"What do you want to be when you grow up?" For those of us old enough to remember watching Neil Armstrong take one small step for a man and one giant leap for mankind, the answer was easy. "I want to be an astronaut." Who wouldn't? You get to fly through outer space, ride around on the moon in a tricked-out golf cart, wear a super-cool spacesuit, and, best of all, you get your very own genie in a bottle. Oh wait, that was a television show. Anyway, the first big step toward becoming an astronaut was to get an engineering degree. The 1960s despite the assassinations, the racial strife, and the free love were the heyday of engineering schools. That was where you got your ticket to the glamour profession. And that glamour, that celebrity, is what's missing from today's engineering career. Initiatives abound to reinvigorate our children's interest in engineering. President George W. Bush's recent signing of the America Competes Act, with its promise of new money for math and science curricula, certainly ups the ante. And smaller grass-roots programs like Lego Mindstorms and its community of robot-building youths, and Manchester, N.H.-based FIRST, with its team-building approach to robotics competitions, are attempting to coax the next generation into engineering. But the complaint we heard repeatedly from interviews for our annual salary survey was that the number of young, qualified engineers is dwindling. What will it take to rekindle American youths' excitement about engineering? What do you know of that is already being done? What can we do better? We will begin looking deeper and deeper at these questions via our web site, forums, and print publication. Let us know what you know. Tell us what'ss going on. Where have all the young engineers gone?
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