Personally, I think practical experience in invaluable. I spent my college years interning at a couple of chemical companies and spent my days in the units working with operations and maintenance to solve problems. During my first few years out of school, I had several opportunities to work on projects that were staffed at the plant site and required a lot of time in the field working with the designers to figure out how to route the pipe through some congested pipe rack and still not break the nozzles off of some new drum we were shoe-horning into a facility. Being able to walk around these units and see how things are laid out and what they really do when they are up and running has been invaluable to me.

I'll admit, I can't to all the matrix algebra and calculus by hand that Caesar uses to approximate the behaviour of piping systems. But, I have learned over the years from this forum and from senior engineers that I've worked with (most notably Noble Stewart) what the limitations are and what the numbers really tell me about a system.

While theoretical knowledge is useful, I think, particularly with the fast paced computer driven nature of our business now, any practical experience you can get is going to be more valuable.

As for the notion that there need to be more broad based quality control standards to insure adequte checking - I think it's a nice idea, but I don't see it happening. To a degree, I think we are somewhat victims of our own success. I don't think I've ever actually heard of a major plant/refinery incident that was traced back to an improper stress analysis, even though there are a lot of systems in service that were improperly analyzed.

Errors in our field tend to show up more as maintenance issues - leaking flanges, worn pump seals, etc. But, with the the nature of the system, the client project manager isn't the same guy who has to maintain the plant down the line and isn't necessarily interested in spending money now (stress review) that will payoff later (lower maintenance cost) because those hours are just a cost in his budget.

There are a few companies around that understand this connection and they are generally the better clients to work for. Most clients, unfortunately, have no appreciation for the value that a good stress review can mean to their facility and treat stress analysts and budgets accordingly.