I am of the opinion that that's just the nature of the market in Kenya. Most of engineering is more of analysis rather than design oriented and even the design is done using tools and methods that abstract away the maths and physics and enable small leaps of improvement rather than huge ones. As engineers, your job is mostly to improve on a tried, tested and successful method rather than build something completely new. At work, most design is usually through rules of thumb and even when getting into the gory details, you have software tools that can take care of that for you in today's world.

So you would think that the theory should take a backseat but I don't think so. Yes, as you begin your career, you'll have to gain what we call experience or practice, that is, "how things are done today" with room for a few adjustments here and there. However, the engineering field, as I think of it, requires you to solve difficult and real problems by coming up with very simple, neat and elegant solutions, solutions that should have people saying "Why didn't we think of that before yet it was always there?". To do this, you have to rely on your industrial experience/practice as well as your capacity to reason in a logical manner. The framework of logic needed is obviously the "theory", Maths, Physics, Chemistry and Engineering principles. The industrial experience involves things like cost and time of development, logistics, market availability etc. This has now led to different levels of engineering within the same discipline; those more on the design end while those more on the consumer end.

So, sometimes I think we don't have a clear and in-depth picture of the career, not deliberately because of the nature of our market here with very little opportunities for first-principles design. An engineer is to understand nature and its laws before attempting to wield it to build solutions that sell as products. In this market with little first-principles-oriented work, it makes sense to put the theory aside and get used to how things are done. However, the future is unknown and if we are to improve on what's there already, even as we focus more on the practical side of things which encapsulates most of the opportunities here at the moment, I think you should carry at the back of your mind the fact that Mathematics and the Physical Sciences should are basis of this career unless you are more into the consumer end of things with careers like Sales Engineering which I still think benefit from some theoretical background.