There are 2 ways to interpret your question. One way is as a request for information about the philosophy of engineering. If that's what you're asking, I can suggest two good books to start with:

Florman, Samuel C. (1994), The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, 2nd edition (New York: St. Martin's Press).

Davis, Michael (1998), Thinking Like an Engineer: Studies in the Ethics of a Profession (New York: Oxford University Press).

The first was written by a practicing engineer, the second by a philosopher. Both deal with questions like: What is engineering? How should engineers behave? You might find some other references on the webpage "What Is Engineering?" for my Philosophy of Computer Science course.

There is also a branch of philosophy called the philosophy of technology, which deals with related issues. Check the article with that title in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

The other interpretation is as a request for information about how to apply philosophical thinking to engineering. Here, I would think that the best answer is that the kind of analytical thinking skills that are the mark of good philosophy would stand you in good stead when dealing with engineering problems.

Another relatively recent, good, general introduction to a variety of philosophical issues is Thomas Nagel, What Does it All Mean?, which I myself read in my first year of graduate school and found most illuminating. Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy is a classic from relatively early in the twentieth century.

You might also consider reading some of the canonical texts of Western philosophy (in my ignorance, I don't know Eastern philosophy, and so am not in a position to recommend any works of Eastern philosophy): a good place to begin is with Plato's 'Socratic' dialogues, the Apology, Euthyphro, and Crito; if you like those dialogues, you might move on to the Republic, which treats many of the problem areas of philosophy, including epistemology (the nature of knowledge), metaphysics (the nature of what there is), ethics, and aesthetics, among other areas; a couple of more 'modern' works that you might consider are Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy (which focuses on issues in epistemology and metaphysics), and Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, which tries to lay a foundation (hence the word in the title translated as 'Groundwork' by certain translators) for morality and hence treats ethics; if you want to grapple with some twentieth-century philosophy from the 'Continental' tradition, you might start with something like Jean-Paul Sartre's Existentialism and Human Emotions. This is just a short selection, of course--other panelists would of course suggest other works!!

it's never too late! ... I would recommend any of Simon Blackburn's more popular books -- "Think" (or is it "Thinking"?), "Truth" -- just google him and you'll find a few titles -- if you enjoy philosophical reflection on God you might try my own recent book 'the God question' -- or of course read Daniel Dennett's recent book on religion "Breaking the Spell" --

happy reading!
Andrew

Peter might also have mentioned his book, An Introduction to Gödel's Theorems, and the similarly targeted book by George Boolos, John Burgess, and Richard Jeffrey, Computability and Logic. Both are standard texts used in intermediate logic courses.

Shame on your school! :-)

After a basic logic you can either go deeper (more of the same, but pursued to greater depth), or go wider (look at logics that deal with more than do sentential and predicate logic -- modal logic, for example, which has primitive operators for "necessarily" and "possibly" -- and also rivals to classical logic.)

Going a bit deeper: try David Bostock Intermediate Logic, OUP; Ian Chiswell & Wilfrid Hodges, Mathematical Logic, OUP (not as advanced as its title might suggest).

Going a bit wider: try Rod Girle, Modal Logics and Philosophy, Acumen; Graham Priest, An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic (2nd edn: CUP).

Some of each: John Bell, David DeVidi, Graham Solomon, Logical Options (Broadview Press).

In Between Man and Man, Martin Buber recounts the following story, which he takes to illuminate the experience at the heart of I and Thou:

"When I was eleven years of age, spending the summer on my grandparents' estate, I used, as often as I could do it unobserved, to steal into the stable and gently stroke the neck of my darling, a broad dapplegray horse. It was not a casual delight but a great, certainly friendly, but also deeply stirring happening. If I am to explain it now, beginning from the still very fresh memory of my hand, I must say that what I experienced in touch with the animal was the Other, the immense otherness of the Other, which, however, did not remain strange like the otherness of the ox and the ram, but rather let me draw near and touch it. When I stroked the mighty mane, sometimes marvelously smooth-combed, at other times just as astonishingly wild, and felt the life beneath my hand, it was as though the element of vitality itself bordered on my skin, something that was not I, was certainly not akin to me, palpably the other, not just another, really the Other itself; and yet it let me approach, confided itself to me, placed itself elementally in the relation of Thou and Thou with me. The horse, even when I had not begun by pouring oats for him into the manger, very gently raised his massive head, ears flicking, then snorted quietly, as a conspirator gives a signal meant to be recognizable only by his fellow-conspirator; and I was approved. But once--I do not know what came over the child, at any rate it was childlike enough--it struck me about the stroking, what fun it gave me, and suddenly I became conscious of my hand. The game went on as before, but something changed, it was no longer the same thing. And the next day, after giving him a rich feed, when I stroked my friend's head he did not raise his head. A few years later, when I thought back to the incident, I no longer supposed that the animal had noticed my defection. But at the time I considered myself judged" (p. 11).

Since Buber's work, in accordance with the phenomenological tradition to which he may be taken to belong, seeks to illuminate fundamental structures of human experience, one way to begin to grasp the concepts explicated in I and Thou is to try to recreate the sort of experience that Buber claims led him to recognize the relation between I and Thou at the heart of that work. (This is not meant to be a flip response to the question, but rather to suggest a way to begin to engage, experientially, with his claims, in just the way that phenomenology, generally, is meant to bring people back to the things themselves, the fundamental structures of human experience that are obscured to us because we take them for granted.)

But experience alone will probably not suffice to illuminate I and Thou. There are numerous books on Buber's thought. The following books were recommended to me by Professor Michael Morgan of Indiana University, an expert on Jewish Philosophy (certain of the books seem to me to be more 'academic' than others; the first one listed seems to me to be the most accessible, and the others are listed in what I take to be ascending order of difficulty--although I haven't been able to read through all the books myself, only to scan certain pages on the Web: Malcolm Diamond, Martin Buber: Jewish Existentialist; Laurence Silberstein, "Martin Buber's Social and Religious Thought: Alienation and the Quest for Meaning; Paul Mendes-Flohr, From Mysticism to Dialogue: Martin Buber's Transformation of German Social Thought.

I hope that these suggestions prove useful: I wish you good luck grappling with Buber's difficult, fascinating text!

Peter Smith's advice is dead on. The only thing I would add is that, while you are looking through the Stanford Encyclopedia and Phil Index and PhilPapers (which is a great resource), you look for recent articles whose titles or abstracts suggest that they provide an overview of the debate (e.g., "Recent Work on X"), and then you use the references in those articles to guide you towards other sources. Reading such articles often provides information about which sources will be most useful to you, given your interest in the debate. And don't forget to read the classic works (e.g., most cited) in the history of the debate as well.

Finally, you will make your future self much happier if you keep your sources well-organized (in electronic or real-world files) and if you jot down a few sentences about each article--its main point and how it might be relevant (or not) to your project. My current self is unhappy with my past selves for not being diligent enough about such record-keeping!

I agree that there is some utility in this way of thinking about formal education, but I also think that this perspective is so shallow that individuals who learn to adopt a richer perspective may learn more and may be able to do more with their learning.

First, I think it can be useful to reflect on the benefits of learning that have nothing to do with social status or employability. Is there intrinsic value in learning and in learning how to learn? Does a high-quality learning make one a better person in addition to increasing social status and employability? Understanding those benefits may improve motivation to work hard and effectively as a learner.

Second, I think it can also be useful to reflect on a more sophisticated manner on the instrumental value of education: those who view a degree program simply as a means to a credential fail to internalize a narrative of self-development and growth (self-consciously directing one's education to increase skills, insight, and wisdom, for example), and as an educator I've found that those of my students who grasp on to such a narrative learn more and learn better. Higher education institutions gesture towards this idea with statements about fostering lifelong learning, but those statements tend to be empty platitudes without corresponding curricular or co-curricular content.

So, one reason why society places more value on credentials than on the learning that underlies them is that too many learners fail to question a shallow and limited viewpoint on the purpose, nature, and benefits of education. Individuals can benefit from rejecting that perspective, and institutions of higher learning have opportunities to help their students do that. Hiring managers may always value credentials highly because they don't have the ability to assess individual learning, but learners and institutions of higher learning can certainly do more to increase the value of those credentials by valuing learning more highly.

You ask a grad student ...

Well, I semi-jest, but a good way of making a start on some new topic is indeed to ask someone what the two or three recent "must read" items are. And reading these will firstly tell you whether you are going to find the topic fun/profitable to pursue, and no doubt the bibliographies at the end of the papers or books will give you lots of pointers for where to go next if your decide you want more.

If you haven't someone on hand to advise (or someone suitable at the end of an email, or among your facebook/twitter friends), I'd start with the relevant Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article, if there is one yet. They vary from good to stunningly good, and usually have amazingly good bibliographies too.

And to fill the gap between bibliographies (necessarily backwards looking, and usually a few years out of date) and the current state of play, you can look at the Philosopher's Index (a bibliographical database any university library should have access to), and PhilPapers for current online research.

Ok: that's my two pennyworth reflecting my own not-very-methodical (so maybe not "professional calibre") habits. Maybe fellow panellists here can add more advice ... And yes, Eddy Nahmias's advice is absolutely spot on, on all counts!

I'd like to supplement Allen Stairs's fine response with two additional points.

First, giving significant credence to the possession of degrees isn't merely a time saver. As a society we have largely delegated the measurement of learning to degree granting institutions. At least in theory, possession of a degree is supposed to correspond to the actual possession of knowledge. There aren't a lot of reliable alternatives for judging whether or not someone possesses the knowledge in question (especially if the person trying to gauge another's level of knowledge is not an expert in that area herself). Sure, a prodigy might be able to self-teach and attain more knowledge than the credentialed person, but that is still relatively rare.

Second, there is more to the possession of a degree than mere knowledge. It communicates to potential employers (and anyone else who cares) that the person has a level of perseverance and discipline and is able to work within the guidelines of an institutional structure.... things a potential employer is likely to value.