Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
So, they recognized that in terms of the concrete, and I had to take an undergraduate concrete
design course before I could move ahead. It was not recognized in other subjects. Certainly, I
was heavily into soils, and when I hit Dr. Roy Olson's soils class and we were into clays and
all the properties of clays and the basics, I had had little--a few days of soils at the Military
Academy, a little bit at the Engineer School--but certainly was not prepared for the kind of
things he had us into immediately.
I remember his derisive remarks that he had all these military folks who didn't know what
they were talking about coming into his class, and he also had one of his students who had
worked 12 years in subways in Canada or somewhere who really knew clays. On the first
exam, all of us in the military went deficient--got "F"s. This guy was a shining light with his
"A."
By the end of the semester most of us in the military had passed that guy in overall grades.
We did not start up where the rest of them started. So, I don't fault the Military Academy on
that because that wasn't the reason for the Military Academy. We all knew what we took
when we were there. Now, the Military Academy has changed. They now have majors. You
can now major in civil engineering, and I would suppose that today's graduate is better
prepared in the kind of terms that I described than I was then.
Q:
I suppose a part of it is the West Point legacy as beginning and being so heavily engineering
for so long, and that reputation persists even after the curriculum may have changed.
A:
Yes, I'm not sure the curriculum ever changed. I think what happened was that West Point
was established as the first engineering school in the United States and then most of the other
early engineer schools spun off of West Point and a lot of the instructors at them were West
Point graduates. Then we settled the West, and Army engineers did all those things.
Engineering at that point was rudimentary compared to what it was years later, certainly by
the time I went to University of Illinois. So, engineers back then were across the board in
disciplines.
Now we have one discipline oriented toward sanitary, another one toward structures, another
one toward highways, another one toward soils. I mean, the subdivisions were all there and
you really couldn't, nor did I at Illinois, concentrate in particular subdivisions. So, I think the
whole development of civil engineering and engineering across the board has developed so
extensively that it just encompassed a bigger environment.
Q:
So, you finished your degree work, I think you mentioned the other day, in February 1962?
A:
February '62.
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