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Fully Endowed FW Olin College of Engineering Opens
olin01 writes "USA Today has a story on the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, which opens this Friday to its freshman class. Olin's goal is to graduate students who are "renaissance engineers," meaning that not only do the have the technical knowledge and skills but also a strong understanding of their context through studies in arts, humanities, social science, and entrepreneurship. This past year, 30 "pre-freshman" worked with faculty, staff, and administration to create the college's curriculum and student live programs. Olin also gives a full tuition scholarship to all admitted students, more information on their website."
can you imagine the incredible parties there will be at this college?
After reading that article on "Hooters Air" last week, I was thinking of a different definition of "endowed" when I read the title of this article!
Upon further contemplation, I like my version better.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
.... that there's a John Holmes University opening up soon that's also fully endowed.
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
#1: Engineers don't take any other courses (from what I've been seeing) besides the engineering courses. No history, humanities, fine arts, etc. It makes for a more well-balanced person. It should be required.
#2: From the engineering programs I've seen lately, it seems as though they're shoving a bunch of formulae at the students and are saying "Here, memorize these." without explaining/proving how/why they work. That is vital. The engineers being churned out now are book smart, cannot apply their knowledge, and do not know where their "knowledge" comes from.
This is why I switched to physics. Generally the same material, except more in depth/proven/etc.
At my BS school, they cut optics out of the physics classes because "Engineers don't need that". What's up with that?
Mike
Mmmm......sacrelicious.
olin01 writes "more information on their website."
/., at least be straight with us. We're smart enough to see through it.
Their website, or yours? If you're going to advertise on
This sounds interesting but how is it different than existing institutions such as Harvey Mudd College?
Just what the world needs, more Stephen Wolframs.
-Sean
From netcraft.com: The site www.olin.edu is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000.
Figures.
Will be interesting to see how this school grows.
Say hello to zMac.
With all students getting a full scholarship, the school can more easily compete for the best students. Most of the Ivy League schools have large enough endowments to significantly reduce or eliminate their tuition fees, but they don't because they don't have to. Perhaps schools like this one will help push them in that direction.
In France schools like Ecole Polytechnique, Ecole Centrale or Ecole des Mines have been doing that for 200 years, with a total output of around 1000 "renaissance engineers" (ingenieur generaliste) per year. In French companies these diplomas usually make you start your career as a supervisor/manager in the industry, in consulting firms or financial services.
Try to engineer a webpage with text instead of detailed pictures.
For example:
American Heritage (6 hours): [boring information] NOTE: Not required for engineering majors.
That's what I'm talking about.
#2: I am quite well adjusted. I just want to make sure that I know something when I get out. It's my money I'm spending, and you'd better be sure that I'm going to get the best education out of it.
Mike.
Mmmm......sacrelicious.
...they won't have an NCAA team to root for.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
I'd hire someone with an education like this in an instant. When I interview someone, there's two aspects I look at: technical ability and communication/leadership ability. Both are reasonably easy to find in a person. It's the people with a good combination of the two that are hard to find. It looks like this will foster that.
As well, the kind of hand-on learning that they talk about here is what you need in a good R&D engineer. I want people who can mock up a prototype with duct tape and zap straps to do proof of concept before they sit down to design it in Solid Works.
Brant
No matter how cool it is, or even how great is the curicculum, the students are taking a big chance getting their degrees from a non-accredited institution. If the school doesn't get accreditation, then its graduates may have a really hard time getting accepted into post-graduate programs.
Yeah, I think that Olin01 wanted to stress-test his web server before the school year started up. That thing's running at a crawl right now! Maybe if there were less cutesy pictures and more text, things would be usable.
I'll admit it though -- the engineering program at my school just plain sucked. :-)
Mike.
Mmmm......sacrelicious.
What about Cooper Union? All students recieve full tuition scholarships.
Not many people have heard about it, but those who do know that we're hard core.
porn seems like its part of the education as well.. mmm pornflakes.
.cig
How to build mirrors to avoid the Slashdot curse!
How are they going to graduate well-rounded people who still want to be engineers?
"Consider yourself a member of a virtual corporation with Mr. Torvalds as your Chief Executive Officer." - Linux Advocac
Ever heard of student participation? Well, maybe you don't believe it, but in some countries (some Scandinavian, like Denmark), there are even national organisations for kindergarten participation. On evey level, you can get the input and feedback of the 'users' (students), and do something with it. I think it is very smart of them (the ones who are responsible for this project) to ask the opinion of the future students on the changes, because this method will show you mistakes in your approach you never thought of.
Kids can be very smart, but you have to give them the chance.
Teenagers these days don't have as much sex as they want each other to think they do.
I got a BFA in Sound Engineering from an accredited college that tailored the degree in this manner. Lot's of bullshit music (which I already knew from self study) and shallow business classes in it. It was an utter waste of time. I had to ended up having to go back to get a minor in Engineering Technology just to learn the truly neccesary knowledge I should have been taught in the first place, such as equipment calibration, simple electronic design, etc. Bottom line, I was woefully unprepared and undereducated when I graduated. Every employer I interviewed with told me so, bluntly. It was a great shock at first. But after going back and getting the needed knowledge, and finally getting hired, I can see that it was true.
When it was time to apply to college, I actually nursed the idea of applying to this school, after all the posters and free shit they sent me in the mail. Until, of course, I came to my senses and realized that it will make MIT look like Florida State.
:-)
I actually go to a great school now (30,000+ attendance) where I get a top of the line education, yet get to socialize with liberal arts girls, party if I want to --- all things from the "college experience" that help you become a well rounded individual street-smarts wise. These guys from FWO will be as well rounded as a home-schooled college student, if you can think of such a thing. I'm surprised if they'll ever see female genitalia in their life. Sure they may be the college of the future -- but hey, they may figure out how to have sex without intercourse! (Anyone remember Demolition Man with the wireless helmets and all? Kind of reminds me of the Coneheads and the sens-0-rings... ahh, my mind is in the gutter
Aw, fuck it. Let's go bowling. - The Big Lebowski
...after going through such a program. You're not qualified to be working in a technical capacity, due to lack of knowledge in the technical areas.
Free tuition and housing. Sounds like a tasty deal!
Makes you wonder if there's an agenda. What kind of grads will this place really churn out? How does the college pay for its operations? There's some big bucks involved: A $400 million pledge from the FW Olin Foundation. (Not my intention to sound critical -- but if, say, Microsoft were to sponsor parts of a university program, it does raise eyebrows...)
I guess my question is, how will the market value (the holder of) a free degree? I scraped through countless crap jobs and jumped through inane scholarship hoops to pay my way through. Guess I feel a bit jealous.
... but when you still can't find a job, even with a BAC+8, what are you to do? having a bunch of phd's, knowing their voltaire and sartre working the cash registers at mcdonald's isn't exactly a picture of efficiency ... not that my BS is doing me much good either =) [french baccalaureat S / maths + american BS Comp Sci/Art]
Engineers need classes other than engineering ones.
By taking classes in history, humanities, etc. it will help them relate to other college students including the ones that party half the week at neighboring colleges. They might even have sex before they graduate.
c.
My two cents:
I graduated from The University of Iowa College of Engineering during Dean Miller's last year. (As the article mentions, Miller is now president of Olin College.)
This concept is very appealing to me. The UI COE prides itself in a student body comprised of those who are "engineers and more." This is one of the reasons I choose to attend Iowa over That Other School. Admittedly, Iowa's curriculum is not much different from the basic curriculum of any other ABET-accredited school. (BTW, we were required to take Rhetoric, like all UI grads, and a number of courses in the humanities and social sciences. In fact, to fulfil, say, the humanities requirement, you had to take a lower-level and upper-level course in the same field.) Yet, the exposure to, and opportunity in, many diverse areas was invaluable. As a hiring manager, I would be very reluctant to hire an engineer that wasn't "well-rounded," with excellent written and verbal communication skills, and a broader perspective on his work.
I don't know, but when I read the part about the copressed air cannon, the first thing that came to my mind is ...
They're training these kids to be on Junkyard Wars!!
i got my baccalaureat in france before returning to the states for college ... i can say this -- i think i got tested more thoroughly by that test (well, all the tests) than by any of my college exams ... sure, CIV was hard ... but did it compare to the bac? no.
... really don't know how to go in depth, force thought ... i mean, how much thought is there in multiple-choice questions? sure, given enough of them, you have to make -quick- decisions ... but compared to spending 4 hours on a single problem, where everything connects together, so that in the end, it makes sense? (well, if you got it all right ... )
... i almost feel like i'd have to go back to lycee again though just to get into the colleges ... and that -really- sucks.
american schools, for all of their practical knowledge
i'm kinda wishing i'd gotten my college education in france -- maybe i should get another degree
I attend an engineering school in Canada and we have a nationwide engineering accredidation board that requires a certain amount of non-engineering courses within the cirriculum. Out of total of 155 credit hours we take ~9 complimentary credits dealing with global issues. In addition we have ~6 credits in courses put on by the engineering department that deal strictly with professional communication and writing. Another 6 credits or so deal with business and engineering. So around 15% of our degree is non-math/science/technial engineering. Does a similar situation exist at US instituitions?
Can't get to the site, but it sounds exactly like the program I graduated from. I was in the first graduating class, and I have to say if it wasn't for this program I would have never finished my engineering education.
The Engineering and Society program at McMaster is a 5 year program instead of the usual 4 for a standard engineering degree. You still "belong" to a particular branch of engineering (chemical in my case), but you spread the technical portion of your education over the entire 5 years, freeing up time for other areas of study. I studied anthropology and philosophy outside of engineering, as well as a number of targetted Engineering and Society courses on social impacts of technology, environmental issues, history of technology, etc. And these were far from bird courses, critical thought was stressed and the work load was high. Math and physics were for the most part easy for me, defending my arguments critically was hard. But it is the skill I took from university that I am most proud of.
For me, it was the best education I could have had. I'm good at the technical part, and always wanted to have a career in engineering. But I always had in mind that sometimes technology doesn't always make the world a better place. I think that as engineers, we need to have a broader world view of how what we do affects the world around us. Both the human societies and environment. Engineering education requires a huge amount of content, and in order to pack it all into 4 years, there isn't much room for anything else.
I think that anyone looking to get into engineering should look closely at programs like this, the extra year may seem like a lot now but the rewards in the end may far outweigh it.
Laugh while you can, monkey boy!
School of Engineering is different than School of Arts and Science/Letters and Science.
... Man, my parents forgot the check for my books."
They have less general education requirements. At UCLA they only had to take 8 units of non-School of engineering classes. That's TWO classes.
They studied about 5-8 hours a day, never got laid and rarely showered. These guys needed to be saved from themselves by showing them women (yes there are a few women in engineering but they're widely underrepresented) getting them to understand the world can't be solved by an equation or logic. And for God's sake, get them to know at least an iota of what they love to argue about with economics, psychology and liberal arts majors.
Examples (All of these are true things said by engineers in my presence.)
"All communism is evil. A free-market economy is what is best for the world...Bill Gates is evil."
"Women are evil. Here's a proof explaining it."
"All people should pick themselves up by their bootstraps and make their own way in the world.
Keep fighting the good fight, mhore!
c.
Hm. Coincidence? olin01... Olin college... nah!
.NET coding tools from "billg@microsoft.com"?
They could at least have tried to make it less obvious. Next week, will there be an announcement about hot new
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I would have loved a course like this. But, I still think it may be solving the wrong problem. My experience is that there are fewer engineers who could do with a dose of liberal arts (though there are plenty) than there are liberal arts students who desperately need at least some basic grounding in science and math.
I have met countless Americans with liberal arts backgrounds who have tremendously difficulty dealing with even the most basic concepts of logic, reasoning, argument and math. This can seriously damage your career.
There are relatively few engineers who would admit with pride that they don't read books or go see films. There are plenty of liberal artists who seem only too happy to flaunt their ignorance of basic math and science.
So I like this course a lot, but I'd rather see something working in the other direction.
Sailing over the event horizon
Jill Crisman, an electrical and computer engineer who left a faculty post at Northeastern University to join Olin's faculty, agrees. "Almost everything I learned well came because I was doing something."
AMEN!
If there is anything that I can stress about my undergraduate career, its that there was very little hands on stuff, and what little I was exposed to was absolutely worthless to my current career (BSEE Controls Engineer)
When I got to college, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to program PLC's and robotics to make nifty cars. I understand that I'm going to have to wade through alot of other stuff- humanitites, other related fields, etc. before I get to the good stuff, but we just never got to the good stuff. Where did I learn that? On my own, with other frustrated engineering students that set up "special interest organizations" to explore and experiment on our own time. I honestly think I'd be a better engineer if I just moved onto campus, never took any classes, and just got involved in a bunch of technical "special interest" groups.
Turns out, through these special interest groups I met alot of people in other programs (even those 2 and 4 year "technical" programs that employers seem to avoid like the plague because they aren't *real* engineers) and found out something quite devastating. I was wasting my money going to the University, I should have been going to the technical school to actually *learn* stuff. I was just learning how to learn stuff.
Now that I'm out in the field, a real engineer- I can honestly say that if I want to hire someone who I know will hit the ground running right out of school, be adaptable, and actually have some familiarity with the technology used in industry, I'm gonna stay clear of the EE's and jump at the EET's.....
I apparently forgot that sig != uptime...
As an HMC alum, I'm glad to see more effort being made to educate "well-rounded" engineers.
As I've progressed through life, I've noticed how crucial it is to have solid communication skills and interpersonal abilities.
The breadth of subjects I studied at Mudd helped cultivate my latent "artsy" side. This has been very valuable, both career-wise, (the further you advance in your career, the importance of interpersonal skills increases, and the importance of technical knowledge decreases) and also in my own personal development.
I strongly encourage more science/engineering/math students out there to take at least one "humanities" class a quarter/semester. It will be one of the best things you can do for your education. (in the broad sense of education.)
Don't worry about the workload, you can sleep when you're dead!
While attending Cooper, many programs had started to make sure we graduated as more complete engineers. These optional programs focused on communication and leadership skills. I would highly recommend any interested school administrators to check out leap.cooper.edu to get an idea as to what we did at Cooper. I'm sure I can talk for my fellow classmates who took the LEAP courses that what we learned in these programs were essetial in the real world.
Olin College Engineers are FULLY ENDOWED
She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue.
Don't get me wrong, this sounds like a great idea. But how can you seriously get all of this without spending over 8 years time? There's only so much you can pack in before extending the time until graduation else you lose important class time for engineering.
Either that or you go in overkill method and give the students the worst four years of their life.
Berto
The Existential Pleasures of Engineering by Samuel C. Florman was required reading when I attended the College of Engineering at the University of Florida. A detailed look at engineering as an art form. Highly recommended.
Their accreditation says:
Accreditation: Creating a curriculum and facilities that meet requirements for accreditation with the New England Association of Secondary Schools & Colleges (NEAS&C) and the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET)
First of all, the regional accreditation that means something is called the "New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC-CIHE)", which is similar, yet different from what they claim. Mistake? Or attempt to mislead?
The second red flag comes from the wording: "Creating a curriculum"? That smells like they haven't been accredited yet.
If they're not accredited, they should come out and say so instead of all this sneaky crapola. The program might be good, but there are very distinct disadvantages to not going to an accredited school, not least of which your classes and/or degree means absolutely nothing if you want to transfer to an accredited school.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
You can't teach someone to be a renaissance person. They are born that way.
What about the 50% of the engineering cirriculum that they have to cut out to facilitate this? Let's not have these people building our bridges.
Experiment!
Back in my day if you went to college you had to take humanities and science classes. Stuff like foreign languages, composition, biology and philosophy were requirements. Even the engineering students. To make it fair, the liberal arts students had to take calculus as well.
But you tell that to youngsters nowadays and they won't believe you!
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
At the UW, the honors program requires you to take any 3 year-long sequences to graduate (along with whatever major you're doing). These include:
I choose the first three. Out of world civ, for example, I got to write a 50-page paper on pyramids, study west African feminist literature, and take a really interesting course from a femini-Nazi women's study professor.
Now, while I'm coding OS thread tasks, I can also appreciate a bit of Herodotus (or whatever else tickles your fancy) while taking my breaks. So if you're interested in a well-rounded education, check out your school's honors program.There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
You can bring the cattle to water, but you can't teach them to drink.
It's a great idea, but without stellar teachers and researchers the students won't know what to learn.
The last time I checked out the faculty at Olin, they were in dire need of a bunch of professors. Believe it or not, there's only one chemistry professor on staff! What about the students interested in chemical engineering??
why does their Web site need a splash page?
learning how to spell life.
one of the biggest problems with any upstart engineering school is that u need to have good labs/facilities for applying all the stuff u learned in class. for liberal arts, a little college on the hill often is better than the big universities because there is just a good faculty. that is not really enough for engineering. u need facilities as well. that is why smaller schools have trouble getting attention
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
You want to know why I dropped out of my local community college. Because I wanted to be a computer programmer and out of my 1st 3 semesters I took a whooping 2 computer classes. The rest of the time I was paying good money to "learn" history, political science and all other sorts of unrelated crap and have libral dogma shoved down my throat. Here is the false premise to this whole "well-rounded" approach. At its core it thinks you are a complete moron who the school must "shape" into someone who knows anything. I love history. I read history books all the time; watch the history channel whenever I can (some of the rare TV I watch). I don't need to sit bored to tears in a classroom to learn that stuff. I don't need to waste two yeasr of my life getting a useless AA degree with all sorts of electives forced down my throat. If I have an interest in the subject I learn about it on my own time. I am thinking of getting a degree from ITT for this very reason. I don't have the money or motivation to be a forever student in the interest of being "well rounded".
You think an engineering school would have I2 connectivity. Instead they are getting slashdotted, my traceroute is showing 3 second latency. I sure hope this pipe isn't their only connection to the Internet. Otherwise the freshman are probably crying about how slow it is right about now.
4 sd-ul.indiana.gigapop.net (192.12.206.245) 3.003 ms 3.062 ms 2.885 ms
5 so-1-0-0.iplvin1-hcr5.bbnplanet.net (4.24.115.1) 3.103 ms 2.681 ms 3.254 ms
6 p8-0.iplvin1-br2.bbnplanet.net (4.0.2.5) 3.335 ms 3.150 ms 2.890 ms
7 p13-0.phlapa1-br1.bbnplanet.net (4.24.10.181) 18.279 ms 19.185 ms 18.074 ms
8 p13-0.nycmny1-nbr2.bbnplanet.net (4.24.10.178) 20.335 ms 19.719 ms 19.569 ms
9 so-4-0-0.bstnma1-nbr2.bbnplanet.net (4.24.6.49) 26.618 ms 25.659 ms 26.185 ms
10 p2-0.bstnma1-cr8.bbnplanet.net (4.24.5.126) 26.253 ms 26.059 ms 26.384 ms
11 s0-1.folincollege2.bbnplanet.net (4.24.94.114) 30.394 ms 3095.996 ms 2883.122 ms
12 olin.edu (4.21.173.12) 2789.972 ms 2759.551 ms 3040.223 ms
Afterall, what have the French invented lately?
He said "endowed".
FYI, there are 2 Olin Foundations out there which some slashdotters may be familar with -- The FW Olin Foundation, which appears primarily concerned with furthering higher education in science, engineering, and business, and the more conservative John M Olin Foundation, which seems to specialize in throwing money at various right wing pundits.
a ltern atives/1998/june.htm
d ers/john_m_ol in_foundation.htm
FW Olin Foundation blurb: (scroll down to #8)
http://www.capitalresearch.org/publications/
John M Olin Foundation:
http://www.mediatransparency.org/fun
They've created a school that's right next to Babson College, a business school whos students mock the idea of studying anything but finance and marketing. The whole idea is not to produce engineers who can read poetry, the idea is that they'll team up with the spoiled Babson brats (the demographics of babson kids is very,very upper middle class to very wealthy) to start companies to show that MIT is not the only place that can manage it.
I was a high school senior a couple years ago when they came recruiting 25 graduating kids to help design their curriculum. IIRC, the first 5 years they plan to be free, and offer buisness classes through a partner university up there. (Sorry, I forget which one). They were going to put the 25 kids up in a hotel for the first few weeks, and then in an abandoned church. I decided not to apply when I found out they would give exactly no credit for APs and courses I had already taken. Wonder what become of those people.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Well rounded means that the liberal arts majors should have been well aquainted with Advanced mathematics, Chemistry, Physics and Logic, before being allowed to graduate. Real world expierence should be required too. Philosophy majors are really just FAGS trying to justify their existance. Ditto Psychology majors.
This is nothing new. This is a liberal application to a technical field. Most other degrees have it; why? To round out the logic process.
Currently, the computer science department at my uni allows for a wide range of perspective; hands-on robotics programming, 3d CAVE modeling, compiler and OS design, etc. Teaching pure skills (such as programming languages or formulae) only leads to mental regurgitation later in life. Guess what? You still have to take your humanities courses before you can even consider doing your upper-level comp.sci. core.
I know other universities are like this as well; the only question that seems, in my mind, to be outstanding, is this. The students all seemed to have turned down offers from Ivy League institutions to go to a free school. Is it because of money, or the program? And does this statement really apply to those kinds of students, who probably come from affluent backgrounds anyways? Quote:
Often, students follow a lock-step program, beginning with science and math courses, but barely touch on engineering studies until their third year in school. And fewer than half of those who enroll in engineering programs complete their degree within five years. Underrepresented minorities drop out at the highest rate.
Sure, the idea of free (as in beer) education must seem great; but is this really reinventing the wheel? Most liberal arts programs in place do well enough. Granted, they may be State U. or anything non-Ivy League... but the diversified programs do already exist. Unless I'm missing something, I don't see what's so special about this new school.
Never attribute to Hanlon that which can be adequately attributed to Heinlein.
The Cartoon History of the Universe, Volumes I and II by by Larry Gonick (ISBN: 0385265204, ISBN: 0385420935)
Herodotus: The Histories (Project Gutenberg)
A Distant Mirror by Barbera Tuchman (ISBN: 0345349571)
Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin by Stephen Jay Gould (ISBN: 0609801406)
Disturbing the Universe by Freeman J. Dyson (ISBN: 0465016774)
Utopian Entrepreneur by Brenda Laurel (ISBN: 0262621533)
How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built by Stewart Brand (ISBN: 0140139966)
The Existential Pleasures of Engineering by Samuel C. Florman (ISBN: 0312141041)
The Immense Journey by Loren C. Eiseley (ISBN: 0394701577)
More seriously, when I was an undergraduate in physics, I felt that I should have been allowed to study whatever interested me, in great depth, and avoid taking the [physics] survey courses that left me half-understanding a dozen messy topics. Now I realize that if I had gotten my way, I WOULD HAVE BEEN SCREWED, just like these Olin graduates are going to be.
You can't increase the non-technical course work without cutting out standard material, much of which is absolutely critical. A judicious edit of the curriculum might not be a bad idea, but hacking away 30-40% of it would be fatal. It seems to me that your only choice would be to cut away the more advanced courses, leaving and engineering degree comprised of:
Physics I & II
Chemistry I & II
Circuits I & II [for ee's]
Calc I & II & III & diffeq's
Signals and systems
Programming
Advanced e&m [for ee's]
A couple more advanced courses
That is just ridiculous.
As a high school senior, all I can say is that it's amazing they had enough money to build the place after all the mail they sent me. The cost of the stamps alone would have provided enough food for a small country...
--
I romp with joy in the bookish dark
... at Stevens Institute of Technology, where I got my BsC. So it's not like this is the first school to come up with the idea.
What is kinda neat is that, unlike me, you won't have $50k in student loans when you get out the other end.
Sure, many Ivies could provide "free" educations -- and many (Princeton, notably, and Harvard, at least, although I'm sure the others, too) will provide absurd amounts of financial aid to the truly needy. But it's all about perceived value. This is one of the (many) problems Linux has on the desktop and in the business place -- something that's "free" can't be very good, can it? By continuing to charge $30k+/year in tuition and fees, the Ivies can maintain their elite status, while at the same time quietly providing free rides to the bottom 5% or so, income-wise.
...clearly none of those classes covered basic spelling or grammar.
I know and understand the exact sort of problem these people are encountering. I just graduated from a major East Coast research university in Chemical Engineering and I took exactly 6 courses in 'humanities and liberal arts'. Three were economic courses, if you could consider them true liberal arts classes.
:)
But, a true Rennaissance man does not learn from the typical professor spouting knowledge like a pool of information and dutifully copying it down, in the vain hope that they interpret this as 'learning' and 'understanding'. From the liberal arts classes that I have taken or have heard about from fellow Engineers, most of these classes involve regurgitating the opinions and judgements of the professor in the form of a bloated essay containing very few of one's own opinions or creative ideas.
A real Renaissance person learns by exploration of the world, of history, of math & science, of politics, on their own terms. The problem is not the availability of information, but the motivation of interest in it.
If any Engineer wants to learn history or politics, all they need to do is pick up a few classic books on the topic. Ever read Adam's "Wealth of Nations" or Machievello's "The Prince"? These are books that are fundamental to modern economics and politics, books that are almost never read in a structured class because there's always that fancy new textbook that costs $75-100, but which says the same thing in baby-talk and with some pretty pictures.
Why learn political science from a guy who's never held office?
Why learn economics from a poor professor?
Want to better understand human nature? Studying sociology will only give you unproven theories made up by professors who write textbooks for a living. Go read "The Brothers Karamazoo".
Basically, my point is...to really understand and learn the liberal arts, to study human nature itself in order to become a better leader, a better communicator, a better businessman or entrepenuer, you can't listen to any ol' professor speak about something which someone else wrote in a textbook (the standard fare today). You need to either experience and experiment with it for yourself or read or speak to people who have done so. Countless classic books expound upon human nature and it hasn't changed since humans left Nature...so they're all still quite accurate.
Salis
Who has learned more about liberal arts by reading enlightening and interesting books (fiction & non-fiction) than in any ol' University setting
Favorite
...it's "survival of the fittest" which is a gem from Adam Smith, believer of social-Darwinism, not Darwin himself.
So, Adam Smith who also believed deeply in the "free market" economy would applaud
Bill Gates for crushing his opposition to expand his empire.
The "free market" economy isn't about everyone being on their best behavior or people being ethical...it's the opposite. It just means there's no government regulation so businesses can do whatever they want. "Free market" economy doesn't mean different things, it simply means a market without government influence.
So if Bill Gates owns a huge software empire and decided to expand into public utilities, hardware or even bathroom supplies, so be it. Sink or swim, small businesses.
You're not an engineer, are you?
c.
Sounds like the WPI Plan to me. The idea behind Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, MA has been the balance of book knowledge and hands on learning since it opened in 1865.
In the 1960's they decided to radically change how WPI students learn and prepare for careers. The current implementaion of the plan involves three significant projects that you must complete before you graduate. The first is in humanities called a Sufficency; you take 5 related classes and then create a project, such as write a research paper, perform a recital, or design a stage set. The second is to relate Technology to society called the Interactive Qualifying Project (IQP). Many students complete this project overseas, helping governments and non-profits develop soemthing important. And the last project is your senior thesis called the Major Qualifying Project (MQP). This is, obviously, in your major and should correlate to your primary focus over the years. Increasingly, students are working with companies to complete this. And, there are no required classes. There areas of study that you have to do, but there is always a choice on which exact class you take.
There must be something to this as companies such as Mitre and GE continue to recruit WPI undergrads. Hopefully Olin College will be able to get a foothold and produce the same caliber, if not better, students. Now if only they weren't in WPI's back yard...
Mine actually went through the School of Engineering and lowered GE requirements to only two classes in the School of Letters and Science.
Previously it was four classes.
Since I was an environmental science major, I was required to do something like 40 units, 10 classes of GEs. I don't see how engineering majors can get out of it.
And yes, I was forced to take Spanish, English, physics and atmospheric science as GEs. Well, I did want the Spanish.
c.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
http://www.wpi.edu/
Wasn't Franklin W. Olin known for anything besides being fully endowed?
I wish my school had taught me martial arts and high explosives because, well, you know, engineers sometimes have to prove that they're right.
Nicely done... agreed, a liberal arts program can't make a renaissance person... motivation & such are required.
The U.S. Military Academy (West Point) already does this to a large extent. The engineering and science majors have to take a reasonable dose of humanities (Psych, Eng Lit/Comp, Int'l Relations, Poli Sci, foriegn language, all kinds of history) over the 4 years, and, perhaps more importantly, the liberal arts-type majors are mandated to take a minor in an engineering field. It makes for much more well-rounded thinkers... it's not the engineering they take, but the engineering thought process associated with it that is important.
It's also full tuition (and room/board/food).
Of course, definitely not for everyone, but a really good education for those who do go.
Moody, during the recent HMC class reunion, said that he would miss HMC, but hopes the Olin will become "the HMC East" (as it is on the East Coast). As far as I (and others on Slashdot) can tell, it is in spirit very much the same to Mudd, with only a few differences (full endowment being an important one!).
Naturally all this came at a price. I was carrying more than 20 credits in my busiest semester, and that was for a Comp Sci degree which was heavily math oriented and for which I needed to take many classes that were otherwise graduate level in order to fulfill the requirements. (At only 2.5 credits instead of 3.) Students in the more traditional engineering disciplines carried an even heavier courseload. It builds character, or so I was told...
At Stevens, students often found themselves working in teams. Even outside the classroom, it proved helpful to use a team approach in studying for exams in the more challenging subjects, but besides that I can recall no lab course where I was working alone. In many of the engineering curricula, a major feature of the Senior year was "Superlab", where teams of students would work on individual projects of their own design. I don't imagine a team-based approach to labs and major projects can be all that uncommon in engineering schools. In RL, engineers almost never work alone. An engineer trained to go solo would be woefully unprepared for the working world.
So the only thing we are left with that's actually unique about the Olin curriculum is the practical approach to every technical subject. This, IMO, cannot work. Not every technical subject can be approached this way. Much of mathematics is just too abstract to monkey with in concrete terms, and many physics concepts can't be directly experimented with at all without large-scale, very expensive equipment. That means the resources to teach some subjects will be extremely limited. In either case, they will have to fall back on traditional methods -- methods, by the way, that we know are effective. Which makes me wonder why the Olin faculty believes they need to be discarded in the first place.
And frankly, I'm not altogether confident they know what they're doing. They debated for 2 months on what an engineer is? Puh-leeze!
And the brethren went away edified.
I don't have your character on my keyboard, but here goes.
Women = Money`2, therefore:
sqrt (Women)= sqrt (Money`2), therefore:
1/2 Women = 1/2 Evil (since the square root of money would be 1/2 Evil, right?)
1/2 Women = 1/2 Evil
Hmm, I wonder who the other half is?
c.
From my view, this new school is doing a lot of things right.
No paying-your-dues classes. Engineering is about solving problems, and most engineering work is done seat-of-the-pants, with the designer researching and learning as he/she goes. The traditional college would have you believe that two or three years of toolbox-building is required before one can solve any real problems. Any practicing engineer will tell you that this is total BS. Real Engineers(tm) just jump into a problem and think/work/caffienate until it's solved, emerging with experience, knowledge and confidence that they can then apply to the next problem. Modeling an educational institution around this iterative process should have been done a long time ago.
Whole-systems engineering. A program cannot be completely designed without taking into account the students' perspective. Most engineering curricula are designed by "captains of industry" and experienced administrative faculty, none of whom know or remember what it's like to be an engineering student. The result is that we (the students) suffer through overlapping or gap-filled coursework, uninteresting classes, and a distinct lack of communication between administration and the student body. More people claim to have survived engineering school than to have graduated from it.
Focus. A traditional engineering department has to compete with the Business school (with its battle-scarred, industry-culled accounting and law faculty) for funding, university resources, and attention. Unless the engineering school is the centerpiece of the university, it will be hard-pressed to get resources. In this case, the entire school offers only three degrees: ECE, ME, and general engineering. The student body will max out at around 650 people, with each class being only about 75 folks; small enough for every student to know every other student. This fosters networking - of a wireless sort - and as we all know, it's who you know.
No tuition. Not so much for the (somewhat fictional) socially-equal nature of a moneyless college, but for the underlying message that it's not about the money. I especially like the story about the cannon project: here's a budget, here's a goal, see what you can do. This monetary constraint makes the game that much more fun; the coolest cannon will be the one with the best ideas in it, not the one on which more money was spent. What's (hopefully) great about this: the coolest cannon will probably get the best grade, too.
Well-roundedness. My experience is that humanities courses are one step in a bureaucratic procedure on your way to a rubber-stamped degree. In order to truly produce well-rounded graduates, you can't just require that they sit through a few lectures on the Roman Empire. You have to make them interested, inquisitive, curious, and driven, so that they will find these things on their own. Knowledge does not make people well-rounded; wisdom and curiosity do. Our educational instutions today are sadly not in the free-thinker-producing business; they are in the business of producing graduates who will follow commands simply because they are given from somebody "above" them.
Personally, I've gained more useful knowledge from a 9-month programming job and two 6-month internships than I have from my 5 years at the university. College has become almost a rite of passage; if thou desirest entrance to the upper echelons of society, thou shalt work in the mines for a period no less than 4 years.
Must...stop...posting...
-- Hamster
I don't know much about this school, but I do know about the Olin foundation, and they're bad news. They're kind of a strange organization run by privacy-obsessed heirs with a huge bankroll. I'm aware of them because they fund a lot of groups, and one they really bankroll is called NRTW, which is an organization more-or-less devoted to trying to screw working class people out of money. They often team up with Wal-Mart, another organization with deep pockets pertaining to these RTW laws as well as other laws. The difference is Wal-Mart is a business looking out for it's bottom line, and Olin is supposedly a private charitable foundation. But why is a private charitable foundation funding all these little groups to the the tune of millions a year, whose purpose is to try and lower living standards for blue collar workers? I mean, it's not nice, but what are they up to? I'm very skeptical regarding them not just in what they're doing but what their organizations structure is.
Somebody here said Olin was screwing over Harvey Mudd to some extent. I caution people interested in going to Olin to do a lot of reading about these people. Frankly, I'm very suspicious and skeptical of them, to me this is akin to the Moonies buying the Washington Times. Before you register for Olin college, read up on the where the money is coming from, and don't just listen to them, read the reports that are out there on the net, these people have always been bad news and very strange.
Oh, stop your negatism :-)
;)
This type of program isn't for everyone. Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses and each has their* own idea of what they want to do.
Let those people who want to have their purely technical degree go elsewhere. Engineering isn't easy; if Olin can improve on its breadth without sacrificing depth, then that is wonderful.
I speak as a 5th year Computer Engineering major, who also happens to be a Spanish major. I've also taken a year of Ancient Greek and will be taking my second year of German starting in September. Not to mention playing in an orchestra, etc. I've taken a few humanities courses, and would've taken more, if time allowed. Yeah, it'll take me an extra year to finish up my degree, my GPA isn't quite where I'd like it, and I'm taking on an extra $8000 in loans, but to me it is worth it.
The real "engineers" who do wonderous things are curious about everything. Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, et al. Everyone else is just a techie
*they, rather than "he or she" and their rather than "his or her" is perfectly acceptable modern colloquial English and easier to read than that other politcally acceptable crap.
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
Well, not really... this college has been doing it for 47 years.
-cibrPLUR
College was great. The equal number of male:female ratio, the parties and then that pesky schooling getting in the way of it all.
I graduated after five years of college. Other people had six-year plans. At my university it was difficult to graduate in four, so people took the extra time to enjoy college life fully.
And in this economy, it's much better to delay graduation. I have to say as an adult, I occasionally long to see the comforting sight of a beer bong or a guy vomiting profusely on the carpet at a party.
c.
In computer science and engineering, Olin has some of the best professors that didn't fit at MIT because they cared too much about teaching and students, namely Lynn Stein and Gill Pratt. When at MIT, I worked with Lynn and heard many good things about Gill.
Olin students sometimes hang around MIT, and they are a cool bunch. One of them mentioned how the inaugural class was so small and the facilities so underutilized, that each student was housed inside a spacious fully-furnished air-conditioned trailer. Sure beats 4/room like the MIT undergrads!
Jesus. Almost all these high-scored posts need to think back to their days in school and realize that sure... they might have a great education... but some of the people that sat in class with them were stupid when they were born, stupid in class, and stupid afterwards.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Your point is damaged by the incorrectness of your cites.
"Wealth of Nations" is by Adam Smith, not someone whose last name is "Adam".
"The Prince" is by Niccolo Machiavelli, not someone whose last name is "Machievello".
Fyodor Dostoyevsky's book is entitled "The Brothers Karamazov", not "The Brothers Karamazoo".
-- Terry
This is all nice, but this school cant really compete with the big boys like Harvard and NYU who have endowments that rival the GDP's of some Eastern European nations. They have to make sacrifices somewhere if they dont charge tuition like in the quality of their labs, professors or housing. I went to Pace University basically across the street from NYU's dorms. Our Professors werent any worse, nor the overall quality of the education (we paid 18k+ a year in tuition) but thanks to its endowment the NYU dorms were cleaner, newer, better. The NYU gyms were bigger, newer, better. Pace does have a killer library and a very good IT department and lots of good machines but NYU simply has more money. Though Pace makes up for it with a much smaller student body, smaller classes, more individualized attention, etc... Im going to NYU now for my masters and frankly its no better overall. So maybe schools like this have a chance, but then again Pace had a 100 million+ dollar endowment, these guys dont (they even share some facilities with some other school). Pace and NYU are also right in the heart of Silicon Alley which is another advantage, but they are also about 3 blocks from the WTC and I got to see September 11th up close!
A liberal arts education gives you something that no book can. It exposes you to other peoples ideas and forces to create your own! It forces you to debate other people, form coherent ideas, and express them. It teaches you new ways of thinking about the world like a sociologist would, an economist or even an accountant. I was a CS major but my school (Pace University) forced us to take 60 credits of liberal arts course work and Im better for it. To be fair lots of the classes were business classes some were even general science classes but they made even us tech. people into well balanced humans who are capable of interacting with others which lots of engineers and CS people simply dont know how to do.
I have to agree with the guy above, HOW WAS THIS OFFTOPIC? It was actually a bit on the funny side....
The "rest of us" had to take 10-16 courses in our college years to make up our general education requirements.
That meant me having to take physics and atmospheric science when I had to be dragged kicking and screaming. It meant taking math where I wanted to kick the instructor in the nuts. It meant taking chemistry and grinding my teeth. It meant me taking English courses where I was bored out of my mind.
So don't talk to me about "geeks" feeling bad about not getting a broad education. They should be. They have a right to understand more than engineering aspects and they should demand it. They should be able to get into an intellectual argument and make sense, even impress, someone from the history/classics/geography/English departments.
I also took two years of a foreign language, but I liked that. And I liked the biology. So I don't see taking other classes as something bad, but something that will show people all the interesting things out in the world.
c.
I wanna be a renaissance engineer...but i wonder about the market for new and better trebuchets.
I'm actually leaving tomorrow on my way to Olin.. and just wanted to reply to a couple of things.
/. and are close to applying for college... Olin has a 50:50 male to female ratio. You don't find that many other places. And for God's sake, guys, please don't start with the lewd comments on this...
1) No, we are not accredited. Olin can't be until they graduate their first class (us). To me, it's worth the potential risk just to be involved in starting the college up.
2) No, you can't "train" someone to be a renaissance engineer. But the type of people they're admitting are already well-rounded.. I'd say I'm actually in the minority since I'm overly computer-geeky and don't play some sort of musical instrument.
3) Yeah, I know HMC is really similar. I actually applied there as well. In fact, in talking to the admissions people at Olin, they talked about trying to emulate what HMC was doing, but with the differences they deemed necessary. So yeah, we're building on something that already works.
4) To any other chicks out there who read
This isn't really so off-topic, given Olin's nonexistent tuition.
The Ivies and other such private colleges give aid to well over half of their students. (It's actually much more than half but I don't have the figures with me.) Consider, a typical upper-middle-income family makes $50k per parent. That's $100k per year, $75k after taxes. It's unreasonable to expect $35k of that to go for tuition. All things being equal, this family might receive around $10k of aid or more, not including loans.
Put bluntly, an income of $100k is smack in the middle of the distribution curve at most well-endowed schools.
Yet, I've talked with dozens of families with incomes in that range and the overwhelming majority of them say, "Oh, we make $100k per year, we know that means we're ineligible for aid." And so they don't even bother to apply. It's a deadly myth that's doomed legions of promising students to choose a college based on cost.
Incidentally, the Ivies' elite status is almost entirely a result of their selectivity, and has little to do with their cost or their overrated quality (yes, I went to one).
---
Dum de dum.
Freedom is not the license to do what we like, it is the power to do what we ought.
Thought I might chime in...
This fall I will be a freshman at Babson College, the school right next to FW Olin. Babson has a unique relationship with this school for a number of reasons, first is that Babson has in the past recieved donations from the FW Olin Foundation. Babson's campus is also located adjacent to the FW Olin campus and many of the resources (educational and recreational) will be shared. I think this is an extraordinary opportunity for two schools with a limited educational scope (Babson is a business school) to provide their students with a broader education through cross-registration and other programs.
Personally, I am looking forward to being next door to the most innovative engineering school in the country.
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
Regarding liberal arts courses requiring only "regurgitating facts." If you are studying the books and then going to lecture to listen to the professor spew forth the same material you just read, then you have encountered a shitty university. I went to one of these crap colleges for a few years before I transferred to a college closer to home, a smaller state school in California. The political science department at the smaller and cheaper California State school was ten times better. (Caveat: Not all of the departments are on par with the Political Science department).
For example, a class at CSU entitled "The State and the Family" surveyed the political ideology of classics such as Plato's Republic and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland. Class time consisted of a 15 minute lecture followed by an hour and a half of instructor-led discussion. I still remember contrasting Plato's guardians with the mother culture presented in Herland. I can't recall one specific thing I learned from the mega-lectures at the other colleges, besides what I learned on my own.
I took another course on state politics by a professor running a campaign to get elected to the state legislature. Real-time, real world, hands-on learning.
The advantage afforded by attending class v. studying on your own lies in the discussion - honing your arguments and bouncing ideas off of the professor in an engaging environment. You won't get that just anywhere.
How come you never see anyone tell the liberal arts, or business majors, they need to take more math and science courses?
Sigh.
I'm getting tired of these "Engineers and Computer Scientists are ignorant fools"-type posts.
During my EE education, I have been required to take the following non-engineering related courses: 3 hours of government, 3 hours of history, and 6 hours of english comp. I have also been required to take four classes from a couple of different areas. I chose to take 6 hours of anthropology and 6 hours of music appreciation / understanding music.
Also, I have been required to take the following math/science classes: 12 hours of Calculus (single variable & multi-variable), 3 hours of differential equations, 5 hours of chemistry (including lab), 8 hours of your bog-standard Millikan oil drop physics, 3 hours of modern physics, and 3 hours of statistics.
Where can you get such a well-rounded engineering education in the United States? At the home of the number one football team in the nation, of course. Go Sooners!
I will add that you might want to direct any chemistry-related questions at my Computer Science counterparts - they've had 3 more hours of chemistry than myself, because it is required in their curriculum.
Oh - I've had three hours of numerical methods as well. Tou-che'!
Yes, you said without meaning. EXACTLY what the world needs. We are stagnant, our civilization is stales, and we need an electroshock. There has been almost no real (I mean revolutionary, disruptive) advance in science in the last 25 years. Check biology, one of the most desperately needed and most backwards of science. What's life? Biology can't even define it's own subject of study. Evolution? What's the best they have? Darwin, 150 years old ideas. And where is HAL? Where are the intelligent computers? We are a *dying* culture. Give me more PITAs like Wolfram anyday.
When I was expelled from school at 16, I got myself jobs in computers, where I was still under the delusion I wanted to work with science and technology. Of course, no way I could be an engineer anymore.
Being raised by an artist exposed me to all sorts of humanities stuff; but it would not really pay-off for about 20 years.
Then I met an engineer for the first time. I was totally dismayed at the utter lack of depth of the character, the extremely closed mind that had not the slightest interest outside the guy's profession, namely calculating the strength of beams going into a building.
I was glad I didn't pursue an engineering education!
Over the years, I interacted professionnally with many engineers, even at one point having two of them under my orders; only a few of those dispelled the initial notion I had of meeting my first one.
Then I worked several years with my father, who was making very-high quality books, and plenty of those were for a major museum. It is at this moment that I cursed myself for wanting to be an engineer, because I understood that I should have become an artist.
Meanwhile, the son of a friend I have known as a kid was growing up, and entered the engineering program of a very good university, of which he graduated with flying colours; two weeks later, he got himself a job, and bought himself a swift sportscar, in which he killed himself several hours later. Six years of engineering school down the crapper.
However, working in art edition circles, as interesting as it was, wasn't very computer-oriented, and it made me miss the OOP "revolution", which took me several years to catch-up; I was fortunate at that time to be hired to work on Internet connectivity just as the Internet was starting to "exist" in the public mind. Needless to say, my previous "artistic" dabblings came handy when some of the company's clients started to want websites...
Then I landed a job of IT manager for a small consulting company who provide turnkey museums all over the world; we are currently working on several projects, the largest of which is a new museum for the Smithsonian, in Washington.
Needless to say, this kind of work calls for a pretty multidisciplinary team. My past exposure to arts and design impressed my bosses enough to have me involved with every design team for several museums.
As you can guess, this makes for quite interesting meetings ("Okay, how should we put-up the Pterodon skeleton?" - "How can we mount those 80 aquariums to achieve maximum visibility?" - "Is it possible to have that subway mockup vibrate so it feels like it is running on the line?") or requests ("Hey, can you find me a planetarium?" - "I need a cable-car and a monorail"). You can guess that I am not ready to let go of that job...
I do not think I could have such an interesting job if I only had straight technical training; exposure to Humanities definitely broaden interests, and allows one to see the big picture and understand how various disciplines interact.
Thank you! It's absolutely scandalous that someone can greaduate from sixteen years of education and not know calculus. The general education requirements at my school (University of Connecticut) at being revamped this year, but it's absolutely certain that students will be able to graduate with a minimum of math and science, because those courses weed out too many people.
For some reason, it's considered acceptable to be mathematically illiterate, but not to be ignorant of history or literature. Bollocks!
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
At the University of Connecticut, the general-eduation requirements are the same for all students studying for a BS (for a BA, there are fewer required courses). These include foreign languages, physics (or biology), philosophy, chemistry, mathematics, non-western cultures, history and social science.
CSE students also have to take multivariable calculus, differential equations and linear algebra (the same classes the math majors take) as well as the civil engineering "statics" class and the electrical engineering "signals and systems" class (which weeds out third-year students like you wouldn't believe). As for learning actual math, the CS curriculum is one course short of including a math minor. (Most students take the extra one, since it's a prerequisite for another CS course.)
Any "breadth"-type requirement that a humanities major would have to take, we also take. We just don't have the free space in our schedules to take fluffy classes. (I get something like five electives over the course of four years.)
I'm not sure where you're getting this idea of well-rounded humanities students and tech-only engineering students.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Diversity MY ASS! Get your PC shit out of here. After working 12 years as both a computer engineer and software engineer, I have only ONCE worked with a black person who was remotely technically competant. And thats out of over two dozen guys. I will say that I have worked for a black manager (ex-engineer) who was great to work for, but technically a dud. Affirmative action has guarenteed that most if not all minorities never have to measure up to the norm when it comes real life.
my 2 cents: not all studies are equal. Well, that much is obvious. But depending on how you cut the cake, you get some glaring differences. ... anyone else want to speak for them?). The same goes, of course, for all studies, but with the difference that engineers in particular cannot allow themselves too much specialisation. I would claim that even physicists and mathematicians, more so studies of literature, philosophy, even law can afford far greater specialisation without becoming completely useless. ... papyrus ... who uses papyrus for data storage ... pffft) is, of course, awe-inspiring, and that across the board .. my claim is merely that engineers need a greater-than-average slice of the whole cake to be able to opeate at all.
... maybe this uni will work out, if they can attract the right students ... but all in all, the world doesn't exactly abound with across-the-board genius. All they can do is make it a little bit easier on the multi-talented. You can do "holistic" studies at virtually any uni these days - you won't be able to stop those who are prone to successfully study a mix of all sorts of stuff from doing so - but for the rest of us, four years of pure engineering is intense enough as it is - add anything else, something else drops out of the pipe the other end.
In my opinion, doctors and engineers are the two groups that require the most simple knowledge to be able to work at all, comparing all studies. That is to say, if you don't teach an electrical engineer adequately what phaenomena he/she might come across say at high frequencies, they won't be unable to design a light switch that didn't cause Bob-from-accounting's PDA to burp three rooms down the hall.
Or in abstract, and as has been said further up in the thread: there is no time for any other shit. We live in what is touted to be the age of reason - scientific knowledge has exploded, and it is a reasonably oredered structure.
An engineer in this age needs to know what an engineer did a hundred years ago, plus about 50 times as much in addition (same goes for doctors, but I'm more of an engineer
The amount of knowledge humanity has amassed (in spite of such things as the loss of the library in Alexandria
Renaissance people are great - we had a calculus prof who also gave a course "Introduction to Ulysses"
yes, we have no bananas
He's on scholarships limited to 4 years.
i.e. he doesn't have much of a choice.
That final year won't be so great if you're making great financial sacrifices to achieve it.
$$$ was my final reason to get a job and go to grad school part-time rather than stay for my M.Eng at Cornell (1 more year with 0 financial aid and 0 income)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Except that the majority of liberal arts classes in a University setting are not able to offer such dynamic discussion and exchanging of ideas as you have described.
Go join a Book club.
Salis
Favorite
This school seems both refreshing and long overdue. However, even this school which boasts of a well rounded curricula, falls short of a well rounded education. Namely: physical fitness. Ralph Waldo Emerson comments on what he believes to be a well rounded education in his essay "The American Schholar", and I find his views very similar to many of the comments by /.'ers, who are for the most part, geeks. Does that make Emmerson a geek? Or does that mean that most geeks are more well rounded than they are given credit for.
I agree with you - About the only major difference I can see between the schools is that HMC requires you to be well rounded in both science and the humanities (engineers that don't even take a basic physics course...sounds fishy). Oh, and the fact that Mudd is a proven school that has produced great results for the past 40 years. No worries, Olin will make it there in 40 more years or so.
It sounds to me like your alma mater has some very bad priorities. They're structuring their entire curriculum around demands that they produce engineers that pass some absurd shopping list of qualifications. Undergraduate education is supposed to be about developing your ability to acquire knowledge. If you concentrate solely on currently required technical skills, you end up with a set of qualifications that may put you in demand now, but puts you at a nasty disadvantage when (not if) the technology base evolves, rendering your current skill set obsolete.
The state of California pays for five years, Einstein. Regardless of that, after four years I think you could have saved to $2,500 to go another year unless you have a cocaine habit.
Secondly, you obviously never went to a fraternity party. Hmm, I guess that would make sense.
c.
I thought I was actually arguing for broadening engineers' educations.
The whole attitude of "I'm not going to read a book unless it's about engineering" is frightening. When I went to MIT I noticed a lot of people there read books, played instruments and were really intelligent in many facets.
I can't say I found an abundance other places.
As for geeks, they're not all engineers. And geeks have sex, I've almost seen that a number of times including the network administrator I sleep with now.
Engineers, I'm not positive about, though.
c.