that they didn't learn in college. They were always engineers at heart, and the formal training just gave them a focus to what they loved all along.

I saw several really smart people who were more than capable of handling the math switch away from engineering to something else because they just didn't enjoy engineering. More power to them, of course, because it would suck spending a career as an engineer if you didn't enjoy it.

But the point is that for a lot of engineers, there is something in engineering beyond the math and science classes that just really speaks to them. I suppose that can be learned, but most of the time it's just the way they have always been.