Fantastic essay, and I think the same teaching could be applied to so many other skills needed to succeed as well. When people talk about academia as an ivory t

Fantastic essay, and I think the same teaching could be applied to so many other skills needed to succeed as well. When people talk about academia as an ivory tower, this is exactly what they mean. Academia seems to be utterly focused on "cool ideas" and "intellectual exploration", and they really short-change the nitty-gritty skills that may not be as intellectually stimulating, but are still absolutely needed to get stuff done. To give another example, anyone who's working in a programming context can boost their productivity by knowing how to set up their aliases, learning the basics of unix tools such as grep, and mastering a good text-editor/IDE such as vim/emacs/intellij. And yet, after 4 years in college, I didn't know a single thing about any of the above, and slowly picked up bits and pieces randomly over the course of my career. If a professor could have taught the above in a intro-to-engineering course, it would have saved us countless hours and allowed us to hit the ground running.