Good Communication Is Essential to the Success of Engineering Projects

This question is posed to experienced engineers: Do you recall during your days as an engineering student when you discounted the importance of English and other communication courses and instead gave all of your attention to your technical courses (e.g., electric circuits, programming, or thermodynamics)? But all of us would realize as we graduated from engineering school and started working in the real world that communication is absolutely critical to making sure that our engineering projects are a success since we depend on many different members of our organization (e.g., budget personnel to get required funding or seek guidance from field support people on how system will be used by customers) and outside our group (e.g., customers who tell us what features are important to them). Without clear lines of communication, our ideas would stay within our own small development teams instead of becoming mature products. While this is obvious to those of us who have become experienced engineers, the real question is: Why is it lost to us when we are in engineering students?