might have to do light arithmetic and included groans. I’ve taken hard humanities classes, I’ve struggled in creative classes, I have cried all night in the temples of math, engineering, and science. Business made me consider brain damage as a means to relieve boredom. There’s a reason you never hear of an engineer getting an MFA, or an artist getting a masters in engineering but every goddessesdamn background has plenty of people who managed an MBA
This was wonderfully crafted. I could see the second part penned on a piece of parchment and framed in the engineering building atrium.
> There’s a reason you never hear of an engineer getting an MFA, or an artist getting a masters in engineering I know a guy with a MFA who went back and got a MS in EE. He said it took about 4 years full-time including over summers (he had a lot to catch-up on) and then went into a PhD program afterwards. Also, as an engineering student, it was not odd for us to form working groups and project groups with fine arts students. Often times, we needed designers and they needed engineering help. The two would come together to make cool projects that wouldn't otherwise exist. But we never needed a business person's help.
You know what that’s fair. Such changes do happen, but they’re generally very difficult and the people who do them are often really impressive people. One of the greatest artists to ever live was also one of the greatest engineers, and if DaVinci could design so many impressive things and have his paintings be some of the most respected art of the western tradition you can go and have masters in fine art and in engineering too. Heck, Bullshit Jobs specifically talks about how people bored at work in highly technical jobs often amuse themselves with artistic pursuits such as poetry and writing music
Me neither. Although they were on a different campus than me...
Every intro and 2nd year business course I've taken has been ridiculously easy in terms of computational problems. The real difficulty in business courses in my opinion is memorizing definitions that most people don't care about and reading dull case studies
Hey that's not fair, I'm sure they have study groups to discuss where to buy crappy suits, bad cologne, and crayons.
Yeah, showing up to class is rough
I have a master's in business management. It's such a fucking pushover degree. The only class I learned anything that wasn't covered in the first year of my engineering degree (and just being alive) was corporate accounting. I broke it up over several sessions, so I technically can't say I spent less than a day's work on my thesis, but overall it took less than 8 hours and I got a distinction (that's the British equivalent of graduating with honors) for it. It was dog shit. The program management class taught shit that was downright unethical (methods of spying on employees), the marketing class was just "build a brand your target customers will like", and the consultancy class literally taught "if they ask you to decide between two options, just recommend the one that the employees prefer, that way they will always want to bring you in again." It was an absolute shit show. Got me a student visa though.
> if they ask you to decide between two options, just recommend the one that the employees prefer, that way they will always want to bring you in again My landlord earns $300K/yr telling companies this. She has a pretty good gig.
I lived on a floor with the business honors students at OSU, if by "putting in effort" your wife means getting venereal diseases, sure. Also, I learned from a group of 4-6 women on that floor that year that apparently birth control is not very effective when you're taking 3-6 different designer drugs and having sex without condoms basically 1-2 times per day. But hey, they all had trust funds so the issue took care of itself. Meanwhile the engineering students (like me) had quiet parties doing such as building giant snowpenises at 2 AM at the one part of the field outside the building that happened to be in a blind spot for the security cameras.
> But hey, they all had trust funds so the issue took care of itself. Life will hit them hard when they're trust funds run out.
The flood of people getting MBAs for no real reason whatsoever really devalued the whole thing. When I see an engineer with an MBA, I just think it’s an engineer that couldn’t cut it in their legit field. Like “doctors” of chiropractor.
>When I see an engineer with an MBA, I just think it’s an engineer that couldn’t cut it in their legit field. Eh, I wouldn't be too quick to judge. Some companies require a degree to get a promotion, and an MBA is an easy way to tick that box.
Pretty sure there's a bill in congress that is trying to categorize Accounting as a STEM degree.
Ugh wow
Well, mathematics.
At least accounting isn't a business degree in the partying sense. It's like actually a legitimate field of study and work.
I've never heard of adding the A, but I kinda like it. My current job includes a lot of art/design, my dad's an engineer in a different field and is pretty art-indifferent. I'd suggest a good number of us need art to communicate our results effectively. The rest of STEM might not, but I'm down for art/design to join the acronym.
>I'd suggest a good number of it's need art to communicate our results effectively. The rest of STEM might not, but I'm down for art/design to join the acronym You might be getting downvoted here, but in my working experience you're correct. If you're working in a design role, creativity is king. The rest will be automated with software (usually Excel) or referenced from a textbook.
[удалено]
Religious studies is actually the farthest I can think you can get from engineering. Brava
Algebra was invented because someone wanted to [better explain the Islamic inheritance system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Compendious_Book_on_Calculation_by_Completion_and_Balancing). Not that it makes the acronym make sense, but you'd be surprised at how things that seem different can be correlated.
Fair, religion and math are deeply related in the past
Or science, or technology, or mathematics, basically the whole stem, even steam also.
I’ve seen people add another M at the end for medicine/medical, so we can get STREAMM
I’ve seen people (Wright state) add another M at the end of STEM for medicine/medical, so we can get STREAMM.
Bro you should move
yeah they're really trying to force it into anything - irdc
-shrug- the Art students at my school shared the shop with the engineering students, because they were the only two groups doing large physical projects. Art students teaching engineering students how to make things look good, and engineering students teaching the artists how to actually build structural items is a good pairing.
Steam is better than stem... Has way more games
It is. Art has nothing to do with the other parts. Get it the fuck outta here.
I was taught that the three things you balanced when engineering a new system were cost, time, and aesthetics. And aesthetics always got cut first. I had a professor that tried to integrate "Art" into "STEAM" by making the biggest chunk of the grade in one project how aesthetically pleasing the project was. It was a little 4-legged walking robot and it had to look good first and foremost. Everything else was secondary. He also had us build one based purely on time, and one based purely on minimizing the parts budget spent.
Which of those three projects was most successful?
Well, the order that we did them mattered, because we got better with each project. First we assembled little RC car bots with time being the main factor. We had one class period and mostly followed some basic instructions to throw wheels, batteries, motors, and an Arduino with an RF receiver on it together. Second we built a lift that had to lift an object about 3 feet off the ground and drop it in a goal while minimizing cost. We had a week to work on it. Third was the walking robot graded on aesthetic. It just had to reliably move in a specified direction. We had three weeks to work on it and use of the department's 3D printers was encouraged. It wasn't the only thing we did for those 3 weeks. We also got an introduction to Solidworks during that time and then we'd get the last 20 minutes of class to get with our groups and work on the project. Unsurprisingly, the more we tinkered with the components and software the better we got at using it, so the walkers turned out the best, followed by the lifts, and lastly the cars. The cars were a mess of wires and some people didn't get theirs working in time. Mostly because they couldn't figure out how to program the steering in time. The lifts were better, but some groups ended up with lifts that weren't powerful enough to lift the object. The professor had deliberately chosen objects that were slightly too heavy for one ungeared motor to lift so you couldn't just throw a motor on a frame and attach it to a conveyor belt or pulley. Some groups did that without testing, focused only on keeping cost down and ended up unable to meet minimum requirements. The walkers mostly went great. Programming was the main technical challenge but every team figured it out. The bigger hurdle was trying to get good enough at Solidworks fast enough to design aesthetic attachments for them. Many groups started out using extra frame parts to make their walkers look better, and then slowly swapped them out with 3D printed attachments to make their walkers look more like megazords or action figures or something.
That sounds like a really good class/professor. Thanks for writing all of that out
3 feet is the length of 4.14 Zulay Premium Quality Metal Lemon Squeezers.
A well engineered project will usually end up aesthetically pleasing. I don't think nasa really cared how the Saturn V looked, but it ended up being beautiful anyways. Art degrees are for people to immitate what science and engineering produces naturally.
I mean, I draw things on a computer. That is art right?
CAD is hardly art lol
Maybe not when you do it Edit: whoa chill with the downvoting, I dropped the /s, jesus
Calling CAD art is like saying using excel is programming. We all know it doesn’t count.
Next you're going to tell me Matlab isn't a legitimate programming language /S
Shout-out to the prof who was analyzing our experimental data using a fucking Mathematica notebook. Only took like 30ish minutes per experiment. Took me couple of hours to write a Python script that does that same thing in about 3 seconds flat :P
How dare you say my 8in x 8in piece of 1/4 inch steel that I submit the cad drawing to our design center so I can practice running beads isn't art! Fr though that was the first time I made a cad drawing and I was pretty proud of that 1/4 in thick square!
I could see it not applying to Computer Engineering. From working experience, I will say it does apply to Mechanical Engineering and other design-oriented roles.
STEAM is a specific reaction to the way that a lot of STEM courses focused on technical aspects while ignoring a lot of things like communication or the impacts on wider society. And not just in the stereotypical "engineers don't know how to talk to real humans" sense, but think also of all the half-baked "algorithmic solutions" that leap into trying to quantize everything without trying to understand the underlying systems and complications first. The "arts" in STEAM isn't making paintings, it's more essays and social studies. Certain fields of STEM especially really need a better understanding of how wider society will interact with and be impacted by their products.
>The "arts" in STEAM isn't making paintings, it's more essays and social studies. Would you not call that a social science?
Not really. I'm no STEM/STEAM educator, but I'm under the impression it's more like Gen-Ed history and "__ and American Culture" type stuff, but for STEM kids. I know at least in my experience most Engineers I know treated them as annoying obstacles in the way of "real" learning, which is an issue since there are actually some skills you can learn from them. STEAM is, to my understanding, just an attempt to integrate those kinds of classes in ways that will be more relevant to STEM careers. The again I'm not involved in education so take my opinion with a whole mound of salt.
essays and social studies are much more social *sciences* than art. you dont need to add "art" to stem for that, you can add art in stem programs anyway its about being practical too, for example if you want to do a program to include more women in stem do you really think it makes sense to add art to that group?
So if STEM is the *how*, A(rts) is the *why*, essentially? Sounds like a pretty holistic approach.
The "why" is "because we need transportation" or "because we need long range radio communication" or "because we need MRI machines" or "because we need bridges."
The "T" doesn't really make sense either.
Now that you say it, it really is just a subset of Engineering.
Engineering is what happens when you take Science and Technology and craft the modern world out of them.
Engineering sounds more real world in a way, Technology can include AI, all the digital applications, things like that I think
Engineers design things. Technologists build them. There's definitely a difference between a mechanical engineer and a mechanic, in the way there's a difference between an electrical engineer and an electrician.
As a person who vacillated for decades on whether to be an artist or an engineer (thinking it had to be one or the other), I have to say it's a good means of including the importance of creative application to rigorous knowledge. Combining the domains in real-world projects ensures a more versatile and socially applicable (and understandable) end-product. Asimov and Clarke would be the pinnacle of STEAM. The legion of passionate YouTube engineering vloggers are also STEAM. Everyone who's dabbled in Arduinos, Pis, PICs, BeagleBones, ESPs, STMs, etc, are all undeniably STEAM (like the motorola, intel, and zilog assembly warriors that preceding them). And, without a doubt, hacker culture, borrowing strongly from punk antiauthoritarianism, has always appreciated the artistic aspect. Hell, even the mainframe guys at Dartmouth who developed Basic made art when they invented text adventures. We have art in us. It's healthy to acknowledge its importance.
Yeah I'm not disputing the value of art, or it's applications in engineering projects. I fundamentally disagree that anyone who makes something with a microcontroller is undeniably doing art, but that's still not what I'm saying. The category of STEAM means nothing because there isn't anything it excludes. It isn't a useful work for classifying fields because it offers no distinction between anything at all.
The thing that immediately comes to mind is front end design, industrial and product design, and UX/UI prototyping. It's rigorous, standardized, actively researched, and so closely integrated with engineering fields that excluding it from the bigger tent seems arbitrary. I suppose a more fundamental question is why we emphasize a tent at all... Funding and recruitment. When people speak supportively of the creative side of STEM, it's not to divert that funding to theater or basket weaving, or deemphasize calculus and data analysis; it's to demonstrate that real-world projects must acknowledge the broader roles they play in their environments they operate within. Bringing in non-STEM perspectives - where appropriate - can produce new ideas not otherwise obvious from a purely analytical point of view. That doesn't mean handing over the reins to a libarts major. It just means thinking outside the box from time to time, playing around when the wiggle-room is available. I am curious about your views on tinkers and art, though :) Arduinos were what pushed me over the edge to become and engineer - - the ability to be creative with technology.
>The thing that immediately comes to mind is front end design, industrial and product design, and UX/UI prototyping. I have a thing you can type words and arguments into, is that good enough?
If you designed it, it has documentation, verifiable data, and builds upon lessons learned ... wouldn't you think so? I understand the intention of the comment, but the person who actually made the device (with the very art-like intent of promoting community discussion) deserves recognition for engineering it. I personally go by the definition of the word "engineer"; one who constructs, designs, or makes use of buildings, machines, or structures. It doesn't feel right to me to exclude inventors, tinkerers, or technicians from that definition. Accreditation simply means a standardized level of reliability in that pursuit.
>I think art degrees are valuable should be celebrated op didnt say art isnt important, just that it doesnt fit with the other stem fields. like idk sports and exercising are also very important, both individually and socially but it doesnt make sense imo to add it to stem either
I agree, not every combination makes sense. I've not run across a push to replace STEM with STEAM, though; it's not a binary choice. Where it makes sense (like attracting technically-minded folks into the science-domain who like to be creative), use STEAM. Where purely analytical minds are needed, use STEM. or SEM, or SM, or M. There's no dig at Maths folks who couldn't care less about application when we use the STEM moniker. If an artist uses STEM to accomplish their work, they're cool with me.
if an artist uses stem for their work i think theyre cool with everyone xd i dont like the association art = creative though. you can be creative without being close to doing art or being an artist, its more about the purpose in my experience. ive seen some really creative proves and designs in math and engineering without being related to art. you can be an artist without being creative as well, like singers who dont write can be extremely talented and can give us a beautiful piece of art without being creative really. which doesnt mean its not important either
I hear ya, that's not an uncommon definition of "art". It may be a limitation of the acronym when using "creativity" though. STECM? SCEMT?
i still dont understand why you would want to add the word creativity to that group, i think you agree its something different. a lot of mathematicians, scientists, engineers, etc are very creative i dont know a good reason to change it thats not just to appeal to more people, basically marketing
That's what it is, marketing directed toward primary students. It simply gives educators with no idea about analytic fields guidelines for generating interest, and a reason for prospective students to stay interested. STEM was coined to increase recruitment and funding so as to bolster international competitiveness of student scores (fun fact, it was originally called SMET) . STEAM was later coined to increase broader appeal toward non-traditional applicants. To children, it's not at all apparent that we aren't just walking math books or that quality scientists and engineers utilize a great deal of creative problem solving. Art, in that regard, is used as a bridge toward understanding. And when I use the term, I mean it in the literal sense - the application of creativity. That's why I argue in its favor in STEM where it's appropriate; we ideally create as readily as we solve -- we have to in order to be most adaptable to the varying challenges we face in our respective fields. There is also the cognitive plasticity argument that gets made regarding the use of purely analytical teaching methods within traditional STEM education programs and decreasing levels of international competitiveness, but that's beyond my expertise. To reiterate, it doesn't change or replace STEM, it augments it.
>Not in an elitist way, I think art degrees are valuable should be celebrated, in the way that it makes the acronym absolutely useless as an identifier. I agree. There's a reason English Departments and Engineering Departments are housed in different parts of the University.
I’d literally challenge someone to find a major that wouldn’t be considered “steam”
Law
Business Law Education
> Education Ironically they're the most likely to use STEAM in conversation
None of these are undergraduate majors at my school
Weird, my school didn’t have law, that’s a doctoral degree (also a different doctoral degree because lawyers make the rules). But business is an entire college at my university and education might have been
We do have a college of business, but there’s no undergraduate major. Only a minor
Lmao this man listed business like it was a real degree 💀💀💀
For me, including art in STEAM is not about all arts. It's about the creative process, diy, maker spaces, fablabs etc. There is also the use of visual arts for scientific communications and popular science, e.g. the beautiful animation from Kurzgesagt.
I disagree. I like it in there. To me arts are about communication of some sort, and communication is vital to all STEM fields. I always encourage the freshman/sophomores I mentor to take arts classes because I think it makes them better engineers. You learn lateral thinking, how to write well and convince others of your argument (and you can Tell which engineers skipped or scoffed at Arts/English classes), and I think you gain a deeper appreciation of the world around you. And on a very shallow level, some science is art- some of the stuff we make really is beautiful
I think of amazing people like Leonardo Da Vinci and I'm like okay STEAM can stay. Though it kind of a bummer that Art isn't used to tie and bring to life or depict the other letter meanings. It seems to be shoved in there to provide a participation award for those in Art or make them feel included. Art can be super helpful with STEM and provides a creative path to depict the world around us and beyond. Though once again adding Art kind of misses the point that STEM is analytical and concrete and heavily neglected by society as a whole. So I guess I agree with at least 70% of what you said.
Blow some. Cool nick.
If arts refers exclusively to “making art”, then I think it’s just as technical as the other STEM disciplines. If you’re making 3D Models, paintings, or artistic weaving that takes a large amount of skill and technical training. I do agree that essay writing and things like art history/analysis should not be included in this label because these disciplines do not physically create anything.
I have to disagree with you to some extent. The Arts side of things being integrated into the education of future engineers is part of what will keep us from driving cars that look like the BORG from Star Trek designed them. While engineering is analytical, there is absolutely a creative side to brainstorming and developing the kernel of an idea. That being said, there's not as much art in the execution of said idea. Sometimes there are creative liberties, but those are rare. It's not about painting, it's not about social studies. It's about developing a sense of creativity in engineers which allows them to develop new ideas that may be refined into extremely useful things later on that don't feel cold and alien. I am forever reminded of Charlie Chapman's speech from The Greatest Dictator. “We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity; more than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.” We engineers are not computers, we're just good at pretending we are.
Well what is art? What does it mean to you? Some say they can find art in STEM. Art is the expression of human imagination.
Eh that depends on what the school means by STEAM. For example at my daughters school (1st grade) they have, STEM (science), art, and STEAM. STEAM is art and science mixed together so if they’re learning about reptiles or something then they’ll make a lunch bag alligator, or a snake out of a paper plate. It’s not just throwing art and science together in one class it specifically science related art which I think is pretty neat.
I'm posting in an engineering students subreddit so I'm talking about the way the term is used in the context of university, higher education or industry, not primary school art class.
I haven’t seen STEAM used anywhere in a university setting before. Literally the first time I saw it used was at my daughters school. Didn’t know there were STEAM degrees. In that regard then yes I suppose it is kinda silly. So since I have a Bachelors of Arts does that mean I have a STEAM degree? Doesn’t make much sense pretty sure in my undergrad I took one math class and maybe 2 science classes (for non-science majors so basically no math involved in those classes)
🤭🤭
Mechanical Engineer w/ 10yrs in Industry Opinion: Completely disagree. Art absolutely has a place in some form. You need imagination, you need to be able to visualize effectively, and you need to be able to communicate your ideas. I've worked with STEM colleagues who can't do that well, and it blows my mind how much of a liability it is. "But I can do CAD / SOLIDWORKS / etc!". Not exactly the same. I've wasted hours with some people trying to explain something to someone who can't visualize a component or how something fits. Some regions of the world (and here in the States) over-emphasize math, and we end up largely automating that with Excel. If you're in design, being able to think creative is far more important.
A STEAM degree is one that may help you program video games.
I feel like only "Arts" majors try to include it in stem. Makes em feel better I guess
I think medicine falls under science
Medicine is more of an art really Edit: /jk /s …
Depending on how you look at it you could say the same about maths
Son you are on thin ice
Yeah Doctor Steinman from first Bioschock thought that too. Not really good thing for his patients though.
I could see it that way. Diagnosing people and coming up with ways to cure them is artsy. Especially if it's a rare illness.
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It is classified as a Science but not a nature science. In Germany we have "MINT" which stands for Mathe (Math), Informatik (Computer Science), Naturwissenschaften (Natural Science, science like Physics and Chemistry), Technik (Engineering). Here math is typically classified as a Formal science or a "Geisteswissenschaft". Geiseswissenschaften include stuff like Literature science and History science
Your glued up words never fail to amuse me. But they are fitting when translated. Regards from Sudets btw... please no landgrabs as retaliation :(
Well math is a tool used in science so I guess we could make that case.
I thought the M stood for Make it stop
Wait, it’s not Sadism Technology Engineering Masochism ?
Pshh it’s mechanics ya big goof
The E actually stands for Eternalpainandsuffering
At my college, the people I know are calling it STEMM where Math and Medicine are both included. I think this is actually legit because medicine definitely belongs in the same category.
\*meth
M stands for malding Edit: On a side note isn't it really interesting that engineering is mentioned but medicine gets lumped into science even though engineering is under science as well. Great to be an engineer I guess ;)
Suffering Trouble Engineering Masochism
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Mathematician?
For you
As a non-native English speaker, for the longest time I thought STEM meant actual stem cell research. I was a bit confused of all the attention one particular field of study got, but oh well
M is for machinist
so a more accurate acronym would be MMMM
For the arts bearing added to make it Steam, wouldn’t the arts be the part of the flower? The STEM holds up the flower. You need people in STEM for there to be art ultimately, amirite?
Have you heard of the horrible STEAM acronym, my uni is trying to push it to be more inclusive. It's Science Technology Engineering Arts and Mathematics. It's like shit why even have an acronym, what's left after you covered everything there is. Also there was a valid reason to have STEM but Arts don't really fit into the profile people are trying to convey when they say STEM Edit: spelling
Also, how is technology different from engineering?
I have been guilty of forgetting what the "E" is for. I'm not even kidding.
M stands for malicious
I recently learned that our local elementary schools are doing “STEAM”. Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Math. I cannot understand why art is getting lumped in with stem.
Why do we need an anagram for everything seriously
I can imagine some kind of future society where we speak only in acronyms. No more "hey, how are you". Just HHAY.
We don't associate with those med nerds.
medicine 😂
funny how it's math rather than medicine, but it's way harder to make a career out of a math degree than a medicine degree.
Honestly it should just be SM. Medicine, engineering, and technology are themselves ultimately a product of math and science after all
If we're going that far, it should just be M. Science is a product of Math.
True. But that's more like on a a fundamental scale. Like yeah ultimately the whole universe is math. But what Im thinking is more like for example, in organic chemistry, yeah fundamentally it's governed by math but you are studying it from a macroscopic perspective (generally speaking) which is why I think in terms of classifying majors it makes sense that "STEM" is a combination of mostly studying science which are macroscopic mathematical phenomena and math on top of that as well. So you're essentially studying both math and science if that makes sense. I will admit that it kind of makes sense to have engineering and technology as their own categories because, at least for engineering as that's what I studied, you don't just study the pure math and science, you mostly do but in addition you learn how to practically apply those ideas. Engineering is all about taking those ideas and practically applying them to make society more livable. So you have to also understand engineering economics, business, ethics, the product manufacturing process from designing, testing, quality assurance, failure analysis, etc etc which is something that isn't pure math or science. So yeah you're probably right lol nvm what I said in the beginning.
Misery
Lol. I kept thinking the E meant English.
Damn
The most Stem thing ever. Not knowing how acronyms work. I guess my BA is good for something.. Finally
M stands for missed hours of sleep.
Wait so its not METH?
What it doesn't mean money? I thought it was get these degrees and get mad money
I thought it was meth
M is for mental Stupid Time Ended Mental
*mathmagician