The pace of technological disruption has grown exponentially over the past few decades, and its impact is evident in our daily lives. For example, living standards continue to rise globally, allowing more people to enjoy food, experiences, and gadgets produced around the world.
This continuous improvement requires us to constantly upgrade and reinvent our skills and capabilities in the workplace. Consequently, traditional social norms are being disrupted and redefined.
A critical element in maintaining this trajectory is fostering rational thinking, problem-solving abilities, and a broad range of knowledge and skills within our workforce. This enables individuals to keep pace with — or even stay ahead of — the exponential changes in technology and industry.
Advanced degrees play a key role in inspiring students to apply this approach to engineering problems and challenges in other fields such as science, economics, and policy.
Although my training is in engineering, I am inspired by several of my peers who are making an impact in areas such as public policy, public administration, education, and economics — fields they were not explicitly trained for during their undergraduate studies.
Thomas Edison famously said, "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration."
I believe that an inclusive and forward-thinking approach to administering and implementing advanced degrees can provide students with that crucial 1% inspiration, along with the tools to efficiently apply the 99% perspiration required to achieve true success.
"I echo how given the pace of change, almost all disciplines can be empowered by engineering. I note that the extraordinary advances in technology, and more specifically in advanced computing, and its manifestations as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), or related techniques, have practically made the flourishing of any new idea, whether in basic discovery or in a grand challenge-like endeavor, the result of multidisciplinary approaches where engineering plays a key role," says USC Viterbi Dean, Yannis C Yortsos.
(Jayakanth Ravichandran, Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering at USC Viterbi School of Engineering is the author of this column. Views expressed are their own.)
