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Why Students Are Leaving Engineering
Ted writes "A former engineering major has written an interesting article explaining why he thinks many smart students are not studying engineering anymore." Many business leaders have commented on the lack of engineers and several companies have even started initiatives to help bolster our diminishing ranks. Will these measures be enough, or does the system require much more drastic measures?
Individual with neither passion nor aptitude for engineering attempts engineering degree, finds it tough, fails, and blames the system. Aside from the math being hard, he complains that the parties were dull.
We should make our engineering programs easier and more glamorous so that more people can hack it. This will help our colleges turn out better scientists and innovators.
Yeah, yeah. The complaint is familiar. In my undergraduate career, we routinely had to deal with taking 13 credit hours of science courses like chemistry, molecular biology and genetics, slaving away in labs until late into the evening while friends taking business courses were taking 18 credit hours for classes that started at 10:00am and were finished by 3:00pm.
Any of us in the sciences can relate horror stories like the molecular neurobiology exam that I took where upon receiving my midterm exam found myself stunned to be looking at a grade of 48%. My look of pain caused the professor to exclaim to me: "What are you worried about? You got the class high". Or how about the mid level Calculus course I took that was taught by a TA who could speak little english, but perfect Russian and often lapsed into it along with weird non-traditional symbols. She routinely exclaimed to us that we were stupid and she should not be teaching a "remedial" class, which honestly may have been, but for someone who came into the sciences from being a film major, I needed the refresher as the only previous Calculus I had was in high school.
But you know what? Science and engineering are hard. That's the honest truth. The classes are difficult, and sometimes you need to show initiative by going outside the class to other resources to master the material in the face of crappy teaching assistants. Part of the system is making it through all of the obstacles like late nights of study, long hours in the lab, poor teaching assistants, etc...etc...etc... It shows that you can 1) persevere, 2) learn, 3) troubleshoot and 4) Work Hard. I am not saying that things should not be improved. Rather, I think they should be improved, but I don't want our scientists, physicians and engineers to be sliding by either.
For those students who may be learning challenged, I am sensitive to those issues as well, but there may be some things that are simply not achievable for all students. That is a reality and those students should be counseled to pick a major that is doable for their skills. Or they should simply realize that it may take them longer to graduate. And before anyone starts shouting me down on this, you should know that I have dyslexia and tend to be a slow reader which makes things for someone with a doctorate a bit hard, but this is the career I wanted and to compensate, I spend more time reading than my colleagues. I knew I could hack it though and just work harder than others to stay current.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
1) Alot of work
2) Alot of theory with little practice
3) Less time to socialize (alot of work)
4) Pay is less than other professions that require less work.
5) No girls in class, and at work after you graduate.
Did I miss something?
Shelf Stockologist and Greeting Technician are still obtainable with the ubiquitous and useful communications degree.
I think a large number of students have horrors story about their engineering studies time. In my case I study electrical engineering, get my diploma, but end up going back to university studying History of Art and Cinema. The funny thing is that 6 years after finishing school and after few years spend in the Cinema Production field, I come back to Engineering, software engineering this time, as a manager, and I realize that all the thing that I learn at the time where actually valuable !
From the Article: "Find a way to teach engineering to verbally oriented students who can't learn math by sense of smell."
I've gone back and forth and back again on this...and right now I'm of the mind that if you can't learn math by sense of smell, well, na-na-na, hey-hey-hey goodbye. Nobody held my hand through Asian, Russian, German and Indian math and computer science profs and incompetent grad student assistants and a myriad of other difficulties (in getting a BA mathematics). Yeah, it's not a perfect world, but if this kid was half as smart as he thinks he is, he'd have made it despite any obstacles. I mean, he kept going on about being a "verbal" learner...and if you're out there, dude, math is not a "verbal" topic...just FYI.
I Want To Believe
If students are leaving engineering but there is no shortage of geeks, maybe there just isn't the same demand that there once was. Or maybe people don't see engineering as a cash cow anymore.
So only students who have an interest in engineering enroll and complete the courses. I wonder what the numbers of high schoolers taking science and higher math are.
Search your logs like the web: splunk!
Simple answers: P*ss-poor pay, insane hours, unreasonable deadlines and no real power. I was a senior software engineer, and lived through all that, and hated that part of my chosen career. Watching morons making more money, making decisions based on ?horoscopes? ?coin tosses? ?eeny meeny miney moe? really sucked rocks.
Since then, I've steered bright kids into an engineering *hobby* and a far more lucrative, less stressful career in management.
Lemon curry?
I can see it now. Cue the chorus of people who say, "this guy must be dumb, no wonder he washed out."
You know what? Bullshit. He has a point.
During my four years of undergraduate, I did my share of engineering, CS, physics, and I threw in an extra liberal arts minor just because I was bored. My experience was exactly like his. The only difference is that I didn't want law or medicine, and was determined to suffer.
I learned mostly outside of class - primarily on the job (I paid for school by already working in the field I was studying). There are always exceptions, and exceptional teachers. Few and far between. For the most part the place was ridiculous, and I constantly pitied the kids who had to actually rely on the teachers to learn.
The sad fact is, the pedagogical technique is absolute shit at the university level. Absolute shit, even in some of the supposedly "great" American schools. The comparison to the secondary level, with its few remaining standards and shattered, vague but lingering sense of professionalism, is stark. These people often have no idea how to teach, and there is very little expectation that they should. There is no requirement for communication skills, metaphorical skills, or even language skills. The grading practices are ludicrous - almost dadaesque. There is no oversight. No standards. For fun, add critical first year classes with 250 students to a teacher. And of course, quite a few of them just plain suck altogether. As an educational environment, it is completely out to lunch.
The math curricula is particularly noxious, but the problem is by no means limited to mathematics. The best I can say of them is that the department may have seen itself as a filter rather than a teacher, selecting the few people who already know as much as they do and can prove it through arcane and torturous inquisition, and discarding the rest. But were they really such big believers in "natural talent" and "high standards?" This theory flies out the window when you see the entire class curved up 50 points. I once saw someone who failed a midterm and skipped a final curved up to a C-. It wasn't about standards. It was just completely non-functional. But this guy expresses it much better than I do.
Making excuses for these people is pointless. If you paid thousands of dollars to learn Differential Equations and got a gibbering 24 year old who barely understands them himself and can even more barely speak your language to explain it, you just got robbed.
I hate to say it, but it feels like the final stages of the great educational decline. We've been letting the public educational system burn at every level for decades, and now I think our higher educational institutions are finally starting to break...
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engineering is supposed to be hard and a great achievment. it's only in managment fantasy land that it's an easily replacable position.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
We got boat loads of engineers without jobs. :) For the love of God dont send more jobs to India or China.
No sex.
A transhuman would just derive most stuff.
In my field, we've seen almost a 40% increase in undergrad enrollment over the past few years, so I doubt that it's every engineering field that's losing students. Sure since the tech bubble burst, students that would have studied a CS or related field might rethink their plans and pick a different major, but that's not every field. Nuclear, Mechanical, Chemical, Civil, etc etc have all seen steady increases in enrollment. It's most likely just students forecasting what field they think they can get a job in based on the current day demand.
cuz like..engineering is hard ok? totally..
or..
word homie you make mills sling'n on the street.
God Bless America.
Some of us were woken up and asked to leave. =( I just tell my friends that I'm "taking time off" for a few semesters.
What do I have to do to get a sig around here?! www.bearscanfly.org
Well, interesting thoughts on his part, but the truth is that all curriculums have weed-out courses or they are not worth a damn. Discrete math is used for a weed out on CS because it IS the core of CS (it is a fun course, though). Likewise, it makes a good wee-out for any major that requires it. Many ppl just do not get it.
With that said, this guys real problem was not that the university was too tough. The real problem is that his high school did not prepare him. More likely, it coddle him into thinking that he was one of the top. However, with US grade inflation, he was most like average. Hitting top course right off the bat would be difficult.
Now, as to the prof who could not teach, well, there are a lot of them out there. No university and curriculum is immune from it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Yes, it is a lot of work for an engineering degree, but should prove to pay off in the end. I have many friends that changed their major after 1 or 2 years, and it's simply because this major was not for them. I have often debated myself whether or not to switch my major, but have decided to stay put for now.
My sig beat up your sig.
Getting out of high school, I was very good at math and wanted to study a practical application of math at college. My life goals were to do stuff that took money. I wanted a job that earned me a lot of money. After three years majoring in ME, my life goals changed significantly - I wanted to be happy and would rather work 40 (instead of 60) hour weeks and spend time with a family (meaning I had to find a girl - they don't really exist in the ME world) than be rich. Of course, now I'm an IS major... and still don't see any girls around. Oops.
Rob
Companies are giving real incentive to be an engineer.
That's what I did, and now I'm in med school, training for a job that can't be outsourced.
solution: hire me!
Well, I can give you my perspective.
I'm a college freshman. I eventually want to be an engineer.
I also want to learn other things too. Enginnering schools are simply not conducive to doing that. Every course you take is likely to be tied to your major in some way or another. That doesn't sound very fun to me.
Right now, I'm taking Psychology and Economics in addition to the requisite Physics & Calc I'll need to go to grad school for enginnering. Although I don't see myself becoming an economist or psychologist, I'm thoroughly enjoying the courses, and can definitely tie what I'm learning back into real life and just about any career I choose to go into.
Next semester, I'll probably be taking some english, and possibly some history. I really don't think I could bear loading my schedule full of science courses (which tend to have a disproportinately large workload). Friends I have at engineering schools seem to be bored out of their minds and stressed beyond reasonable limits.
Simply put, if you become an engineering student, and find out that you hate it, you're pretty much screwed. If I end up not going into engineering, I'll still have a great liberal arts education to fall back on, and at the very least, I'll be able to write well.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Engineering is too important to be easy. The right way to get more engineers into circulation would be better pay -- it's basic supply and demand. When demand exceeds supply, prices must go up.
It's funny how corporations love economics right up until the point where it involves paying intelligent people higher wages.
Instruction in math, engineering, and sciences is abysmal. At least, according to the author.
I had some phenomenal instructors at my own Smartypants U, but there were some bad ones, too. And even the best of them sometimes failed to communicate the concepts well. Ideally there would be plenty of instructors who can really capture the students' imagination and communicate the joy and beauty of the ideas underlying mathematics, computer science, and engineering. Lord knows that these fields have no shortage of beautiful and powerful ideas.
However, it seems to be true that teaching is undervalued in the typical faculty job. There aren't many reliable metrics taken, and of those that are, there seems to be little accountability for poor performance. For research output, on the other hand, judgement is precise and swift. Under such a regime, how can one blame a professor for focusing on his research? Certainly there are many cases of faculty who are brilliant researchers and teachers, but in the more marginal cases, it's typically the teaching that gets the short end of the stick.
For the long-term health of mathematics and science, I think more focus must be on inspiring students within those fields, and that requires uniformly good teaching and advising. How we get there, I have no idea.
The path to becoming an engineer is rediculous, I recently was about to enter college as an engineering student and realized that all of my credit hours were basically forced to be engineering related classes... This is a problem for most teenagers that are still trying to decide what exactly to do with their lives. Plus from what i gathered from listening to the Profs speak the only thing an engineering degree guaranteed you was 60+ hours a week of work during AND after college. That LSA (Lit. Sci. Art) course looks mighty inviting after the 'Don't Look Back' attitude taken at (at the very least) what WAS going to be my college. (university of michigan dearborn, current reapplying at the Ann Arbor UofM) Thought i'd share my experiences as they seem relevant to this discussion
Live according to the Categorical Imperative. If the Categorical Imperative tells you not to live by it... ignore it
My brother is a mechanical engineer. Nobody is breaking down his door to hire him away from a dwindling company. He often has to fly to Asia to train others how to replace him and his coworkers for less money. He is looking to start up a non-engineering business of some kind to make good money the way most of his successful friends do: start their own (non-tech) business and master it over time. The "American Education Dream" is dwindling. The real money in the US is in salesmenship and ownership.
Table-ized A.I.
I really hate math and I was going for a CS degree. I got sick of seeing half the class fail and me busting my ass just to get by, so I switched to CIS (Computer Information Systems) which was more business-based and less math! The funny thing is - I became a programmer anyway, and I'm now programming for the university with my CIS degree. The math I learned in class doesn't really apply to anything I'm doing while coding. I make the computer do the math for me. =)
"took the free ride to the local state school, and found that their professors didn't teach, the TAs didn't care, and they walked away knowing very little."
This was essentially my experience with undergraduate engineering. The state university I'm going to has little interest in anything other than churning out gross numbers of graduates, with little mind for the quality of the program. The program itself is a series of hoops to jump through - put up with shit now, if you stick it through to the end they can be sure you'll put up with it for the rest of your career. I switched out of the engineering program after three years, and I'm going to be graduating with a degree in film studies.
It's obvious to me that the writer of the article is not an "engineer by birth." The real clue is the correct spelling and grammar. Seriously, though, it takes more than aptitude to be a good engineer.
Retired from software... maybe. Sort of.
Could it simply be that an average engineer-to-be looks at countries like China and India where engineering is becoming *the* career choice (including software engineering) and given that engineering profession is highly outsourceable chooses some other more locale-dependent career like doctor or lawyer? It is kind of difficult to compete with someone who is willing to work for a fraction of your salary... At the same time, accepting lower salary is not an option because of the difference in the cost of living. Thus, bye-bye engineering career.
"You mortals are so obtuse." -Q
One reason I'm posting anonymously is a funny tidbit. Some of the Pakistani people were connected in various ways to Pakistan's nuclear program. I didn't think of it much at the time. Due to that I followed news of Pakistan's nuclear tests, as well as the news about how they sold nuclear technology to Korea, Iran and Libya. While the upper middle class white kids, with their rooms full of expensive stereo equipment go to business classes, the Chinese, Indians and Pakistanis are doing all the EE, CS and physics stuff that actually takes work. There's no one to fill those seats except people from these countries. White Americans don't want to do the work to be a physicist, so the US takes people like Wen Ho Lee off the boat from China and puts them in top secret nuclear facilities. Then they flip out that he might be spying. If you're worried about China and Chinese spies, don't put people in the top-secret nuclear labs that weren't born in the US. This seems like common sense to me. I guess the answer is, they're cheap, and they can't really find many US nuclear physicists.
I think this guy is a typical "smart" kid who thought he could be an engineer, but he didn't have the math skills to do the job. Obviously as he stated, his strengths are with words.
His comparison to getting easy As in liberal arts classes to getting Bs and Cs in engineering classes is also crap. As he even stated at the beginning of his article, he wanted to learn something useful. Engneerings are compared to other engineers. Not to business majors, econ majors, . And most engineers don't have straight As, or close to it even. What matters is how you do compared to other people. And even then GPA only matters for graduate school or your first job, but even then it might not even be brought up.
Scott
The author is spot on in quite a few respects - engineering is more a test of endurance than intelligence. Professors are assigned courses that have nothing to do with their areas of research, and it shows. Most TAs hate their jobs and constantly attempt to unionize because of poor working conditions.
Shortly before I started engineering, a crazed physics TA went on a shooting rampage through my campus, killing seven people before he turned the gun on himself. Yes, being a TA at a major university can be a very bad career move.
Get as much education as you can from a community college, where teaching is the main goal and not a sideline. It will do wonders for your GPA.
University Professors take a liking to students for the flimsiest of reasons - in my case, after compiling twm for hpux and replacing vue, my 68000 assembler professor hounded me to enter graduate school (an offer I sanely declined).
The whole system is a sham. Worthless waste of time, just to have a line item on your resume.
You know, the guy in the article could almost be describing my school (Georgia Tech), except that I haven't noticed as many incompetant teachers, and they seem to care more (but then again, it could very well be that the guy was ignoring the help available).
However, despite the school tradition of complaining, it's almost always self-deprecating humor rather than genuine unhappiness. Around here, we take pride in our 40%s, when the average is 20% -- numbers don't mean anything without context, after all. Also, most of us were warned before even applying to the school that we should expect our grades to average a letter grade below what we got in high school.
You're absolutely right: this guy has completely the wrong attitude, so it's no wonder he gave up. It's just as well, too: everyone I've met with his kind of attitude would have made a horrible engineer anyway! As my Statics professor says: "When engineers make mistakes, people die. You must be ever vigilant, and you must be perfect." And the only way you can do that is if you really enjoy what you're doing.
If this guy did become an engineer, he'd kill people!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Alternatively, kids are increasingly being told that they must make money fast. We have spoiled children and criminals who have done little if any work at all levels of government, while the ones who have genuinely studied and work hard to advance human knowledge, and in the process create the knowledge that allows engineers and businessmen to create all the products we rely on, are vilified.
I mean who wants to be a science teacher if parents are going to say you are a devil worshipper. Who wants to be a math teacher if all the people in power say they never were good at math and it never did them any harm. Who wants to be an english teacher if the highest authorities are saying they never read. And without someone to teach kids these skills, there really are no engineers. And increasing the hostile environment, at leas in the US, is causing fewer students to enter American universities from abroad, which ultimately has a significant impact on the ability of the US to peacefully spread it's message of democracy.
A less touchy issue is simply the time needed to get an engineering degree and funding. A student will often need 5 years to get an undergraduate, and, if he or she wants job security, will probably wish a masters which is two more years. There are fields in which one can make as much money after going to school for less time. There are many degrees in which you can still party your freshman year and pass your classes. There are many degrees that you can finish in four years, and not risk having your funding cut off because you are not making suitable progress.
In the end, we are not training engineers. When I was in school, the number of qualified students at the high school and college level were high. It was a challenge to get into programs. The focus on national testing is reducing the number of students who can independently and creatively solve problems, and as a result reducing the number of students that are currently qualified to enter the programs. Popular schools have to turn people away, but the rest go out begging for minimally qualified students.
If we, as a nation or world, believe we already know everything, that everything can be gotten from a single book, then no engineering is needed. IMHO, we need to be curious, know that the universe is more interesting than a story told in a few pages, and be humble enough to admit that we cannot completely understand the mind, intent, or complete working of what we each consider holy.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
There are those that have said that this must have occurred because this guy lacked aptitude or passion, but having seen a large number of people with both who simply got caught up in an often fickle system where if you entered during the wrong semester, you got Professor X, who was interested in the reputation of his school (and thus wanted to make the course "hard") but was totally uninterested in whether or not his students learned anything (because he had research to do or books to write or whatever else). This is more avoidable as an undergraduate than as a graduate student, and the fact of the matter is, there were courses where the folks that excelled were the people who'd taken the course before. Or (more often) the large groups of people who were cheating.
Science and math are hard, and anyone who tells you differently is selling something. The thinking isn't "better" than in the liberal arts, but the learning curve is steeper, and it's frankly a lot more work. I've done both, and it is a lot more work. But there are plenty of talented individuals who really want to work in engineering fields who simply get to the point where they say "screw this" because they realize that research universities are, in general, a lot more interested in funding and their reputations (often apparently judged by how many people they cut from the program in the first semester) than actually teaching anyone anything.
People, as they grow up, learn to cut their losses. We need to start worrying about the quality of education and not necessarily only admitting those to the discipline who will say "Yes, sir, can I have another" after every boot to the head.
... and those of us who stuck it out, who were able to look past our GPA's, who were able to realise "hey, getting a 55% on an exam is OK if the average was a 45%", we are enjoying better than average pay and benefits in our engineering jobs. You get back what you put in. Freshmen engineeering courses are BUILT to weed out the weak, the people who won't stick it out.
-everphilski-
I admit to contributing to this problem. I am truly interested and excited by many fields of engineering and science, but a lot of the people entering school when I did were merely in it for the money. When I graduated, the only people getting hired were due to nepotism since the engineering market was suffering from the tech collapse and saturated by cheap labor. I did get a job (via nepotism) but it wasn't in the field I studied. That turned out to be a blessing in disguise. However, my current job requires very little engineering and I merely need to understand various concepts rather than apply them.
So I've been telling kids, whenever I talk to a highschooler who says they're going into engineering, that unless they are really interested they should choose a different major. You have to know that NOTHING ELSE will be acceptable, because you are going to suffer for it with the current economic climate. It is no longer a cash cow, and also moving away from the by-the-book number crunching that anyone can do with training...engineering here is requiring more and more creativity and innovation while the plug-and-chug jobs are shipped to outsourcers. Nothing is more irritating than having an uncreative, engineer-by-rote slob on an engineering team that needs to be running in front of the cutting edge.
Right now I use a little of my education at work, the primary use being only the fact that I have a degree. Most of my education is relegated to my own hobbies...what an expensive hobby that turned out to be, eh?
I'm in 4th year engineering. Those of us who make it this far (massive attrition rate) have to be pretty smart, hard working, and full of energy. Not to mention that it's a 5 year program in many places. We all realize that some day unless we get into management or business we'll be busting our asses yet earning less than our potential elsewhere. It would be so much easier to become an mba or lawyer and get the big $$$. We're not in it for the money though but i'm fed up of people abusing that and having us work in high tech sweat shops.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
The author takes his own personal experience and tries to extrapolate it to "thousands" of other students. What bullshit.
My first chemical engineering professor (Dr. Edmond Ko) set me on fire. He taught us how to solve problems. He even built up our confidence with his great proclamation: "I can solve any engineering problem. I simply apply the same principles, be it chemical engineering, mechanics, electrical engineering, whatever. Once I apply basic principles, I can look up any specific equations or methods I may need." He made us believe we could do the same.
Throughout my engineering studies, I had professors that blended humor, real world experience, and good 'ole basic problem solving to give me and my fellow students the tools to succeed. To this day, I still attribute my success to their efforts.
Did I have bad professors? Yes. I had the ones who had no heart for teaching, passed the buck to untrained TAs (who were just as frustrated as me), and couldn't teach a fish to swim. But they were few and far between.
Engineering is in trouble in the US not because of education but because of the business world. Why study engineering when some bonehead MBA can get a big bonus while still screwing things up? (And I have an MBA!) Why devote your skills and time to building a great product when your job is going to be shipped overseas anyway? I, like many other engineers, came out of college eager to apply my skills and help build new products and processes. It's been the business world, and its utter lack of respect for the abilities of engineers, that's crushed my love of engineering.
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
In high school, the instructors have much smaller classes and do a lot of hand holding so that every student who wants to learn can figure out the material. In college, instructors are supposed to guide you without doing all the handholding. You, the student, have much more responsibility for doing the hard work of reading the material, studying all the time, and actually seeking out help if you need it. There is, nor should there be, any hand holding in college. The reason for that as I see it is that once you get out into the workplace, you should be responsible enough to figure out a lot of what you need to know to do your job yourself.
The real reason why United States students are not studying engineering much anymore is because engineering jobs have been and still are moving to third-world countries at an alarming rate. The fact that a lot of people are still going into health fields, which are also scientifically-based technical fields, illustrates that since those jobs are still widely available in the United States that students will go into those majors despite the difficulty in the coursework.
When I went through the weed-out courses in college, all I can say is "Thank God they were there."
I was working at the time. A co-worker of mine attending the same college would approach me around the end of every semester and ask for "a little help with an assignment." Usually it was several assignments, two of which were late and the last of which was the final "hard" project that was due in a couple of days, and the cow-orker was completely lost. It wasn't a "little help," it was "please do my work for me." I would give broad hints, but not any code. Three or four semesters of this, and the person was gone.
If I was working with that person today . . . *shudder*. I have worked with some folks who apparently skated through coursework and managed to get hired anyway, and it can be pretty miserable. [Hint: You want your 'A' people to hire more 'A' people. Not 'B' people. 'B' people hire 'C' people and then you are totally screwed and you might as well toss in the hand-grenade and start another company.]
Any sufficiently advanced technology is insufficiently documented.
is that there are complaints of all this lack of engineering staff... I'm willing to bet a 12 pack that there are thousands of people doing engineering like work, that would be more than happy to take night classes if someone would help them pay for it....
Sheesh, take the motivated people and turn them into engineers instead of just trying to churn out thousands of newbie engineers that don't know the first thing about working in a business environment and expecting them to be uber-engineers.
I think there is a general lack of focus and understanding of this problem. Its not just why don't more people go into engineering, why don't more people go get a degree? Damn, if you are going spend that much money, it won't be your money, and all these 18 year olds (since the beginning of colleges) don't know what they want to do... anything is okay as long as it doesn't interrupt their social schedules. Fsck! Where is the focus and systematic help programs for people that really DO want to be engineers but can't afford it?
After working for as long as I have, I know that school isn't as hard as people say... Imagine yourself with the Learning PERL book in your hand and contemplating a 3 month project that will eventually include 32000 lines of PERL, 60000+ lines of SQL, and unimaginable days and nights of trying to learn while you are coding. School is not more difficult than that. School has a grade in the balance, that project had my job in the balance!
Yep, lets see some of those programs start funding older-than-23 students, then I will believe they are serious about changing things.
two cents used
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As soon as there becomes a scarcity of engineers and companies become desperate enough, the salaries will rise once more to acceptable levels and you'll quickly have a glut of engineering sutdents again.
Supply and demand, folks. Plain and simple.
I've seen plenty of my friends who started out as Electrical Engineering majors, but then change to business just after the first year of classes. Most of them simply don't want to put the time in. The problem I have with most of my "bottleneck" (classes you must pass because they barely have anything to do with the major)classes are held at too high of a standard. Especially Physics I & II, the lab TA's must think that the lab writeups we do are to be published and grade them as so strictly.
I don't mean to be mean, but sometimes certain people need to be weeded out of programs. I hate to criticize someone, but six times on a titration experiment? After the first time you fail you think you'd learn from your mistakes. As a former mechenical engineering major who switched to be a mathematics major I can empathize. I came from a good high school and took many challenging courses and did well on many AP test. College is quite a transation in many ways, it can be a difficult one. However, if you are failing out of Discrete Mathematics (the easiest math course, besides college algebra) and you can't handle the experiments in a chem lab, maybe you aren't cut out to be an engineer. The courses are challenging, at least you found out early on that you weren't up to it.
Sounds like he got weeded out. Big effin' deal. I have a MSME from a Smartypants U. I made a career change and got into IT. Now I work for morons like him. Way to go me! Whoo!
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
Calling himself a washout is the only thing he got right in this article. Plain and simple: engineering school did not fail him, he failed engineering school.
IT folks and such also count as geeks, and there are growing numbers of them - less engineers.
Why the continent for Asians, but countries for the rest? Because all Asians look the same, right? Of course.
And, by the way, Indians are considered Asian.
Does that student really think he's going to learn how to be a chemist 25 minutes at a time? Do you think you can become an accountant, an author, or a journalist in 25 minute increments? In college, class time isn't where you learn everything you need to know about the subject at hand. Class time is meant to answer questions and summurize the material you have already studied on your own time. That is why college instructors are called professors or lecturers, and not teachers. Learning is your own responsibility. If you can't follow the lectures, get a tutor or start a study group.
He didn't wash out. He failed. They don't hand out 4.0's in college like they do in high school and his poor ego couldn't take it. He signed up for classes against the advisor's warnings. What else should he expect. By his own admittance, he had little to no interest in the subject matter. He never should have been in the major in the first place.
Good riddance.
I'm willing to be this sounds a lot like the experience of most engineering majors. And you know what: good. Engineering isn't supposed to be easy or glitzy or sexy. You either get things right or they're just flat wrong. A civil engineer doesn't get credit if "most" of the bridge stays up. A chemist doesn't get acclaim if their product only harms people instead of killing them.
Granted, it would be nice if more TA's spoke english. But you know what won't help that? English-speaking students who bail because it's "too hard". Call it a downward spiral, a self-fulfilling prophecy, or whatever you want.
And it would be nice if professors were better teachers. But they're not professors because they're good teachers. They're professors because they do research. And even at big, hoity-toity schools, student tuition is a tiny fraction of the school's income. So even if you're forking out $40K/year for tuition alone, you're still a small part of the equation. Don't delude yourself into thinking that you and your classmates are paying your professor's tuition. You might be adding an extra 10% - 20% on the top, but it's research that puts food on their table and a roof above their head.
Part of the problem is the "get-rich-quick" mentality most people seem to have nowadays. I don't want to actually put the hours in to get paid, I just want to make it big in real estate. I don't want to actually deal with solid right-and-wrong fields like engineering, I want "gaze-into-the-crystal-ball" fuzziness of day trading that might get me my piece of the pie tomorrow. Screw waiting until I retire! I want it now!
So combine one part get-rich-quick with one part affirmative-action-grading (i.e., HS grades not reflecting actual performance because that might hurt poor Thomas and Dakota's feelings), sprinkle with one part actual-challenge, and toss in one part less-than-ideal-teaching, and you've got the perfect mixture for a decline in engineering.
-jdmP.S. Nyah! Get off my lawn, you stupid kids!
There is a lot of emphasis on hard work, but no amount of hard work is going to turn a mediocre intellect into an engineer.
It's a fact that intelligence is heritable. It's also true that the generally more intelligent have decided not to have many or even any children.
At some point the country will be full of mediocre intellects and no amount of hard work or instruction or money for education is going to turn them into good engineers.
Now I'm sure the author of the article is above average. But I suspect he was deceived by inflated grades at public school into believing he had what it takes to be an engineer. There is a degree of innate talent that is required for engineering, but I think he probably lacks this.
It's interesting how ready people are to accept their own lack of talent for running, or throwing, or catching a ball, while also praising another with those talents. There is little envy. But somehow we're all supposed to be equal in intelligence. And if we just "work harder" or have "better teachers" we can all be Einsteins.
It doesn't work that way.
Like it or not, intelligence is strongly genetic.
The main thing with engineering, is that it is the HARDEST of all bachelor degrees. Period. I'm half way to my mechanical engineering degree, and it is the most difficult thing I've ever had to do. How many bachelor programs can you think of that 3/4 engineers who graduate, are on the 5 year plan. Very few. I mean seriously, I look forward to my liberal arts requirements as they are a way for me to beef up my grade point. The only thing that's great about engineering, asside from the 100% job placement, and good pay when you get out, is a sense of achievement. I actually feel like I'm accomplishing something when I pass a test. When I get a B on an engineering exam I'm fricking proud of myself. I don't get that when I take a humanities test. The work is tough, but doable. Work as a team with others that share the same boat as you. Support your peers and they will help you out. Take the initiative, most engineering classes aren't about what you know, but how hard you are willing to work. Also, understand that while you are in an engineering program you will have NO life. You came to learn, and not to party. An engineering degree is just as much a testament of your willpower as it is your knowledge. The only advice with facutly though, is to tour a ton of institutions. Find the smallest one that has a good program and go there. It's a lot easier to learn in a class of 20 then in a class of 200.
wow, funny to FINALLY see this in print. I had his experiences exactly 20 yrs ago. Mid eighties were supposed to be science=heaven, but all we got were bs TA's who couldnt even friggen tie their own shoes much less teach an advanced class. I went from a 3.6 hs average to a 2.0! haha it was all supposed to be about "weeding us out". Yeah, they weeded us out and every other american who wanted to get a science education. I'm still bitter to this day, because i was demoralized and felt stupid. I actually studied hard in my engineering class, and, with a "d" (which was definitely my first ever) looming, i pleaded with the fucking ta to give me the .5% to put me over the top(basically 1 question on one test). He didnt, and i basically flunked out of the program. I don't really regret getting a dual psy/anthro degree, but deep down, I WANT TO BLOW HIS FUCKING BRAINS OUT MOTHER FUCKING BASTARD.
ahhh...i feel better now....
When engineers screw up, people can die. When a writer writes a shitty column, people just make fun of him.
The guy couldn't even perform a simple titration. How hard is it? You just slowly let the liquid drip until you see the slightest hint of pink. If he couldn't even follow the instructions for such a simple experiment, he had no business being an engineer.
But wait, people say, "Is an engineer ever going to have to perform a titration on the job? Why should we care about stuff like that?" Well no, you probably won't be many engineers performing titrations and all the other bullshit you do in freshman chem, but if you don't have the attention to detail required to do it right, you're either going to kill people or lose your company a lot of money.
Yes, there are definitely problems with engineering education. Yes, we need to find a way to get professors to be a bit more interested in their students. Yes, we need professors who are capable of communicating (although my five years of experience at Georgia Tech have shown that it really isn't as bad as he says). Yes, the language barrier with foreign TAs and professors can be frustrating (but that's going to be a reality in the workforce too).
But his solution is to make it easier. "Inflate the grades!" he says. Everyone in engineering knows that the good schools don't inflate their grades, so they understand the achievement that a 3.0 GPA represents. So sure, we need to do a better job of teaching. But that doesn't mean we should make it easy enough to let morons like this guy slip through.
There's nothing like starting with 200+ ppl in your major, only to have the bubble burst. By the end, there were 21 (incl me) CompE's in my graduating class.
In my experience, the engineering dept. was pretty good. It was the MATH dept. that SUCKED.
Just wanted to drop one note.
Slashdot very frequently runs alarmist articles about the state of engineering, computer science, and so forth.
While there are market shifts, if you were to just look at Slashdot for your information, you'd get a *wildly* distorted view of the world. You'd think that the entire career world is incredibly volatile. The people who are worried about their career post, and so you get the perception that the majority of people are concerned about what's going on.
If you want to do engineering, computer science, or whatever, just go for it. You'll be fine. Until a computer can drive my car, display custom paintings on my wall each morning, understand what I'm saying and speak back to me, until all this happens and beyond, there will always be demand to produce new computer systems. And as long as there's demand, you can get a job doing it.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Although he has several complaints a large number of them is summed up in this one
Write textbooks that are more than just glorified problem set manuals.
He seems to complain over and over again that nobody is explaining to him how to do the problems. He wants a magical subroutine that he can run a question through that will give him an answer. I'm teaching mathematics at a university so I've seen this same request before. The vast majority of the time you do a little prodding and you find that the student has spent no time struggling with the problem. They looked at it, didn't immediately know how to do it, then came to my office hour. Given very little prodding these very same students are often able to solve the problem while I'm watching. So what's happening? These students are refusing to struggle with a problem. Spend some time with it in their heads while not knowing the answer.
The reality with teaching math (at higher levels) is virtually none of the learning happens in the class room during lectures. Fortunately I have the luxury to be able to work shop problems in class where I say virtually nothing and the students figure out parts together in groups. But even better than that the vast majority of the learning will always happen with the assignments. In other words you can't learn math listening; you can only learn math doing.
I remember my undergraduate physics education being hard, sure. I also know that the grad students I compete with from Europe and Asia beat the hell out of me in my first year of grad school in many subjects. They were not taking "science lite" in college. How is it that with harder, more complete courses other cultures are able to put out a high percentage of science and engineering students?
I did an engineering degree. Sure, there was abysmal teaching (they weren't stupid, just most academics make poor teachers) and tough subjects but what exactly do you expect?
Fantastic solution though, lower standards for more engineers! Is this the american way? Smart countries would try to prepare students better for careers in engineering and find better teaching methods.
Most people who come out of engineering degrees have no real practical clue about anything as it is, we're taught a mass of theory with very little practice, above all that is the biggest issue in engineering education. Experience breeds confidence and right now any engineering student who isn't working in an engineering firm during the degree has it tough because the unknown is always daunting.
One of things I found when I was in engineering school was that high school did little to prepare any of us for college. Even the advanced/AP physics, chemistry, and calculus classes in highshcool were nothing like what we were doing right out of the gate in college. In most high schools the smart kids don't really have to do much homework or really try to get an A. I know when i was in school you could sleep all day and still ace the test if you just skimmed the book right before the test. The high school ciriculum just isn't up to the standards of the top engineering schools. Often students think the subject is easy and possibly even fun because it requires so little work to understand and use in high school only walk into a university and be overwhelmed by the subject matter they thought they understood. High schools need to step up their sciences to a higher level to make the transition smoother. Having the universities dumb down their ciriculum is just silly. Part of the problem too was the way the college classes were taught. Often in a subject (most notoriously physics) we would jump around as to doing things algebra based one chapter, then physics based the next reguarless of whic hwas more appropreate for that chapter. Often we would be using a style of math that was coutner productive to what we were doing, but had to do it certain way to make the professors happy. Another problem is that in the univerity setting the subjects of engineering are often abstract, limited to examples in textbooks and drawing on the dry erase board. Univerities need to introduce the students sooner into more of a working type setting. Each major should have at least one class per quarter that is all about the application of what the students are learning in a semi real world way. I know the ME and EE students really got more out of building the solar racers in their spare time than they got out of all their classes their first two years. Actually seeing how the math was applied to a real world problem often was what made the subjects they were studying click. I know the CS majors learned more making games and actual projects that had real implementation than the stupid example programs in the books that had no real world uses.
Probably one of the wrost articles I've read in a while. I think ol' Kern needs to understand that university isn't high school. Thankfully the system worked, and he got weeded out.
The oil industry world wide hires anyone but engineers, I'm talking about accountants became reservoir engineers, yep is true, when I've applied to jobs the interviewer is a guy with some technical courses on petroleum but no formal engineer formation (i.e. Not trained to think), most of the time they asses me as a threat to thier careers and own ignorance so I'm dropped from the candidates list.
Learn from me, you don't need a degree in engineering to practice engineering these days, is all "networking", get some minor bullshit courses and you are in.
And then people ask why the world reached peak oil status (the oil production world wide will decline), the only thing that peaked was the intellect of those within the indutry.
Word of advise, don't waste your time with an engineering degree unless you wanna flip burgers the rest of your life.
A former petroleum engineer.
I do not think that Kern said things in the right way, but I generally agree with him. Look guys, engineering is not about pain and suffering. An engineering curriculum should help you learn about a limited set of facts and theoretical basics that will enable you to solve complex design tasks that real-world situations will throw at you. It is increasingly obvious that the ability to design creative solutions to real-world problems is at a premium (and this is not something that a typical curriculum teaches). Pain and suffering are not part of that equation. Kern is pointing out that there is an unnecessary amount of pointless heartache, wasted hours in lectures given by inept teachers, and horribly crafted textbooks. To those of you who get on people's cases when they complain about the inefficiency of the engineering-education situation: Aren't you just bragging? Or lying? Or just beating your chest because you were able to manage the pain?
I think the most important part of his article came at the end:
I'm not sure if Kern meant this in the way that I take it, but to me he hit it right on the head. It's about design. The ability to solve certain known sets of problems computationally is essentially solved--it can be delegated out to machinery or people in other countries, even if they don't speak your language. The most interesting problems facing people these days are those that are not well-defined, or "wicked" problems as some would call them, and the only way to solve them--to engineer a solution--is by a human being, well-versed in the subject area, to creatively apply their knowledge to the area.
Good design can't be automated, but this automation is exactly what the American engineering environment is producing, because of this machoistic culture that has taken root. Engineering students are rewarded when they are able to play to a system that assesses everything that is quantifiable. Those things that are not quantifiable (such as the ability to effectively solve problems with teams or design new solutions to problems) are not graded and therefore students can't afford to spend time honing those skills. I think Kern is right; we have an engineering education system that is inefficient, and I think that system is producing exactly the wrong kind of engineers for the American engineering environment to be sustainable in the future.
and the hot chicks are all mass comm majors!
when they ban enctryption only criminals wi$21*J *#JF$%!@#$':
I'm in my second year, doing computer engineering. And yeah, it's hard. I wish I had the courseload of my girlfriend, who has less than half the number of hours in-class a week than me. But at the same time, I'm actually learning how to do something. Not how to get a masters, not how to get into law school, I'm learning *real* skills. At the end of my 5 years (doing co-op) I'll have 20 months of experience as well as an education that means something. I'll be a professional. Yeah, maybe I'm young and foolish and the real state of things will become clear to me later on. I don't know. But at least I'm not like the thousands of arts students taking classical studies, anthropology, and women's studies.
/. instead of studying, and I'm getting through it fine.
Also, I RTFA, and how the hell can you screw up a titration that many times??? Once you do it once, you know roughly how much you're gonna need, so next time you slow done 5mLs before that. Not hard. At all. Anyone mathematically inclined who puts in a fair bit of effort can do well enough in engineering. Trust me. I read
Anyway, yes, students are leaving Engineering. Good. All the more demand for me to cash in on.
When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl
I remember my engineering physics final exam. Only six problems. Three could be done by the freshman class if you knew more physics material than what was covered. Two had to be solved by graduate physics students before the TA's could figure out whether we actually got them right. The last question hadn't been solved yet in Physics.
Who wants to compete with engineers in India who are happy to work for $50 a month?
Yes, there are some jobs that must be done locally, but the supply/demand ratio looks grim. Seems like a lot of hard work and expense to compete for such dismal prospects.
Still, engineering makes a lot more sense than computer science, which in turn makes a lot more sense than math.
Law school is the only way to go. An easy $150K after a few years. In the future, all USA citizens will make their living suing each other.
1) Engineering programs are generally-speaking harder.
2) It's hard to party the night away when you have 20 FSA's to compile into REGEXes. See 1)
3) Some see it as ``grunt'' work with no future, and in particular, no economic future due to dubious hiring practices abroad.
Hence, while previously a lot of people went into say, CS, because it was a money tree, now the only people hanging in there are those that actually are interested in CS.
I was on the fence whether to mod or post on this thread, but you just tipped me to post.
You're right that engineering schools in general aren't conducive to learning much liberal arts/history/whatever (though some may do a decent job of it). Science curricula, however do allow for more of the liberal artsy stuff, and will let you go into engineering later if you want, or something liberal artsy (with maybe a technical twist) later. I did physics (and eventually went on to a PhD in it) and managed to study abroad, take history and lit classes, be involved in extracurricular stuff that I'm still glad I did 20 years later. My current job is on the line between science and engineering (tips back and forth), but also occasionally benefits a lot from my liberal education.
A friend did a similar thing, doing chemistry and art history, and uses knowledge of both as a preservationist.
Another friend did biochemistry, also managed to spend a year abroad as an undergrad, is extremely well rounded in science and literature , and went on to a PhD in physics and is now a professor of engineering.
So my advice, if you like science and engineering and technical things, but also like the "soft" stuff, is to go science. Some schools even (in my opinion correctly) put science in the same college as literature and arts, rather than with engineering. Science (the real deal, with calculus and all) is as much a part of a good liberal arts education as art and literature are. If you go with a non-science major, getting into an engineering job or grad school could be hard, and if you go into engineering it could be tough to get into a non-engineering field. If you do a science major with a strong emphasis in a non-science thing, you can probably go either way.
If you want my opinion as to what science will be hot for a long time, it would be neuroscience, but you'll be better at it if you do it in a physics or chemistry (or electrical engineering) department rather than a dedicated neuroscience dept.
I originally started out as a Computer Science major at Georgia Tech. I, however, left that school after my first year, and am studying Psychology at a state university. (I didn't leave because of grades either -- I left with a 4.0 GPA)
I'm way too social of a person for my own good sometimes, and I had a terrible time finding friends who were interested in anything that I liked. Nobody to go to concerts with at the various great venues in Atlanta. Plus, the school was fairly "greek or die" with respect to socialisation, and I despise the Greek system by and large (and I did, in fact, pledge a fraternity despite that) so my options were a bit limited. My impression of most of the other engineers/science majors there was that they were very antisocial, introverted people, whereas I was not.
Having switched to a school with few engineers, and changed my major to an outwardly-focused one, I'm so much happier.
I would bet there are other engineers/computing majors like myself who are smart enough to "hack it" in the program, but for one reason or another, simply cannot deal with the lifestyle that goes along with it.
At most universities, professors gain esteem and money for their research, not for their skills as teachers. The hiring committees ask, "How much have you published?"; not, "Do your students respect you and value your courses?"
Indeed, from the perspective of many professors, undergraduates are just a distraction. Thankfully, a handful become grad students -- then they have real value.
High school graduates need to choose their universities more carefully, selecting ones that claim to be undergraduate or teaching universities, not research institutions. Universities can be prestigious for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the undergraduate experience.
Research is important, and people who are brilliant researchers should be funded. In fact, the best researchers should be at separate institutes where there are no classes to take up their time. But universities in general should put teaching #1, research #2.
It's continents for Asians, but countries for the rest because it's damn obvious who's Russian, German, or Indian. Americans have to ASK which country the other Asians are from since they DO look and sound alike to people who aren't actually FROM Asia.
Well, personally, what I seem to mean when I say "Asians" is "people who appear to be from countries in Southeast Asia (i.e. China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, etc.) or descended from people in those countries". Would it be acceptable if I said "Southeast Asians", then? I certainly don't trust myself to guess since my only real clue is probability, and Southeast Asians understandably tend to get annoyed at people who refer to them as "Chinese" despite their country of origin. I _can_ tell a Chinese person from a Japanese person, and _maybe_ I'll pick up if someone is Korean, but I'm not willing to risk insulting someone by guessing his or her nationality wrong. How am I supposed to refer to these people?
-insert a witty something-
A lot of the time the professors just don't understand how LITTLE you know. It is like you are in 1st grade and they are reaching down to 7th grade to try to introduce 12th grade concepts.
I had a very smart college professor (Dr. Verma) who was notorius for being a very hard class (even weedout levels- 50% drop/fail rates). Here is the tip that gave us close to an 85% pass rate that semester.
I figured out to ask him for a "trivial" example. When he gave a "trivial" example, at least half the class would understand what he had been trying to explain for 15 minutes. And often, the understanding was like "Oh my god- that's so easy, why was he saying it so complicated?"
Sometimes, all you need is just to comprehend a little edge or corner of the problem and suddenly the entire problem just peels open for you. The professors are speaking in jargon that you barely comprehend- if you can get them to drop the jargon and give an easy example in english, it may help.
Good luck!
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I went into engineering school straight out of high school, thinking I was cock of the walk. That was a mistake. I ended up dropping out after looking at a steam table in second year EE class (yes, Virginia, Not-So-Smarty-Pants U had us studying thermo in electrical engineering) then figuring a) there was no friggin' way I would _ever_ use this and b) even less did I need this course hosing my GPA.
Spent five years hanging out with rock & roll bands, mixing sound, having a jolly old time, and returned to EE school when I wanted to sharpen up my technical chops. In the interim, they'd dropped the thermo requirement in favour of microprocessor machine language, so the coursework was also a damn sight more relevant.
Got my degree, got to work, and haven't looked back. Sometimes a body just needs a bit of perspective to get his butt in gear.
Before writing anyhting, I have to admit that, I am a science PhD dropout. Science is hard. It can't be taught easily, it can't be spoonfed. You cannot learn it by osmosis (more properly diffusion, but who cares?). The reason taht "verbal learners" are finding it so difficult to hack it in the "hard" sciences is that these fields are INHERENTLY QUANTITATIVE. This student--and many others like him--has probably read _the Dancing Wu Li Masters_ or _the Beautiful Universe_ and came to his classes expecting that things would follow similar lines of argumentation. The nature of the Beast (hard science) doesn't allow for this. You have to re-train the way that you conceive of things. Quantum mechanics seems coounterintuitive? Check your intuition before you reject the theory. The math works, and all the bowling-ball-on-a-trampoline analogies are of little to no use, no matter how many popscience books they show up in. I think that the real problem is that we're not putting high schoolers through enough of a hell in their course work. As a friend of mine from Singapore once said, "the American secondary education system really gives your ego a blow job." To Mr. Kern: good luck, man. There's no shame in leaving science if your heart isn't in it. If you didn't love it, there's no way you'd have ever been at all good at it, and that would have made you even more miserable. You're better off for having done it. PSno one cares what your grades were in college once you get your first job, which probably won't be based on your grades anyway.
One thing to note about engineering (lets think about electrical engineering for x86), we have a lot more to learn then someone 10 years ago who was working with x86 (286s, I believe...but that's just a random guess because I know it's old) and such. We didn't learn a good foundation (everything at the time) and then spend the next 10 years creating/staying knowledgable in the advances. We have to learn all these major, new advances in addition to the foundation that an electrical engineer got 10 years ago. It's such a difficult field because of it's quick pace and new technologies. We went from having 4 registries to having numerous (at still growing) number or registries, in addition to caches, and everything else electrical.
It's a lot more difficult for someone to start out now in electrical engineering then it used to be, and it's a lot more difficult to do electrical engineering then any other engineering degrees b/c of the fast pace of electronics.
NOTE: Later half of last sentence is an opinion with limited knowledge.
Article is junk, so here is the real reason people don't go into
engineering and science: money. I am a postdoc, but despite that
advanced degree (PhD) I am making 35 K per year. When I continue
as a professor it'll be 60-70 K per year. The job is in many ways
like that of a lawyer (read books, figure out what happened before
you, and develop stuff on top of that), the pay is at least 2-3
times less. I am in it because in some ways I feel like doing anything
else is a waste of time (translation: doing science is the menaing
of life), but for most people this is a foreign thought so no wonder
they don't go into science. Want more engineers and scientists in the
US? Easy. Raise salaries 2-3 times. Make sure starting salaries for
engineers are six digits and you'll have plenty to choose from within
5-6 years.
I agree with many of the points in this article and the Parent here. but bear in mind, I am not a subject of the American education system, I was born, educated, live and work in Australia.
I studied Electrical Engineering for 2 years before dropping out and switching to Computing/IT. The reason for my choice, Well, at the University I went to the Electrical Engineers were few and we were lumped into the classes and courses of other streams, Mechanical, Civil and Mining engineering studies. Whilst there are many common themes and subjects that these streams share, what they don't is vastly different. We once brought our concerns to the assistant head of the school who told us that once we finished the subjects we would see the relevance, he once told us "Electricty in a circuit is just like water in a pipe"
That coupled with the fact that many of the good teachers were leaving the school to be replaced with Engineering lectures that had, at best, an arts degree and a year or 2 in management, I decided that the time had come.
But once in Computing and as a whole the greater IT world I discovered why this is so. Universities need to pump out students to get reputations, the reputation leads to more students, Students = Money. Subjects are not taught at University, they are presented. the learning is more or less up to the students. however this creates problems of understanding. I know a 4th year honours student in computing who was afraid to install a sound card.
That aside the University enviroment helped me because I formed a good group of friends and since we were all in the same boat we managed to pull each other through. It's that communal enviroment that still makes University worthwhile
I now work at a company that offers IT Training and Certifications. we have many students, and while I would love to train each one to fully understand the Microsoft Windows system so that the MCSA exam material becomes second knowledge to them, that is not what they pay for, they pay money to get a certification. Students = Money, and if you have 'Money' you can equal 'Student' anywhere.
The reason I highlight this fact is that these are the expecations that our students have, that they can buy an education, and unfortunatly there is very little evidence to suggest that this is not true.
And this does not even begin to question the examination practices that simply prepare students to memorise slabs of text and develp no real problem solving abilities. Which is also a major problem in my eyes, in IT and Engineering. Why is this the case? Because standard mutiple choice/solve problem X for Y is much easier to mark, and we can get a computer to o it. who wants to read through an exam and see if the student has developed an understanding fo the material. Not us in IT certification it seems.
But how do you fix the system, change the expectations and really teach the material? University does prepare the students for the real world. it's a pity that this is what the real world wants.
Leg Godt
Who would want to be an engineer, when there are plenty of construction work jobs available in the sprawling suburbs.
When we can just import cheap H1B visa folks at 1/4 the cost?
It doesn't make sense.
So we all end up working at Wendy's. Hey, that's what the Powers That Be apparently want.
Well, to the untrained Western ear, Asian accents sound essentially the same. But I can hear a German or a Russian or a French accent 10 miles away. It has to do with linguistic similarities. Same (mostly) alphabet and everything. And for the record, I can't tell a Western person's nationality by looking at them anymore than an Asian person. It's the accents, not the appearances, as you presume.
I Want To Believe
Gawd! Just this one paragraph says it all!
"...Making excuses for these people is pointless. If you paid thousands of dollars to learn Differential Equations and got a gibbering 24 year old who barely understands them himself and can even more barely speak your language to explain it, you just got robbed...."
Not only robbed, but pistol-whipped into a coma!
(Stolen sig) Remember: it's a "Microsoft virus", not an "email virus", a "Microsoft worm", not a "computer worm
I had to reply to the parent post because I couldn't believe what I was reading. What rubbish!!!
Colleges are too full of people who think someone is going to hand you something. The most important thing you can do in college is to learn to THINK FOR YOURSELF. If you have passion for the subject matter you will either have talent in the subject material and naturally, without much effort, excel in that area. If you don't have much natural talent your passion will carry you through. If all the proffessors spoke broken english and all the TAs where all horrible SO WHAT! Learn it on your own! I don't mean to be an ASS or rude, but I went to college with too many whiners. Too many people who didn't know what a nights homework was. I was in the honors portion of my Computer Science program and I was also one of the ones who spent the most time every day studying. I didn't like most of the profs and didn't show up to the classes when attendence didn't effect the grade. When it did, I showed up and studied for another class while in the front row. Your proffessors are not always going to be there to hold your hand, why expect them to be at all. Learning is done on your own. One goes to college for the piece of paper that saids you have achieved something officially. Again, learning doesn't happen at a university, it happens in your mind!
Also, I, as well as the rest of honors portion of the computer science department had plenty of time to 'party'. I think we able to do it, because we never waited to the last minute, we never accepted the minimum, and we helped each other(not because we needed help, but becuase like people, naturally come together). We had study groups where all were welcome, but only the smart ones really benefited. We benefited because we worked on all the problems before the study session. The slackers came, not even knowing the problem set.
Furthermore, the smart ones got keys to the computer science building and came during off hours. These where the times when all the slackers have gone home. We would not only do homework, but we would work on extra things. Like exploring a branch of a text book that is not officially covered in the book or doing something that wasn't in ones area of computer science. For instance building computers. Several of us bought computers and ran our own demonstrations on building computers. IT WAS THE STUFF WE LIKED TO DO!
Man, I can go on and on
Also, who cares about grades. I and anyone with passion for what they were doing naturally did better than our peers. So what if the highest grade of the class was 50%, I took physics classes where the highest grade on a test wasn't over 30%. SO WHAT! I didn't have to worry about it because a test only measures what the prof decides to test on and it is all subjective. In the end the whiners would whine enough, the prof will realize that he can't flunk everyone and the top people will get really good grades. Regardless of the grades, the ones with passion will learn what they need too. If you can't get the grades or your ego gets bruised, then my thought is that you have lived in a society where whining gets you somewhere, where last minute is good enough, where finding things out for yourself is foriegn. If that is you, then it is good that you changed majors. My thought is I hope you have that passion for whatever major you choose, because life is too short to spend that kind of money and time on something you don't have passion for. If you wouldn't do it naturally for free then don't major in it! Certainly don't whine and say it is the system that screwed you.
ok, that is my two cents, crap, that is more like 100 cents...LOL
Again, don't mean to offend anyone in particular, just speaking the truth plainly
It was like this when I went to school 25 years ago and writers have been complaining there are not enough engineering students ever since. The real problem is that there is not enough to be able to pay them $20K/yr when they graduate like most other majors without a graduate degree.
I started out in Aerospace Engineering here at Texas A&M University. The classes were really hard and the only thing I liked about it was the computer graphics. I changed majors (they were about to kick me out of engineering anyway) to American Studies, but I'm still taking Engineering Design and Graphics (ENDG) classes because I love working with 3D graphics. It looks like ENDG is going to be offered as a minor soon, so I'll be able to use it as a minor, which my degree plan requires.
I am now happily married and have made a transition to a comfortable and exciting data analysis position at a big IT company. Though I no longer use much of what I learned, the entire learning process gave me maturity and poise to enable me to make the transition. I am probably not the norm and it's possible I've been very, very lucky. But I wanted to share my experience since there are many, many good reasons to pursue engineering/sciences even though there might be less material rewards.
"You just wait," I thought, gazing upon them like the ant regarding the grasshopper in the summer. "You party and blow off homework now, but in ten years, you'll be making merely wonderful money as investment bankers and consultants, while I'll be getting laid off from a great job at General Electric."
Business increasingly treats math & science talent as fungible and freely exchangable across borders, in an effort to cut costs, and salaries fall. And we all know how much social status and respect we afford to those skilled in math & science, right?
Add that to hit-and-miss quality of instruction, and in some cases, an intentionally withering gauntlet to run, and I agree with the author. The truly smart are looking elsewhere.
Me, I studied Mathematics.
Tweet, tweet.
If Business wants more Engineers, its simple--just increase the average engineer's salary.
Whenever you hear a businessman complain about an engineering shortage, what they are _really_ doing is griping about how much the engineer's salaries are eating into the golf and yacht budget.
I'm going through the second year of an engineering program myself (computer, rather than chemical), so I can sympathize with the author's poor professors and TAs, and with overwhelming courseloads. But I have to say that his summary judgment of the problem as bad teachers is in error, for that exact reason. It's not a unique experience. In fact, though I admit I have never attended class overseas, I doubt this issue is unique to America.
If there are not enough engineers in our country, it is either because we coddle too many college students into being wimpy, or because the public school system trains students to expect - to paraphrase the author - formulaic work that could be easily completed by robotic chimps.
Glog!
hear my story, and learn why the United States lacks engineers.
There is no complex cause for the engineering shortage. It's all right here, in his story. Only in his story. Hear it and learn.
Remember: Kern = real good at math and science.
Just because he got a 43 on a physics final, don't think he's dumb. Oh no! It was the system. The bad TAs. The ignorant teaching he got. He's quite smart, you see. Why? Well, because he says so right there.
"Discreet Mathematics" is "how Kern dropped that class along with the rest of his engineering course load and signed into liberal arts classes, all on the last day he was eligible to do so, because he couldn't stand the stress, abuse, and lack of comprehension anymore."
Apparently, getting a 2.7 GPA is considered abuse. Maybe he should be calling his lawyer. We don't want his inner child stressed any more.
I know what you're thinking, and you're wrong. She was as American as I am. Spoke perfect colloquial English.
It seems that if someone can't communicate with him, we are to immediately assume that she's not a native English speaker, because, well, it couldn't be HIM that's the problem, right? After all, Kern is smart.
If you want more engineers in the United States, you must find a way for America's engineering programs to retain students like, well, me
No explanation for the self-centerdness needed here.
Personal note: I say these things as a man who went through something similar. I graduated High School with honors, got scholarships to college to study engineering, then found it exceedingly harder than I had ever imagined school could be. I matched Mr Kern's 2.7 GPA my first semester. I endured for a few years before Engineering school kicked my ass, and I flunked out. Not just the engineering program, but college entirely.
And I moped.
Then, six months later, I decided I was going to finish what I started, and I worked for three years just to earn enough money to pay my way back to finish college. Three years after I re-enrolled, I graduated with a Bachelor's in Electrical Engineering.
I graduated. I didn't bitch that the System wasn't to *MY* liking. I didn't whine that education had to change to keep more students like *ME*. I didn't complain when I had bad TAs as instructors. I didn't automatically assume that when an instructor and I couldn't communicate, it was due to their lack of mastery over the English language. I persevered.
That's what *I* did.
I didn't write an article blaming my quitting engineering on the system that didn't adapt itself to keep students like *me* around.
That's for a certain liberal arts major to do.
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
I'm in my 4th year...and still have at least 2 to go. Did the teachers suck in the beginning? yes. Did I take classes from teachers that had seemingly intimate relationships with the chalkboard they talked to throughout class? yes. Did I quit, hell no. I stuck it out, and am still sticking it out. Turns out, once I got past the weed-out classes, and GE(still have some GE to take, *shivers*, ugh), the classes were awesome. Also turns out, some of that crappy teachers I had for weed-out classes....they are good teachers. Many of them have no patients for freshman-sophomore students because they know most of them can't hack it anyways. Once I got to upper-division, they assumed I was there for the long run and start to teach/treat me like a real person.
I've often wondered if I should have chosen a different major. But that would be taking the easy way out. So what if its hard, I'm an engineer, that's what we do.
anyways...gotta get back to writing that lab report, and not partying, not studying, and not usually getting A's.
The broader point is -- in a casual conversation do we really have to carefully qualify and specify every clause and vocabulary point in each sentence?
For what it's worth...
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Chinese, Japanese, and Korean sound pretty different to me. The slavic languages sound pretty similar.
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I agree with your basic point but you could mistake a north american for a european based on accent (french). And I agree that we are better educated on european accents tho that is changing with more movies like Hero, Crouching Tiger...for chinese and Anime for japanese.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Basically he went to some grade-inflated little nursery school his whole life and then discovered that he had no skills to survive in a real school. Big shock there. The real problem is that his high-school was not tough enough. He should have properly found out that he wasn't the genius he thought he was in junior high and high school and been steered away. I guaranty those courses aren't as tough as he thought they were, it is not as if foreign engineers have it easier. They have it tougher from the beginning so they self-select.
I went to a trade school to get a diploma in Computer Engineering and then decided to try engineering via a bridge program into 3rd year. Everyone who took this path did very well because they had touched the subject matter with their hands and not just on paper. Instructors at college were orders or magnitude better since their only job was to teach. Learning the fundamentals, math or otherwise, from them in a class of 30 or so people was a better way to go than enduring the first two years of University. I honestly don't think I would have made it through the first two years due to the abysmal teaching and academic BS yet I graduated from 3rd and 4th year Computer Engineering with straight A's.
Passing engineering is all about learning how to do stoopid math tricks, getting old exams and social engineering to find out what will be on the exam. No genius neccesary.
Having worked for a few years I am now considering doing something that doesn't involve computers...not quite sure just what yet...
No it doesn't. He should have gotten a clue, like I did.
In high school, I got mostly As, and a few Bs. I Graduated top of the class. I was admitted into one of the top engineering schools in the country. As an undergrad I sucked academically. I didn't study enough. I never did in high school, and everything was fine, so why should I here? At first the low grades were a shock, but several of my engineering friends were also getting similarly low grades, so I accepted them. Eventually I was put on academic probation. By the end of my sophmore year, academic probation turned into academic suspension.
Suspension was a shocker, and you would think it would have been a wake-up call, but it wasn't. I went to another school. I only halfway studied there. Afterall, this school was beneath me. I belonged at the best school, and would be back after a semester I got some grades, but enough to get off academic suspension, but for some reason I submitted them anyway. I got a form letter back. It was pretty short, and I don't remeber what it said, but until the day I die, I will always remember the last line:
Only then did I get a clue.
I realized I washed out, because I was a slacker. I stayed at the lower ranked school. I began to study. I knew what classes I had to work at, and which ones I didn't. I started to get high grades again. In the two years after that letter (I took an extra semester), I managed to turn around my gpa from 1.7 to 3.0. It's lower than I would of liked, but given where I started, that's an accomplishment.
The point is, I managed to turn it around. That guy could have too.
I'd say it's more likely that it's easier for the typical person in the US to place a Russian, German, or Indian accent than to distinguish between different East Asian accents.
Everyone can keep dissing people who bring these problems to light, but I don't think it will have much of an impact on the fact that students are not finding this type of education every rewarding. They aren't going to sake up one day and say, "Oh yeah, it's my attitude!". They're going to accept the fact that the education in these fields just plain sucks, quietly set down the institutional thumbscrews, and walk away.
If you had mild autism and therefore could not learn the subtleties of human interaction well enough to become an effective salesman, what would you become instead? How would you deal with the fact that life is unfair?
I met this guy who was a web developer, worked hard, overtime , for crap wages, etc. He got laid off sent out 200 resumes and not getting a single interview. Now he owns a convienience store and rakes in the bucks. He went and sold $900 worth of champagne he bought at Costco for $4000 on New Years Eve! I met a guy who was an ex-molecular biologist doing mortgage brokerage which is glorified undergraduate business school homework and was making $26,000 a month out of his freakin apartment (NO this was not an MLMer trying to sell me shit, an actual good friend of a family member).
As an engineer I wouldn't recommend going into it unless you really like it and you're really good at it. Even if you're good you run into a big wall called marginal income taxes and the alternative minimum tax, if you work for a salary, once you start making six figures.
Going into engineering for the money is far more attractive for people who live in countries where the wage scale is wildly skewed to the point where you can live very well on a regular salary if you're an engineer making $20 an hour because the guy who works at the supermarket or cuts your hair or makes your clothes or cooks for you makes $2 a day (80 times less than what you make) not the $12/hour or even higher union wage they're making here.
Tech Central Station is where you go when you can afford to pay someone who sounds intelligent to generate some buzz that supports your talking points... but what are those talking points? As far as I can tell, he ignored his advisor and he thought (thinks?) that Engineering courses are supposed to be easy. What the hell?
[o]_O
I am so tired of the phrase "hold your hand" when discussing the process of teaching and learning. It is a cop-out. You know, there IS such a thing as a good teacher.
What is wrong with doing your best to make sure your students are learning? What the hell do they pay tuition for, anyway?
Please explain to me how a Prof. can be proud that half their class failed. What is there to be proud of? The only thing this tells me is that the teacher is incompetent. Why is it too much to ask that students get in the 80's and 90's on tests instead of 40's and 50's? What does this do to their sense of confidence in their professional competence, when they graduate knowing that in any other context they would have failed? Confidence in one's abilities is very important when one is making tough decisions and working on complex problems. And I do not mean fake confidence. I mean the confidence that comes from having a thorough foundation in your field, and the ability to reason and solve problems in that field. All of this can be taught, and it does not mean "holding their hands."
My experience in the engineering school was horrible. I transferred to a lesser-known school after getting a 4.0 in my freshman liberal arts classes (including math) at a major university. I finished with a 3.1 GPA in Computer Engineering, and that included two years of a foreign language.
I had the same experience with incompetence as this guy. The profs just could not teach, or just didn't care about the students. It seems as if "teaching" was number 34 on their daily list of Things To Do. Basically, the people who did best were those who: cheated; had relatives or friends who graduated a few years earlier and saved their tests; lived at home; or knew the material beforehand. There were a handful of good teachers at the school, and they made a HUGE difference, and nobody ever accused them of "holding hands." They TAUGHT.
Many students enter college young and unsure of themselves. They don't realize there is a real possibility that they are getting ripped off in their education. I am sure as the average age of the student body population gets older, their will be more voices such as this guy's about the incompetence and the inefficiencies of the engineering schools.
Textbooks are chock full of errors - I once spent three hours on a section of transistor theory, only to find out in my (5-minute max.) office hour that the text was wrong. When one is taking 15 credit hours, one does not have time to waste on this bullshit. We pay good money for tuition, and we deserve competent teachers and quality textbooks.
If I go into surgery, I want my surgeon to have had an education where he was taught the material, used textbooks of high quality, had confidence in his abilities, and had professors who cared about their student's learning the material. Everything that a typical engineering school does not have, from what I have been reading throughout the years and have experienced myself.
To the people who constantly use the refrain "they shouldn't hold your hand through school," I say this: then don't go to school. Go to Amazon, buy the textbooks, and learn it yourself. What? It's too hard? Oh, you want someone to hold your hand?
In HS all your course material is spoon fed to you by the teacher. It's nothing more than taking notes and then memorizing them in time for the test. Engineering is different. You have to teach yourself. That's the point of engineering. The teacher, from my experience, is there to guide you when you have issues, but they certinly do not spoon feed you the material in the way that it was done in HS. As an engineering, you have to be smart enough to figure it out on your own, because in the real world, there is never anyone to spoon feed anything to you. Most of the time, engineers have to do stuff that hasn't been done before, and thus, they have to figure stuff out themselves. If someone liked how things were in HS, then they should stick to liberal arts.
Engineering school was great, the best thing I learned was absolute fanaticism for solving problems. Nowadays I'm a "software engineer", whatever the bleep that means (it pays the bills), but I continue to astound my fellow workers with fanatic desire to solve problems and "make things better" whether product, daily workflow, other people's realities, deranged possessed customers, what have you. My puny little Bachelor's took 7 f*cking years, due to the lovely amount of real world experience I acquired during college, what fun, I enjoyed it immensely and actually believe that it prepared me for the Iron Fist of Reality after college quite well.
Enjoy yourselves...
engineers that should be engineers realize that some classes/professors will be more hassle than they are a learning experience; they will always be a part of the mix, because research is an integral part of higher education. but those should-be-engineers realize there is a greater goal to be achieved; sure, your chemisty or signals (for you EEs) class may have been a waste of time, but there's plenty of material out there to master it yourself. 99% percent of the time, it comes down to effort for those who fail, plain and simple. Go to class. Spend a few hours on the homework and reading BEFORE you ask the TA.
A very large percentage of what you get out of college (or insert your favorite educational institution here) depends on what effort you put into it. In all schools there are boring teachers, dry subjects and near worthless textbooks. It's been that way for years.
Yes, it's time for a change! But we are the first ones capable of making a difference in our own lives, and in addition to the lives of others.
All the worlds indeed a
The system tries to drive people into engineering for a number of reasons. I won't enumerate those reasons because they aren't the point of my comment, and will only serve to divert conversation.
What is important is that the system drives people into careers that they are uninterested in. Not only that, but most engineers can look forward to careers of disdain and humiliation as students who did not have their aptitudes become their bosses, making more money than they do, ordering them around, and in general, holding them in disdain because they know that their underlings understand their trade better than they ever will.
When I returned to graduate school, an associate of mine who will remain nameless gave me the following advice. He told me to take a few business classes and jump into an MBA program. He himself holds multiple degrees in engineering, but never reveals this in conversation to business associates unless asked. While I won't give away his position, he makes far more money than most engineers (though, I do know engineers who make more).
I've chosen not to follow this advice, but I would never tell a student who has no interest in engineering to go into it. Science and Engineering are hard. If you don't actually enjoy them, you'll find yourself doing tons of work, only in order to find a career where you have to do tons more work. You can look forward to all of the things listed above.
If you think that the reason that US companies are outsourcing labor to India is because we have a shortage of engineers in the US, you are allowing yourself to be mislead. They're outsourcing to save money, and because they don't understand the value of producing something. They've been mislead into believing that a company can have value added merely by acting as middlemen in the process, rebranding technology to sell you a name. Most of these companies burn out quickly, the only people understanding what this does to the company running away with hefty sums of money as they enjoy the quick blossom of profit that can be realized by laying off everyone that you pay, while riding the last few products that they produced into the ground, and scurrying off the sinking ship.
In short. You've been lied to. Let your kids grow up to be what they want to be. I don't know a single engineer who is jumping into an MBA program who thinks that they'll take a pay cut for this. I certainly don't know any who think that it's a tougher career path. I do, however, know that about 1/5th of the people working at the company that I left (counting only those who were working there when I started, a scarce 4 years ago), to come to grad school, are doing just this.
As a student just starting his third week of engineering at Smartypants U. I have to report that i'm not having similar issues. While I do have one or two TA's are aren't competent at what they're doing they've been honestly trying their best. As for the actual professors I have two department heads teaching respectivly the intro physics and chem courses. Those professors are great. That being said I know this isn't the case everywhere. Money certaintly helps get better professors, fair or not that is the current situation. (financial aid however is also at very high levels from what I can tell)
Now the person I think who has hit upon this topic best is Dean Kamen the creator of the controversial segway. Whether or not your support his commercial endevours he's started one of the best programs to ever touch students. FIRST robotics (http://www.usfirst.org/) is a program that introduces to high school students (and through the lego league program middle schoolers) to what it is like to be an engineer. In his openning address to the competition's participants last year, he talked about how kids in the United States just want to hang out and in essence be lazy. After taking a tour through India however he saw droves of kids trying their hardest to learn everything they could, desperate for jobs that americans have begun to it seems believe are a birth right. Its an issue that his program that while becoming international he is hoping will help with these issues in the United States.
After being on a team for four years I learned almost everything that is involved in an engineering project. Given a strict deadline of six weeks to produce and ship a competition ready(heheh...) robot is just like reality, stressful, long nights(after school till 8 or later) and full of rewards. I've learned more than how to use machine shop tools, design parts in professional cad software, troubleshoot or write code for a robot. The program forces teams to fundraise and seek funding just like any real company. I've had to hold fundraisers, contact sponsors, cultivate relationships with companies and hunt down wealthy alumni for funds. The main goal of the program is to as the acro-name states, For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, to inspire and foster a love for science and engineering. So my team also transformed itself into a PR machine(a vital part of companies in todays world) producing everything from corporate giveaways to hosting robotics expos in places as big as the world financial center in downtown manhattan.
Now I realize I sound like some brainwashed zealot, but ask any person who has participated and you will get a similarly positive response. After four years of participating I managed to wrangle a summer internship at an engineering firm actually doing engineering. Also now here at collge, while many students here can easily rival my abilities in a classroom, when it comes to what matters, making something and getting it out there in the public I'll have a huge upperhand. I know my dad, an engineer at a small company now looks for FIRST robotics experience on the resumes of new workers.
The educational instutions of today still offer education in the same way that they always have. FIRST offers people a chance to understand what engineering actually is about, creating things! The number of people that my team converted to engineering was sizable. The program is now relativly large at close to 1500 teams and I'm sure that within ten years the effects of it will be felt throughout the engineering world. Former FIRST robotics members will spread throughout the industry filling it innovation and a new life that is sorely needed.
~Ian
Proud Member of Team 694!
engineering major, give me a cookie.
But you know what? Science and engineering are hard. That's the honest truth.
Responding "tough jerky" is an educational cop-out, though.
I started as an Electrical Engineering student. I ended up in Math, and certainly didn't make that switch because techincal subjects and abstract concepts were too hard for me.
I made it because the Engineering Department at my university seemed more interested in throwing down a withering gauntlet than helping one through. Meanwhile, my math professors seemed genuinely interested in teaching and exploring their subject rather than cultivating a sense of professional pride. Especially the honors freshman calc -- I've rarely seen more work put into trying to make a curriculum and classroom *work* in the post-secondary world.
Which is why in the end, though I knew what I'd learn from a Math degree would probably be less vocationally useful, I picked that direction. If I'd wanted nothing more than a challenge, I could pick up a few Schaum's volumes and try for the PE certifaction test. Probably still could. But I wanted an education and room to enjoy the college experience. And if I had it to do over again, I think it would have been smarter to have done *more* of that, and to have worked for a math minor and liberal arts major, rather than the other way around.
Tweet, tweet.
This is pretty much spot on. Engineering is difficult, and does take a lot of initiative outside of class, but there are just inexcusable problems in many engineering programs:
1. Learning is not something to be survived. The grueling pace that some schools pride themselves in is only teaching students how to hate something they once loved. Proper work loads and allowing students time to absorb knowledge instead of cramming is the right path to creating good engineers.
2. Professors need to be more focused on teaching and less focused on research. I can't tell you how many "research" professors I had that had no business teaching. While many were brilliant in their field, they did not have the language skills to pass their knowledge on to others...and this is not just a problem with foreign professors...english speakers alike were unable to express ideas in their most basic form, give clear consise explanations, or evaluate students progress by the questions asked in class.
3. Engineering schools need to encourage their students, not frighten them. Having been in a class where a professor asked everyone to look to their left, and then to their right, and then say that two of the three of you would be gone by the end of the semester...I can tell you that this is NOT a motivator. Engineering is stressful enough without the threat of "weed out" classes hanging over your head.
4. Concepts first, then the math. Many times I was asked to "not worry" about the concept and just do the math...I would eventually "get it". Well, there are a lot of people that don't just "get it" without an overview of the concept being taught. Case-in-point: In senior level classes I still heard students answer with "because the equation states this is true" when asked to explain a solution. They still did not get that equations were a model for a system, and not an explanation of it...a model based on empirical evidence, then best-fit mapped to an equation and tested for accuracy. To many kids, "it follows the equation" was the depth of their understanding.
Yeah, I know, that's a fantasy, but if you are going to have to basically teach yourself and you can demonstrate you know the material, why waste money being herded through with the rest of the cattle? Ah... I just answered my own question there, didn't I? Colleges are transforming into multinational corporations right under our noses. It isn't about teaching those students, it's about cashing in on that government subsidy and raiding the bank accounts of the impressionable.
Hey, studies funded by various universities show you'll make an extra million dollars in your lifetime with a college degree. Funny, but I've gotten one and I'm not seeing it. With the money I dumped into college, I could have made an extra million dollars in my lifetime by investing it in a mutual fund according to historical data provided by Fidelity. What a crock.
Too bad I can't get a 'do-over' for the last ten years of my life. I would take that money I wasted and invested it in *gasp* myself! You know, like... starting my own profit generating business. Then, in four years time, I would have been well established, and the desperately broke college grads would be begging me for a job they could have gotten with a high school diploma. Live and learn. I actively discourage the younger generation in regards to college, but 18 years of active brainwashing is powerful stuff. That's right old men from a different college era, children who have been brainwashed, mod me Troll. But ask a late twenty something what their college degree has done for them and they'll more than likely tell you, "Bupkiss."
I thought he was going to write about how the career opportunities for engineers are limited, how job outsourcing overseas leaves fewer jobs at home, or how engineering pay and benefits fall behind some other career fields. But no, he writes about how HARD his engineering classes were. Reading between the lines of his article, he just didn't seem to LIKE studying technical subjects which is, after all, what an engineering education is all about. If you don't LIKE technical subjects, it doesn't matter if you are a bright person with a good high school record, you will probably fail at the college level, just as he did, unless you have an unusually high amount of self-discipline and tolerance for pain. Why did he even start in engineering in the first place? His article did not say.
You have to WANT to do those problem sets. The TA, the professor, the lectures, the text book, and the problem sets are there as tools to help you learn but no one will hold your hand and walk you through the stuff at the college level, unless maybe you are in astronaut training or something.
The article has been archived here. The link in the parent no longer contains the article.
The strange thing about this article is that most people consider US science/math/engineering undergrad classes too easy (this is based on first hand observation).
It seems that Kern got one thing from his engineering education
Kern = real good at math and science.
He now thinks that he can modify adjectives with other adjectives. Congratulations Kern, if nothing else, you now speak English like an engineer.
YES!!! I've wasted how much money? for this shit?! Aiiiiigh. I'm one of the flunkies. Oh well. What a nightmare. Some people can suffer through it. Me? Who the fuck knows any more. But personally, I don't think money is everything. And I don't ever remember what it's like to be starving to death on streets, so it might actually turn out to be a whole lot more enjoyable than getting a tech degree where I go/went to school at.
Funny, my test word to prove I'm human is "atrocity". I can't think of a better word to try and sum up.
"Because it is a passion. I get to learn new things that nobody else knows yet. I get paid to do that"
Which is a fabulous way to *personally* choose field to study and work in, but if you're worried about general demographic trends surrounding such choices, you can't just encourage people to tough it out for sheer love of the subject.
Tweet, tweet.
Many professors are professors because they want to be in higher education, but they have to do researcy-type-things to keep their job and keep the money coming into the school in the form of grants, and that takes a lot of work and time. So, even if they did want to be there just for the betterment of the students, oh well.
I'll bite, since everyone's sharing their stories.
I'm a Junior Biomedical Engineering major in a program that's ranked in the top 10. Our engineering school as a whole is ranked around 30, or some such.
At this school, BME consists of taking standard engineering courses (with the exception of two biology courses, chemistry, introductory course, and a 300-level BME-specific course) until you're a Senior, when you'll be able to take courses that are related to your field of interest. Yep, all two of them.
Anyways. Every pure engineering class I've ever taken was completely and totally worthless, in terms of what I got out of the class. The closest most professors come to explaining a concept is mathematically deriving a formula. Engineering can't be taught in a class environment. In can be clarified, but in order to actually understand it, you have to work out problems, and lots of them. In fact, there have been several times in classes where I went into the lecture with an elementary understanding of the subject, and I came out of the lecture more confused then ever.
The worst problem with being an engineering major is that you're being driven towards industry. There's little, if any, discussion of the research going on in the field. I felt like I got screwed, because the introductory course focused on the research that each professor conducted within the department, but by the time you get to the 300 level course, they're assuming you're all going to be designing marketable products. That's one thing I miss about the pure sciences they actually focus on the theory and recent research, wheras engineering courses usually focus on industry and 50-60 year old material.
Engineering degree programs aslo have to adhere to ABET certification. ABET certification requires you to take 45 credits of engineering topics. This becomes a problem when you want to take science courses as your electives. Any science course that doesn't fall under the jurisdiction of the engineering school (Chemistry, Biology, Math, some Physics) do not count as engineering topics.
And even if you do make it into industry, you'll often find that all the hard work you spent to fully understand PDE's and Fourier Transforms was pretty much worthless, as every moderately challenging mathematical problem is taken care of by computation. Most of the guys I run into live their lives out of reference books and modeling/computation programs.
Honestly... I'm an engineering major and I can't understand what the hell people are thinking when they set out to work in industry. While the starting pay is substantially higher than average when compared to that of other disciplines, you're more disposable and moving between industries is quite a pain (as you have to be retrained to deal with that industry's product). And then there's IP.
I had a professor tell me recently that education is now a business. Until schools figure that out and make engineering sexy, they're going to see lower enrolment and lack of funding till it implodes.
I used to want to disagree with him - but now I can't help but realise how right he is.
I think we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg. It doesn't help that if you're smart, you're a social outcast, and that money talks, no matter who you are or how good you are.
*Sigh* I just can't stop picking on this guy. This article is, however, garbage. Kern goes on to complain that his tuition dollars are funding the research of a professor whose teaching skills he feels a bit lacking.
So why was he kept on staff? His research was outstanding. My tuition dollars at work.
Apparently Kern fails to understand where the funding for this professor's research come from. It's a simple fact that that professor's research probably bring far more revenue into Smartypants U than his tuition does.
I'm typing this quickly before bed, so forgive grammar errors, I'm not planning on rereading it.
I had taken a lot of AP classes in high school, good at math, high SATs, you get the point. Going to school as a CS major killed my love for programming for a long time. I started coding cheesy apps when I was 13, and by the time I was a senior in high school I could build windows apps and was dabbing in my own OpenGL 3d engine (no AI, just run around inside it and stuff).
At a professional level? No, but that is why I was going to go to college.....and yes I went to a "good school" that is rated as one of the top 10 on the west coast for CS.
I quickly learned that many of the profs had no real world experience and had no idea how to program in a professional environment. We had one elitist jerk off prof everyone hated that would say "If you didn't do at least Calc 2 in high school you shouldn't be a programmer" This guy got his Ph.D. in like 1965, and had never once worked as a developer but would speak with utmost authority on any topic.
Other profs would come to class high or really hung over, and it became obvious the whole CS degree meant absolutely nothing.
I knew guys with 3.75 GPAs graduating and they were going to work as support people because their 4 year CS degree didn't teach them one damn thing about writing an app in a professional environment.
Think about this, these guys had a 4 year degree in CS but if you set them down to write an app you needed for a project they would have no idea where to start.
I changed my major my junior year after I had passed the class designed to "weed out" those that couldn't hack it with an A (311).
I have worked in the IT field since I first went to school, have a A+/Net+/Security+, and thinking about my MCSE or CCNA.
Then one day I decided to just sit down, and get back into coding.
I have learned more in the past year practicing coding in my free time than I ever did at any time in college, and I am enjoying it again. I do a little bit at work but not much, and feel solid enough that I may apply for a programming job in the near future.
Come to think of it, the people I know coding full time for a six figure salary have never had one college class.
The prereq classes went ok, but after getting into the program I was extremely disappointed. I've got many years of academia, and also had an assignment as a Special Duty (assignment) instructor teaching GPS in the Air Force. I authored an accredited, collegiate level course from scratch, with a great deal of help from academic advisors. What I observed were instructors with no knowledge of the topic, slides that were direct from the publisher, syllabus cut and pasted from previous semesters and other academic shortcuts. The one professor who obviously was involved in his field and took the time to create a syllabus that prepared the student for real software engineering work was being kicked out for, according to the school's dean, being "too geeky". I couldn't believe I was hearing this.
Just to further illustrate my point, the database class was taught by someone with a PHD in education, but never touched a database or could even structure an ODBC request. Java was dropped the previous year as one classes' prereq, yet the first class he expected us to be programming Java, and threw an O'Reilly _reference book_ as a textbook for an intro class. I love O'Reilly books, but reference books by them are meant for people who already have a good grasp of the subject. Finally, the software testing professor couldn't get the .NET studio to load well into the 3rd week of class. Classes are only 4 weeks long, and our final grade was over 50% weighted on getting a program to work in the .NET lab. I couldn't wait and got my home computer working and asked if it would suffice (since at the time he still couldn't get the lab to work). He didn't remember saying it was ok for screenshots and I got a B while people who just downloaded from ASP.net and read narratives from webpages got an A.
Keep in mind...this was all in a grad school. I dropped the program out of disgust even though I only had 3 or 4 classes left.
I majored in computer engineering. There were some excellent professors, who could explain topics, make them interesting, and genuinely add material that I couldn't get from a book. There were also TA-taught classes, some of which were good; some not. And there were classes taught by profs who were teaching because they had to in order to spend the rest of the day in the lab and it showed.
I also have a spanish major. While I doubt any of the profs that sucked were running off to a lab, they certainly existed. And there were also excellent professors as well.
At any reasonably large school there will be alternatives. And no, I don't mean performance art. For every TA who admits he's just arrived in this country 2 weeks ago (and has the "can extract topic but doesn't actually understand questions" grasp of English to prove it), there's a TA with a genuine flair for teaching and a sufficient command of English to communicate. Everyone's different; if your brain doesn't deal well with accents and needs an unpopular teaching style to succeed, you'll have (not-insurmountable) problems. But most people can arrange to find classes and professors / TAs that work for them. Intro classes are great for this - there are often 4 or more TAs working with a given professor, giving you plenty of opportunity to pick one that you can live with.
The system's hardly perfect, but it's neither as bad as the article suggests nor as isolated to engineering.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
There is a significant portion (at least 10%) of my engineering class that did not go on to engineering positions. In general, I do not think that it was a voluntary decision, but one caused by a lack of hiring. I can't believe that companies complain about a lack of skilled people when they refuse to hire the decently qualified people out there. One company I worked for actually knows that they did not bother hiring much during the 90s, and now they have an experience gap, and yet they still aren't trying hard to actually fill it.
He sounds like someone who couldn't hack it and now decides to bitch about it. Frankly I can't believe this guy is willing to say he failed "Discrete Math" on the web! Of all the math I had to learn discrete was the easiest. In fact I remember my alarm not going off, runing to the exam hall 1 hour late and very stressed, did my exam in 2 hours instead of 3 and feeling like shit and still passing.
Let me put my own experience here for those who are still in University to think over and maybe learn. I didn't do well in the beginning of my undergrad either but by the end of it I was doing very well because of a few things I learned.
You got to be the most persistent bastard ever if you want good grades. So the TA sucks at explaining, so the Prof writes one equation and talks 45 minutes without adding any more notes. It doesn't matter this is your first taste of adult life, it sucks and you will learn to live with it. No matter how bad your TA is they can still help you out a bit but you need to meet them half way. Some of the ideas being taught are difficult and everyone has a slightly different way of understanding them. That's why you can't expect the TAs to be able to explain the ideas well. The Z transform of this or that is so familar to them they have no idea you still don't remember how it's done. So write down whatever they say, ask questions and if you still don't understand ask more. And always do your readings! Before class if you can manage it.
Reading things 5 times can help. It's interesting how people never seems to learn this fact. It works like this: 1st time you are confused and annonyed by the end of reading, 2nd time you make out what hey are trying to say, 3rd time you start to get it, 4th you got it, 5th you are crystal. The difference between that kid that gets 99% every exam and you might just be that he was reading his text book over and over and only tried once and gave up. Depending on how smart you aren and how much affinity you have with the topic in question you might only need to read once or you might need to do it 10 times over the course of 2 to 3 days. If you have been to your classes and made sure you did understand what they taught before you should be able to work out, maybe with a little help from your smartie pant friends, what they are trying to teach you now.
Speaking of classes you are most likely not one of those people who can do without them. So go to them. They help structure your time so instead of playing games at home all day you actually maybe learn a little.
Don't expect you are smart. Few are ever that bright that engineering is a breeze. This Kern guy's basically complaining how hard it is when to my eyes the problem isn't his University so much as his high school building up his expectation and giving him a false sense that he's really smart. He also thinks he's motivated enough and can do the math. Well I think he's lying to himself cause if you failed discrete where u learn things like graph theory.. how can u expect to learn harder math where you do have to calculate? Also so he got a D it's no big deal he could have retook it and got something better. Almost everyone I know in engineering at a bad grade at some point or another.
My comment is A-FUCKING-MEN!
US Colleges SUCK! We pay huge amounts of money for teachers that can't teach their way out of plastic bags let alone speak fucking english, and play silly stupid games just to get a degree.
It's a joke. I left school and learned on my own, and I mean I learned LOTS MORE on my own. I dare say my knowledge level is above my peers who went to college for the same field. And at this point, I am making more money than anyone I know who stayed in school.
Its sad, I wanted to learn lots of college but the bullshit and the teachers who can't speak english and the 300 people in a physics classroom crap just left me say fuck it.
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
"Every one of use who's stumbled through this kind of course and walked out with a 45% average and a B+ knows that something is rotten in the state of Denmark" Sorry about that. Every one of us might not know that something is rotten in the state of Denmark -- that's a Hamlet reference, for you humanities-deprived folks.
Tweet, tweet.
I went to a UC school, got a BS in a scientific degree, and now have been working at a UC school as a sys admin/help desk manager/special ops. I started out my degree as a Computer Science major, and couldn't get into the full major. My GPA was a 2.73, and the required GPA was 2.75, and they rejected me. I was not a lazy student, but I have to say I had trouble with certain classes, for instance....we had to program MANCALA for a lower division class which consisted of programming AI with C, and implementing a binary tree. somewhat implemented the tree, but the AI was hard, didn't get much support, and couldn't turn in the assignment. I wasn't the only one. However, I was one of the few students that refused to copy code from someone else, and didn't turn in someone elses work. Half the class would copy code...standing around printers, reverse engineering applets, what have you. It was disgusting. Bottom line is there were at least 5-6 'weeder' classes, and while 40% of the people who got weeded out did rightly so (lazy CS students who were in the major for the money), I think I was part of the 15% who REALLY had a passion for computer science, but didn't know how to ask the right questions and didn't know where to go for the resources to fully learn what I really wanted to learn in this UC institution. It was pretty tragic. Here's the kicker: almost half the students that did make it to the upper division did copy code among other things (heard some rumors about a few "CS babes" having slept with TA's) to make that 2.75 GPA cutoff. I guess I should have "worked harder." What do I do now? I am a successful sys admin/help desk manager for the same school, doing IT work. I get paid 38K+ a year, not too bad for my first job, but I think you are right to assume that I didn't get in this field for the money, but I got into it because I felt very strongly about the science, about open source, about improvement in code architecture, about object design, etc..I do not have an engineering degree, but I am still young and I want to pursue an MS degree in engineering. However, my GPA really suffered from these weeder classes I spent countless sleepless nights studying, while my friends who partied all day got 3.4 GPA's because they were majoring in sociology or anthropology. Don't get me started on the inequities of engineering GPA's and arts major GPA's. Any engineering student will tell you there is no fucking way you can apply the same grading scale between Number theory and Appreciation for music. but sadly, they affect your gpa in the same manner...they're both 4 units. what makes money: research what doesn't make money: great teachers the university system is geared towards research, not teaching students on how to be good engineers, sadly. the idea of vocational schooling or applied schooling is nonexistent. Frankly, with the money I spent in this institution, knowing what I know now, could have used that money in some good stocks, open up a fat ROTH IRA account, trained myself to be a master in a job that I probably would be making much more money out of...I could have been a badass programmer, etc. etc. Some people might argue that you need a degree, it makes you a well rounded educated person....really? I was already well rounded before I got to college...so I really don't buy the whole argument "but if you don't go to college you will not be well rounded" Bullshit...if you are not well rounded by the time you are in college, any attempts by professors trying to shove well roundedness down your throat while you sit uncomfortably in a class of 400 will not make you well rounded either, so don't give me that crap. Plus if you love learning and have a lust for life, you cannot not be well rounded. The university discriminates against undergraduates on all levels, compared to graduate students or post docs, or plain researchers who are enslaved by professors trying to get a name for themselves. Professors really don't care much about teaching undergrads. My high school teachers were a lot more into teaching than most of
Insinct is stronger than Upbringing - Irish Proverb
Boy wake up. Don't give BS excuses for the Finger Banging you did in your Smart Pants...yada yada..
Now I should question the crediblity of scores in your high school and other tests. Did you cheat ? What is that you were introduced to in your Freshman year that your physics grades dropped from 90+ to 40ish ?
If you can't dance, don't blame the dance floor. If you don't get mangoes to eat, don't tell they were sour. Accept the fact you were a loser and incompetent rather than pointing dirty fingures at renowned professors and scientists
I've got a couple points of advice for anyone headed to school...
Highschool does not count for anything. Your not prepared, you don't know anything. Good grades/success at highschool is like your mommy telling you that your smart.
Poor performance in a non-sheltered enviroment does not indicate a fault in the enviroment.
If you want to learn something: READ A BOOK! You are an idiot if you think that you are going to learn something by just attending class and doing the assigned reading.
Thats right, your STUPID if you think one text book that has half a chapter on a concept is going to prepare you when other people have written ENTIRE BOOKS on that subject.
I can remember when the internet didn't exist, now you have Google. Your a waste of skin if you can't find an answer to 90% of any and all random ass esoteric questions that you will ever have, within minutes.
Every one concept that the instructor introduces, you should be able to extrapolate 3.
You should know if the instructor is wrong. If don't know if what your instructor is saying is right or wrong, you don't belong.
If the only way you can hack it is in an enviroment where the correct answers and understanding are spoon fed to you, how in the hell are you going to hack it when your out in the real world and can't ask someone to explain something because *nobody* has ever done it before.
If life isn't fair, then why would it take a fair and reasonable ammout of work to produce results. When I was in the Army, I busted my ass to learn everything I could, above and beyond the 'standard'. When it comes time to put up or shut up, God ain't going to come down and give you an 'A for effort', the only way your going to go home is if make it happen, no matter what it takes. Same applies to being a chemical engineer or anything else. NASA can't put people on Mars by virtue of a 'reasonable effort', the only way NASA puts a person on Mars is by virtue of *making* it happen.
I graduated from Lafayette College with a Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Lafayette is mostly considered a small liberal arts college, but it has a very strong engineering program. Total size of the school is about 2000 students. It is considered part of the Little Ivy League, though formally that doesnt really exist.
In my opinion, you get what you pay for. Lafayette was small enough that I knew every professor and every student in my department. They knew me as well, and my grades in every class, even outside of the department. I don't think you can get that kind of personalized attention at a larger school. All of the classes were taught by professors. Never was there a T.A.
I mainly learned from lectures. The expensive $100 dollar a pop books were usually references guides for me. The professors knew their craft. And the course load was reasonable.
One issue that we had that first, my class was the first class of ECE majors. The college had decided to scrap their EE degree in favor of a mixed ECE degree. My class was the only class that was allowed to chose. Everyone before us was an EE, while any new freshmen were all ECE majors. The fact that we were the guinea pig class may have lightened the work load a little, but the move from EE to ECE was just shuffling around some classes and adding some Comp Sci classes.
On the flip side though, the whole college was also changing from the 5-3 system to the 4-4 system. The 5-3 system is you take 5 course for 3 credit hours a semester while the 4-4 is 4 classes for 4 credit hours. As an engineer I always had to take 5 classes regardless. But any class taken outside of the engineering department was now beefed up with usually more writing (Damn those humanities requirements).
Again, you get what you paid for.
Small school, low student professor ratio, less chance to do some meaningful research, less known name on the diploma, and also usually in the middle of nowhere(Easton, PA isnt exactly a happening place)
Larger school, large city (usually), large classes, less interaction with faculty, more known name, bigger research being done.
I enjoyed going to Lafayette. I had enough free time, each semester usually only had 1 maybe 2 really difficult classes, while the rest were easy.
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The article to me has some glaring misconceptions. The main one being that the writer believes that has a highschool science star he should have been able to master an engineering degree. AP courses help, but american highschool are woofully inadequate in preparing students for college.
I went to an international school and took the International Baccalaureate http://www.ibo.org/. It is an internation highschool degree program that tests and scores you on an internation level which is recognized by universities around the world while a regular american highschool diploma is not.
Grade inflation is not just occuring in colleges but start at elementary school. Getting an A in the US is just too simple. Too many straight A students are not really all they are cracked up to be.
Thus, I dont see a problem with the teaching being to difficult, to me it seemed like he had an over inflated ego by being the valedictorian of his class and never actually learned the way to learn in highschool. The fact that he switched completely out of the science field just shows me that he shouldnt have been an engineer.
I also think that the fact that the comp sci field has become increasingly more popular over the years, it is taking away a lot of the students that would have gone into engineering in the past.
The article reads too much like a blog entry then a news report. No input from the college stand point nor is there a student point of view of those who have managed to go through the program where he was successfully.
Flawed article.
Iceman
Simply put: If you want to learn how to program, try a Software Engineering major, rather than Computer Science. I have spoken with many students in Computer Science and I cannot hold an intelligent conversation with them. 10 seconds into a conversation about programming, and they are completely lost. By the end of Sophomore year, I probably had more programming experience than a CS graduate. Anyways, Computer Science is what it is... but I think a lot of people go into it wanting to program, only to find out that it's a bunch of theory instead of hands on coding. Software Engineering gets you down and dirty with the code. For instance, we aren't alowed to use STL in our programs until we write them all from scratch on our own. We can't use c# or managed C++ or mfc until we write apps using oldschool Windows API. I dunno, the stuff you said just reinforces my opinion of Computer Science.
If he thinks studying to be an engineer in American Academia is a bust... he oughta try actually being an engineer in corporate America. I had some good teachers, some bad teachers, learnt some good things, feel like the system dropped the ball on some others. For all that, I kinda miss it. The fact is... that while there are still some Cool Places To Work (tm) in corporate America, most will concede that it ain't what it used to be. And that job satisfaction working as an engineer on the average, continues a downward trend. That Scot Adams has been so dead on for years now, and that it just gets "better", is perhaps most telling. I wonder sometimes if this sense of career frustration bleeds back into the academic circles. And in some ways, it's probably good that it does. If I'm beating my head against the wall more than ever with PHBs I work for/with, it's probably best that the kids coming out of school learn to cope with and still produce in a similiar environment while in University Land.
One man's pink plane is another man's blue plane.
This is HYSTERICAL. A school with "engineers" and millions for so called amature sports, and no one can cob job their own desks back together? glue, screws, a clamp? the tech leaders of tomorrow who will take us to mars and give us mr. fusion reactors? HAHAHAHA! A simple door off a hinge repair, and NO ONE does it in a year?
sounds like some people are studying being "elite" more than learning to become practical engineers.
No, I don't want to hear "it's not your job" either or you pay blah blah blah. Sometimes you just chip in and get something done, don't wait for an invite in the real world.
Down the street from me is sort of a weird intersection, the weeds grow real high quickly, blocking the view so you can't tell if a car is coming around the corner or not making it hazardous. Ya, the county mows it once a month, sometimes that isn't enough. solution! Take weed whacker in trunk of car, stop, get out, and HORRORS OF DE HORRORS do something practical that benefits the neighbors and me just for the hell of it! And not get paid! And it's not my job! And it costs time, and uber leet mad weed whacking skillz! The horrors!
MUAHAHAHAHAHA!
not trying to flame, but really............organize a dang fix up party with your buds and some brewskis some weekend, fix the desks and the doors and the leaks. Maybe after the school newspaper covers the action (don't leave out the contrast with the stadium, nice set of before and after pics, etc), it will embarass the school and alumni enough so they will fund the maintenance department better.
As to bad professors, no idea other than I hold that all bossess need to work the loading docks and the assembly line once in awhile, just to keep them straight, so all professors need to go out and get non academic jobs once in awhile. Pass a law or something.
... and those of us who stuck it out, who were able to look past our GPA's, who were able to realise "hey, getting a 55% on an exam is OK if the average was a 45%",
If the average on a test is a 45%, it just proves that you are not covering (properly, at least) the material you are testing on. Either your test is broken, or your lessons are. One or the other should be adjusted. Stop testing on things you aren't covering, or start covering everything on the test decently. Getting a 55% on an exam should never be okay...though getting a 70%-80% on an exam should be about average.
This is probably the only thing that annoys me more than classes where everybody gets 90%+ on the test...also a sign of a broken class.
Engineering was too hard for me, but since I have a high opinion of myself, the problem isn't me. So I suppose it should be easier for everyone. I mean, if can't do it, really nobody can. Give me a break. I'm a CS major at Berkeley, I've been in classes with plenty of people who can't hack it. The reason fewer people are going into engineering is that they can drink their way through four years of a poli-sci degree, get all A's anyway, and go to law school to make much more money. If people were paid more, if jobs were secure and not being shipped off to India, if science weren't as demonized as it seems to be in this country, if tech companies treated their workers better (I'm looking at you Electronic Arts) then maybe we'd have more engineers.
Cuz it's a lot of hard, difficult work, yet the payback (at least in the US) in terms of money and social prestige is not commensurate.
In high school I had grown accustomed to math classes that featured clear, helpful instruction from teachers who liked to teach and excelled at teaching.
After all of his running down of Smartypants U, he has to go on and rub it in our faces that he went to a private high school!
You are like the 10th person that has told me that, I just think it is really sad that you go into Computer Science and have to learn on your own how to actually use your degree, unless you want to be a professor.
The same reason IT has a shortage. We get no respect, only decient pay, and have some paperpushing motherfsker over us all the time. I see it day in and day out. Sales weenie drives the new car, has good house and is making 80k a year for going to meetings, looking at reports, and doing market/sales speak. Meanwhile the people who are actual _doing_ the work get shit on, are making 2/3 thirds that and are stuck to their desk.
I reciently had to get sign off for a tech conference. I showed how it would increase my productivity. Declined. I went back the same day, the same damn day, and spun it as making contacts and strengthing relationships and they threw money at me. Insisted I stay at a $200/night hotel when all I wanted was a rack for $60 or so.
If not for the fact that I enjoy IT I would be out doing the same. But I cant sell my soul and look at myself in the mirror. It appears the way this whole country is heading (US) Everyone skimming 5% off the top but not actualy doing anything. Bitter? Oh hell yea. Justified? You better belive it.
Every microecon 101 class makes a simple fact very clear: There is no such thing as a shortage in a free market economy. Prices may fluctuate, prices may become astronomical, but in a market where prices are allowed to vary naturally, there is no such thing as a shortage.
So what's happening with the dwindling ranks of engineers? Why do we have a perceived shortage of engineers? Simple; engineers don't get payed as much as business school grads. Why not? Simple; business school grads are educated, at length, in the practices of negotiation and garnering of wealth. Engineers are not. Business school grads are taught that buying anything, including labor (which is what engineers are), at the lowest possible price, is the measure of success. Engineers, generally, create because they love it. What's the natural outcome in this situation? Artful, frugal negotiators on one side, non-negotiator idealists on the other. What's the natural outcome? It's not rocket science - pay for engineers is low.
So what? What does that have to do with it? Simple: When was the last time you heard of an engineer making over a million dollars a year? Pretty rare, yes? How about managers? Lots, right? How many engineers who are actually doing engineering do you know who make more than $200,000 per year? Not many, eh? How many managers? Which is harder, business or engineering school? So, what percentage of people with feet in both streams are going to choose engineering? Once again, it's not rocket science - it's going to be something like zero percent.
What he says in his article is true - engineering school is hard, and the professors see teaching as a necessary evil. But guess what? If we paid for the skill, there would be no shortage. There is no shortage. There is simply an infrastructral unwillingness to pay. Labor doesn't get paid as much as management. It's a rule that is as old as the free market (older probably). But engineering is hard, and getting harder - the easy stuff is all being done by computers now. And the value of good engineers is getting larger - computer aided engineering is an extraordinary force multiplier. This isn't the old-school labor that the old-school rules are based on. Today's engineering labor generates enormous wealth. But the wealth those engineers are generating is not reaching them, even though they are having to work harder and longer hours, and even though the bar for entry is being set higher every year.
Still not convinced? Look at the changes in patent and other IP standards and practices. Who owns the IP? The creator? No, a corporation. Who gets the money the patent generates? The creator? No, the corporation. Who decides what to do with that money, the engineers? No, the managers. I'm not necessarily saying it is wrong, I'm saying it is. And what's the latest change to patent law on the table? Officially throw out first-to-invent in favor of first-to-file. Management, paying legislators, to create laws, that tip the scales further in favor of the managers. Infrastructural unwillingness to pay labor (which is what engineers are). And the hired help in Washington isn't even raising an eyebrow - it is standard operating procedure.
The answer is simple: If you pay them they will come. If you dont, they won't. It's not a magical mystical formula. It's microecon 101. There is no such thing as a shortage. The US simply doesn't know how to pay labor (which is what engineers are) what they are worth.
One final note before I click "Submit": Ninety five percent of the well educated managers in the US are completely aware that there is no such thing as a shortage. It's one of the most basic things taught to any student in business school. The stories you read about corporate execs claiming there is a shortage are just PR. It's a negotiating tactic. They're good at it, and they will, once again, get the hired help in Washington to give them a handout (more H1Bs, more tax advantages to offshoring). And it will continue to erode our nation's ability to compete. And it will continue to make a mockery of the elegant scientific theory that is free market capitalism.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I was a brilliant high school math and science student. Could do it like breathing -- it just came to me. And I aced standardized tests, got accepted to a dozen top-flight colleges.
I also grew up in a state with a top-flight State U. Thinking it was a step down I enrolled in their math dept, thinking it was easy. And CS as a lark.
The damn thing steamrolled me. I graduated with a B- GPA, my grad school plans shattered, my ego shot. I also spent 6+ hours a day hacking on code which had no relation to classwork -- which was probably a big part of my problem in classes. Couldn't concentrate on stuff I didn't want to do.
So I went and got an engineering job. Which was hard because of the low GPA, but ended up through a friend of a friend. And I excelled. And kept at it as an ace programmer with a reputation of working minor miracles. So good that I kept out of management.
I'm tooting my horn. No question there, but I think it was just a bad fit. I wonder a lot what would have happened if I'd gone to another school.
I am the opposite person. I have my PhD. I love teaching. I think I am good at it. I have always received exceptional reviews and comments from my students. I wish I had a dollar for everytime I heard "You are the best TA I have ever had!" variants I have heard.
Yet I will not teach. Why?
Because I do not love research enough to enslave myself to the professor's life, which frankly put, is 80% grubbing for money so one's graduate student/post-doc army can spew out more papers. Teaching is completely an afterthought. Of course, I could teach at a community college or even a high school, but I would be paid only half what I would make working in the corporate world. As much as I love teaching, the difference between $40k and $80k is too much too pass up.
Hence, though I want to teach, and it would be to the obvious benefit of my students that I teach, the system forces in another direction.
Teaching and research are different skills. We should quit pretending otherwise.
So if I screw with this brainless Visual Basic application that a monkey could code, lots of people will die? Sweet.
Even 10 years ago, studying at a semi-decent technical school, I encountered the same crap. We spent two thirds of one course studying "how to use Excel Spreadsheet" for windows 3.1. This was in 1986. What was I paying good money for this utter crap for?? don't tell me "to think like an engineer". You cannot 'teach someone how to think'. All you can do is give them tools: deductive reasoning, experience, logic, a common frame of reference. Schools are not set up to TEACH YOU JACK. Schools are a business and the goal is to Make Money. They can hire the guys from India to teach Discreet Mathematics.... but do they pay the teacher to take English lessons? A language tutor, perhaps, so that he can be understood by native english speakers?? of course not. (no offense to anybody from India... If you have the chops and the Gift to teach, you have my respect..... but for us Oregon boys, y'all are hard to understand sometimes.)
Hate to generalize, but the higher education system sucks these days for the same reason any other major business sucks: its all geared towards paying the top dog and increasing the shareholders dividends.
Give me back the country of my parents childhood and I will die a happy man.
Why is this article posted on it.slashdot.org
Yeah, it's really too bad how the degree is usually set up. I'm not sure what kind of projects they have you do in Computer Science, but you would assume they would have at least something to prepare you for the real world.
:(
Anyways, I really hope they do something about all the CS programs out there, though it's doubtful...
For instance, something similar to SE, where we have a Junior Project (Teams of 3-4) and a Senior Project (solo). Junior Projects usually have a client which you work with to create customer requirements, software and design specs. As a group you create use cases, class diagrams, e-r diagrams, etc. Also having weekly status reports, and multiple presentations in front of the class and faculty. And you take the project through 3 terms to completion. Senior Project is a self-directed 3 term sequence in which you have a formal proposal, assloads of use cases, and any other forms of design documents you can imagine. I have no idea what kind of projects most CS majors have, but I feel that the projects we do will at least somewhat prepare us for creating an app in the real world
Is this "Engineering" related to computers or does it emcompass all the other traditional disciplines that are clearly-defined and recognized.
Quit whining kid. Just because you were an all-american high school student does not make you an all-star engineer. High school is a joke. Engineering takes time, discipline, and ingenuity. If you cannot hack it you should not be in the classroom. Blaming your downfalls on the professors and/or teaching assistants is bypassing the issue. I am glad he left. When I was in engineering I used to complain about how hard the introductory classes were and how much homework I had. I would look at my liberal art friends see them partying and wish I could have it as easy as they did. But it got me no where. The older I got the more I began to realize how important those intro classes were. I would bark at the fact that I would never use this much calculus in my life and often times find myself using it everyday. Sometimes I would have only learned one thing in a engineering class but that has proved to be invaluable, day in, day out. So be it if there is a drop in engineering students. When I was at school, I would see the kids who dropped out of my engineering classes occasionally around campus, not that all of them were stupid, but just did not have the right mindset to be an engineer. Whether it's an electrical engineer designing the flight controls for a new aircraft, or a mechanical engineer designing some safety feature of my new car I want them to have that mindset and heart to consider all design possibilities. In closing, I say if we have to make engineering flashier to attract more people then we are wasting our time. An engineer should be attracted to solving the problem in the face of all odds. The only sense of accomplishment he or she needs is getting the job done and doing it right. Maybe that is a flash of arrogance, but then again do I care? There is no room for whiners, only problem solvers. A whiner is the worst problem of all.
My major is computer engineering from a university in South Korea. During my college days, I found out that 95% of TAs/Professors DON'T know anything. But the only thing, I think, they do know is how to write a paper. They do know how to find a way to avoid public attack on your paper and get away with a bullshit, thus still survive.
Then how did I mamage to survive my college life and become a professional engineer? I studied by myself. I just found out how to get a relatively decent grade from those poor professors. And in library, at that time, there were great books written by 5% of real good professors/engineers who could communicate and actually understand what was on the table, and who were honest enough to say "I don't know" or "I know that's a bullshit but that's the only thing I can think of right now to solve the problem!".
I guess the only thing I learned from my college is how to learn somethng independently. Ironically, those poor professors/TAs made me more strong. BUT
DON'T you think the tuition is too expensive for the training?
What the hell, I don't know. Anyway I got my degree and recovered my investment.
Your ego is Matrix!
It took less than a year and a half of college for me to get sick of it. I dropped out of chemistry midway through my sophomore year, because the lab work was unending and tedious and I dreaded every day. I managed to coast through those three semesters based on what I had taught myself, before I switched my major to math.
The math work was a world apart from chemistry tedium. With the exceptions of linear algebra and differential equations, there were no routine problems; every problem involved proving a new, interesting theorem. They all required patience, work, and creativity. I solved one problem while doing crunches in weight lifting class, another while walking to the mall, a third one in a dream (really). Most of the tests were open book and/or take home.
As a result, I can run elliptic curves around most engineers in virtually any math topic. (Which isn't meant as a slight, of course; engineers take lots of courses that I didn't.) I can reason very abstractly (infinite dimensional vector space? No problem!).
No regrets, but it's not all roses. Job prospects are definitely a concern; most math graduates went to grad school, became actuaries (ugh!), or were "undecided" (read: unemployed). I was one of the lucky ones - I graduated with a signed job offer as a programmer, which I also love. Knock on wood.
And, like any major, we had our share of bad, bad professors. No need to get into that.
You can say that Kern wasn't cut out to be an engineer, and maybe he wasn't, and maybe I wasn't cut out to be a chemist. But my own experience has convinced me he's on to something. College turned my six year passion for science sour in a year and a half.
Engineering is hard. It just is. No amount of sugar coating will make it easier. Studying hard, going to office hours, going to class and actually doing the homework, instead of copying, makes one better. I partied my fair share, managed to play an intercollegiate sport, got exceptional grades, co-opped 6 terms, and am involved in many extra-curricular activities. I'm not an exceptionally smart person, I just work hard, and I budget my time.
Well said. There's no way to take the work out of the work. All the rigors this guy described are familiar to those of us who stuck it out and got engineering degrees.
Hell yes it's hard. But in the past, there were usually high paying job opportunities awaiting engineering graduates. That is no longer the case. Many of the businesses which hired these US engineers in the past no longer do because they can hire an engineer in China at a fraction of the pay. That's where the work went. For example, twenty years ago, there used to be a couple dozen good places in the RTP NC area where a skillful analog circuit design engineer could find a good paying job. Today theres one or two. There's still plenty of circuit design work in the world. It's just not being done here.
Today, engineering is still just as hard as it ever was. There are still good and bad educators at each engineering school. But what is different is the reward is vastly less than in decades past. When companies cease to manufacture and design products in the US, fewer engineers are needed here. There's too much stick and not enough carrot.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Why do you think Microsoft ships products with so many bugs ? The answer should be obvious.
Maybe the original post has a point about communication, but in the wrong way...
What if the problem with engineering education is not poor communication of concepts to students, but poor development of communication skills in engineers?
Most of the best paying jobs (doctor lawyer consultant manager etc..) don't necessarily emphasize original thought, but all of them emphasize communication. These professions also attract more girls, not entirely by coincidence.
Instead of pumping out many students with basic (and, apparently, quite poor) training in engineering skills, perhaps engineering schools should focus on turning out well-rounded people with the ability to communicate?
The solution might be to make engineering into a 2-3 year professional degree, with a set of courses that emphasize professional/communication skills in addition to engineering ones, and a required math/science undergrad set of courses (e.g. med school) to give people the basic theoretical foundation they need to handle the engineering stuff.
This would also have the benefit of producing fewer (and hopefully better) engineers, which would give engineering a little bit of the cachet required to attract some of the talented all-rounders (and girls) who might be dropping out now, and push salaries up as these new grads replace some of the MBAs now running engineering firms.
In the Institution from which I graduated with a BME and a minor in electrical engineering, we had classes 6 days a week (in my freshman year, anyhow), it took nearly two hundred credits to graduate -- as opposed to the approx 125 credits at most engineering schools (yes, my credits transfer credit for credit to anywhere in the world). Our students were restricted to those that had high SAT scores (high being 600 and up in math (clustered between 700 and 800), >200 in verbal -- my verbal score was higher than my math score, wasted skills) and were from the top 10% of their high school classes. There were also other filters, in addition to a 6-hr admissions test. When you're competing against a room full of people like that, the distribution is fairly narrow and grading on the curve is merciless.
On the first day of my first semester of calculus, the instructor asked how many in the class had 3-4 semesters of calculus in high school. A smallish number of hands went up. He then processed to ask how many had at least 2 semesters, then 1. At the end, there were only 2 of us without our hands raised, one of which was me. I remember feeling the mildest of twinges of concern (hey, I was 17, who knew?) and thinking "Wonder what THIS means?" Some of the guys had 4 semesters of calculus using the SAME textbook we would be using.
I had a rough time, but managed to hang on and learn. In my first course in differential equations, I was frantically struggling to take notes as fast as the instructor was filling the blackboards, until somebody next to me stopped me and pointed out that he was merely copying the text to the blackboard, word-for-word, from memory. As soon as the class was over, I went straight to the bookstore and purchased a copy of Schaum's Differential Equations, as I knew that if I was ever going to pass this class, I would be doing it all on my own.
And you know? That was one of the most valuable lessons I learned in my time there. Repeat after me:
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS TEACHING. THERE IS ONLY LEARNING.
All that any instructor can do is present the material in a manner (hopefully more than one) that will stick when flung at a student's mind. Anybody wanting to be spoon-fed knowledge has watched the Matrix a few times too often, and thinks they can have knowledge downloaded into them.
The way I think of the learning process is that I'm building a neural net in meatware. It takes motivation, concentration, and reinforcement in the form of repetition to get good at anything. This process is called learning. It's a very active process, nothing passive about it.
In my day, motivation came from the fact that we were allowed only 2 failed courses before being ejected out of the program and losing our draft deferments, a sure trip to the far east. IF we successfully completed the program, we were virtually guaranteed well-paying jobs and lifetime employment. If we completed with a high enough GPA, we got a free ride to the grad school of our choosing (I didn't make the cut, had to pay for my own graduate degree). The stick and the carrot, time-honored tools in motivation.
But you know? We had people entering our program that had exited other programs which were suspected by the rest of us of being "more difficult". Those people invariably breezed through our program without breaking a sweat. I consider those schools Tier One (MIT, CalTech, any of the military academies). Guys that washed out of our program went on to breeze through state schools with good names -- names like Purdue, Northwestern, U of Michigan, etc. I consider those to be Tier 3 schools. And there are a large number of lesser (Tier Four) schools that turn out perfectly serviceable engineers. There's a definite hierarchy of engineering schools out there.
I have no sympathy for someone who isn't willing to do the work. Just because you were hot stuff in high school means very little as you move into larger ponds. You'll find that this situation exists in Med scho
I have friends that are in education and I know a few with PhD's in it as well. I know the theories and how they are told to teach. What happened to this guy is unfortunate, but is solely the fault of his high-school teachers and himself.
What is happening now is that these kids are told that they are awesome in everything (plus total hand holding, etc), and given good grades to reflect that even if they only show a glimmer of hope in that subject. So, what we end up with is a bunch of kids graduating from high-school that are borderline retarded in most subjects, but think that they are the best thing since sliced bread.
Then they hit University (Play times over, it's time for some real work.), and they can't cope.
When I came back to University I forgot everything: and I mean everything. I didn't know how to cross multiply. That's how much I had forgotten. I also had "instructors" that only put the book on the board. Hey buddy, I can read, tell me/explain something that isn't in/beyond the book!
But, what I did, is sit at said University for two months, ~8am to 10-11pm everyday (aside from fri, sat, sun evenings), and worked my ass off. I did every problem and asked when I couldn't figure something out. After that, I had caught up and all was well and good with the world. Though from what my friends tell me, my sanity took a fair good hit during that time ;) Right now, I'm in my final undergrad year with plans to go to grad school.
If I can do that, then anyone can get a decent grade in first year classes.
This guy says he's good in math and then gets a D in Discrete?!?! Sorry guy, but you've been lied to. You're retarded when it comes to math. Books more than just problem sets?!?! It's called being able to properly interpret those crazy symbols on the page like a person that actually understands how to read a text book ie not like a novel you mental midget. I could go on.
In fact, I'll will. But, just one last thing. This is my favourite quote, "...like, well, me: people smart enough to do the math...". What grade did you get in Discrete again? One of the easiest classes in all of Math. How about those other Math courses?
IMO, if the US and any other country for that matter, wants more engineers/scientists/etc, don't pull any punches in high-school. Make the kids think on there own and actually push them. Let them fail if they should fail. Then and only then will most high-school grads be able to handle University.
What's going on right now, is doing no-one any favours. It's creating people like this guy. A guy who may have the potential to be good. A guy whose smart enough to realize flaws in the system. But, not smart enough, nor has enough integrity to admit his own failings and limitations.
We are all good at stuff and bad at stuff. It's up to ourselves and only ourselves to find out what we are good at and stick to those things. And stay away from the things we are bad at, no matter how interested we are in them, because we are bad at them. This way, we all contribute in meaningful ways, and are most happy.
Hell, I'll never write a novel: god help you all if I ever get the chance. But man, can I derive the shit out of a function. So, I'll stay in my little abstract world, knowing that I fit here. And leave the other things to those that are good at them.
Anyway, that's my 2 cents.
My college did not accept any community college credit, nor should it have had. When I brought home my first term Freshman year books they brought back fond memories of his Junior year math and physics (he's a mech-e and went to Texas Tech). I don't want people who can't do the math or physics designing my dams and building and power plants. If you do less work, you will learn less, period.
What proportion of engineers at Microsoft or Google went to the top 30 CS colleges? Let me assure you that to get though those schools CS and Engineering programs you need to be both or incredibly intellegent because pure endurance won't hack it.
Forgive me for putting words into your mouth, but the causal story you are trying to tell here is a little thin. A belief in supernatural things does not entail an unbelief in proximate physical causes; it just (usually) entails a belief in ultimate supernatural causes. No teaching of my religion informs me that because a guy came back from the dead once, science is bunk.
Rather, my particular holy book, which does not contain the be-all and end-all of human knowledge, does contain the following two interesting tidbits:
If we parse this out, blessed are those who try to learn about what the LORD has done; astronomers, geophysicists, and meteorologists are singled out, but even generic understanding and wisdom are better than material things. Sounds pretty good for all the scientists in my religion, then.
I realize that you are talking about a certain limited subset of religious people who say "Foosball (molecular biology) is the devil!" Maybe the same people that have hijacked the image of my religion against my wishes. So maybe you need to meet some religious scientists to cure your overgeneralization. So, Exhibit A, me, the Christian grad student in artificial intelligence.
Q: What did the comedian say to the crowd?
A: If I knew, this joke would be funny.
Some ppl might say suck it up, or if u can't stand the fire get out of the kitchen, but universities operate as a business. This makes you, the student the consumer, and as a consumer you have a right to good quality education.
Some of the problems he mentioned were encountered by me and my friends at Canadian universities.
These include:
Having TA's do all the work, including teaching, marking etc.
No feedback, besides your grade.
Difficult to understand TA
Difficult to understand Prof
TA/Prof are always in a hurry to get back to their research
No QA in course design
Required courses overlapping content
Over Assigned course content
Instructors not making up classes missed.
Arrogant instructors who try to make u feel like an idiot when you ask them questions.
and the list goes on.
In many cases, I have found that I learned the material, not from the teacher, but collaborating with my peers and working on HW problems.
There a bunch of good instructors too, but far too many courses have bad instruction.
On the other hand, people don't seem to understand his point: if you want more people to go into engineering then you need to change the system. There is a large barrier to entry to become an engineer (i.e. feeling like you've been raped every week for four years), and the anticipated payoff for entering the field is shrinking (i.e. less job stability, lower pay, fewer job choices, etc...). Engineering is therefore becoming less and less appealing as a career, and thus society needs to change the system if it wants more people to become engineers.
Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that you need to dumb down the material. Like Kern says, you could start by just hiring professors and TA's based upon their actual teaching ability rather than their ability to pull in research dollars. Of course, that's not as easy as it sounds, but it is the reality that universities need to start facing. Kern may or may not be a perfect example of an engineering student, but let's face it -- universities aren't perfect examples of teaching, and that's where society needs to start focusing its reform efforts.
"Will these measures be enough, or does the system require much more drastic measures?"
Less money. More love.
... because they want to catch the Giant Squid (on film)
Perl Programmer for hire
Hehehe, so I wasn't the only one who got a nasty shock in engineering freshmen year because of the weak math and physics education in high school.
What was even worse for me was that my family hired tutors for me when I was in high school.
I was used to asking questions and expect my teacher or tutor to spend time and help me until I understand a particular concept. When I got into an engineering school with professors that spend very little time on teaching (most of their time is on research) and TAs that couldn't speak english...
Of course I crashed and burned
Looking back I realized pain and suffering has its value. So the school system didn't help you but at least you were forced to acquire knowledge yourself. If nothing else, perseverance is a good virtue to have. Because as an engineers looking for solutions to complex problems, I have to get used to fail attempts and be ready to try again.
I think the main thing in freshman year is to make friends, and there are lots of bright people out there that can make your lives a lot easier. Even though all students compete with each other, they have to cooperate to get through because of so many project courses. A lot of my social life then was about working together with my friends to solve engineering problems, not partying.
All the serious stuff aside, at the very very least, your school should have a foosball table. And you should know what to do with one of those.
"Relating his personal experience to the industry's lack of engineers is stupid. I mean, it's been my experience that..."
Well said.
My definitions
Arts: That which depicts the nature as it is
example, a painting of a flower, a sculpture, clay model etc.
Science: That which tries to explain the nature as it is.
example: big bang theory, H2+O2--->H2O
Engineering: Study of compromises? How do build a system that works.
Maths:It is really a form of art. Also used to study science? model the nature using mathematics, apply scientific principles see the results etc. It is a tool for engineering - cast the engineering problem with science and math in paper solve it. build a system that works.
So where does programming fits here? Its just an art with a little bit of maths(modelling) with a little bit of engineering with a little bit of common sense.
sigbldr is currently in pre-alpha.
I'm getting an IT degree from a top school.
Everything I've seen has closely mirrored this kid's experience.
If you want to succeed, you gotta learn that college doesn't give a damn about you, so you gotta make sure you don't give it any respect either. Group-work your individual assignments, spend your time researching what is going to be on the exam from people that have taken it last semester, find out the easiest professors and courses and take them. Whatever it takes to have the best GPA when you graduate, regardless of the methods you employ.
BUT...
Find out what is going to be helpful in the real world for your line of work. Get experience. Learn outside of class what is important for you to know, WHILE still having that BS or MA with a good GPA. Read a lot too, if you have time.
Take note that the majority of what you are (barely) being 'taught' has no relevance to the real world.
College is a game - play it, or it's gonna play you.
MOD PARENT UP
While getting my Master's in CS we had a course on software development. We spent a whole class talking about whether programmers today are engineers. My conclusion is most definately no.
Why not? I spent a short time working as a junior engineer doing power and lighting for buildings before the market drove me back to school. While there I was exposed to the whole "Professional Engineer" process. Really, to become a leading Engineer (capitalization intended) at the organization you would need to get your Professional Engineer (PE) certificate. That alone would allow you to approve a design for use. When the design documents were finalized, one of the PE certified engineers would open up their safe and get out their stamp. They would stamp the design and sign it. From there on out any flaws found, including possible deaths or damages, would be on his head. Before participating in this process I had no idea how important it was for an Engineer to truly and wholly know and understand the final design. Their approval is worth its weight in gold.
Compare that with a software product. Yes, it is approved at the end by a small group of highly experienced individuals before it ships, but if somthing goes wrong it's "We found a bug". Sometimes it has a large impact, but it doesn't have the career impact that an Engineer faces once their design is found to be flawed. There is just a difference in how the two groups operate and the requirements that are placed on them. Don't get me wrong, programmers and software architects are often highly intelligent and creating things of wonder, but the software industry just does not have the rigorus and formal tools and processes that the older engineering fields do.
The thing to remember is that software engineering is still almost entirely R&D for every project. Because they are operating with tools that have no substance and really only mathematical limitations they can do *anything* at creation time. This makes the sky the limit every time a programmer sits down at their keyboard. As further processes and design styles are developed the industry will mature. You also need to remember that computer science is really only about 40 years old. This is very young for an engineering field, and especially for one that is based purely on mathematics and not physical limitations. Back in the early 1900's there were no electrical engineers, only scientists - the schools taught applied electrical sciences. Eventually the processes and methods were given more form and eventually the schools developed the concept of an electrical engineer, not just an applied scientist. Someday applied computer scientists will get to that level, and the signs point to sooner than people think, but not yet.
It is an area of deep discussion because it goes to the roots of what makes an Engineer more than just an applied scientist, but there is a difference. Seeing it is tough if you have never been exposed to the process of what makes an Engineer what they are, and the responsibilities that come with it.
Just so you know. My bachelor's was electrical engineering, but a lack of jobs around 2001 lead me to sysadmin jobs and now I've wrapped up a MSCS and I'm looking at Phd programs. Being an Engineer is very hard, especially after you graduate. It's more than just hard work, it's responsibility to the world around you.
I'm a biomedical engineering undergrad at the Univ. of Wisconsin, and I have to say I'm very much enjoying the program here. Yea, it's an assload of work and my roomies (who are coincidentally business majors) don't do jack shit, but I feel like I'm learning something useful and that the work I will do will actually serve a purpose rather than just bringing in a fat paycheck.
The thing I like best about the BME program here is that each semester we are given a team design project. Two sophomores are paired with two juniors and given a design project from local companies. Right now, I'm designing an artificial eye for my project. And it makes me feel like an engineer. None of the other engineering majors here have design projects built in throughout the curriculum, and some of my buddies in mechanical or electrical always drop comments about "not feeling like engineers" while getting raped by all the classroom learning and homework. Maybe if there was more hands-on work infused into engineering degree programs people would be more motivated?
To be an engineer you must know how to find out information you need, how to solve your problems on your own. For an engineering project, the engineer should know where to look for information, how to deal with problems he never met before.
Although most of the material taught in engineering classes is rarely used directly by engineers, someone who cannot pass an engineering course will probably not make a good engineer.
I empathize. While doing a humanities grad degree, I took grad-level CS classes and got absolutely wrecked by them - both academically and emotionally. The article brought many things home - same cutthroat vibe from fellow students, the same macho contempt for people who were involved in lesser fields and were therefore retarded. Some of the teachers were pretty awful - they had zero presentation skills, or would scoff at certain questions students asked - but some of them were excellent. They lectured well, and took time out to walk the students through a problem. Despite this, I did not give up, and am still working at educating myself in cs. What I do not get is the article's assertion that American science departments need to improve their "feel" to attract more American students, otherwise the field will continue to be dominated by foreigners. Why by foreigners? Does he think that quantitative fields elsewhere in the world are any less bleak than they are here, or that, in India or China or wherever else, classrooms are led by inspired, charismatic teachers who cause students to achieve through passion for their subject? If that is the case, then he is downright wrong. I taught in China for two years, and the traditional classroom is a one way street. Students sit there, obediently take notes, and are often reluctant to ask questions for fear of embarassing themselves. And the teacher is not accountable, and therefore is in no way obligated to treat his students fairly. Intelligence is measured in the number of facts memorized, and the ability to solve problems which have clear right or wrong answers. Foreigners tend to excel at quantitative fields because many of them come from environments where you have to excel to survive, and it has to be in a respected field where accomplishment is clearly verifiable. If your grades slip, there are few second chances. If anything, our science departments get the ones who made it through a very cruel selection process. The sciences are rough, and they are not for everyone. And, while it would be nice to have better lecturers, the fact remain that the sciences are so all-consuming that its often not possible for a professor to cultivate their teaching skills. Either way, I do not think that the sciences need some sort of makeover to appear nicer or more inclusive.
Im in the middle of Indiana.
one must interact with many differant langauge backgrounds
What more can the government due to encourage higher education?
Let me guess... you were the TA that was trying to communicate with Kern. No wonder he had a hard time.
I've been trying to find a new job for over a year now, and its bad. I'll probably be putting stickers on cans at Wal-Mart soon, with 10 years of engineering school under my belt and hundreds of high tech credits.
The last big place I worked, my engineering boss was a pinhead who must have cheated his way through school because he could barely run a calculator, yet he had a Penn State ME degree. He assumed I was just like him apparently, and when I wouldn't back up his bullshit thats when the trouble started. When things got tight I got cut and he's the one driving the gass-hog SUV while I'm on food stamps now.
It really doesn't pay to learn math and science, study cheating and stealing and sycophantic psychology instead because nobody in this country apparently earns an honest buck anymore. Sorry if I'm a bit cynical, but I earned my lousy B average and I still remember all that stuff, and I'm the one without the job.
Clickety Click
As a third year engineering student from the friendly northern kingdom of Canada, his article has a great deal that I can relate to. My course load this semester doubled from last semester, which doubled from the semester before that. The TA's are every bit as unhelpful as first year. Mean while I am still paying twice the tuition fee of that of the arts and science students. Having incentives being increasing misaligned against engineering, it leads me to wonder what sort of major character flaws do upper year undergrad engineering students have that prevent them from excelling in other areas of life. As for me, I can only say that my ill placed respect for the profession of engineering during my high school year has lead me to a mistake I shall probably regret for the rest of my life.
No engineering student would be expected to know anything close to what they need to know at their job. They might be expected to be able to learn it quickly, while the fuse is lit...
An engineering degree simply means that you are willing to work very hard and don't crack under inordinate deadlines, and you make the right calls in the midst of pressure. It's also meant to drive out the egotistical skew that "genius" high-schoolers graduate with. Colleges can't send kids back to high school to get another shot at turning their homework in, so.
It means either flunking them out or guiding them into different majors... but certainly not graduating them! Just because, what? They paid the money so they're entitled to a degree? Or they got a 12,000 SAT score in high school? No.
I know what my limits are now. I've worked many 90 hour weeks, and I've accomplished ludicrous deadlines, but I've never been pushed to the brink of madness since I graduated from Georgia Tech. Probably the success come from knowing exactly where that point of failure is. It was hard, but I've never wished it were easier.
If the author is really as smart as he asserts himself to be why didn't he test out of the introductory engineering courses? The College Board offers advanced placement (AP) tests on a variety of subjects that are graded on a 1-5 scale (5 being the best). Most universities in the US will grant you college credit if you do well enough on the AP test (3-5, depending on the school and/or test). At my high school your GPA was only part of the metric used to determine how "smart" you were. AP scores were a lot more useful.
He fails some weed out classes, then somehow claims the the fact he is not an engineer is everyone else's fault. For those of you who don't know, a "weed out" class is one that is made to be hard on purpose. They are low level classes in which the average person gets a bad grade. The point? Discourage people who don't belong from wasting their time for 4 years. If you don't do well in these classes, you weren't cut out for the major. Yes, engineering is hard. Some people's brains are made for it, others aren't.
I agree that the professors who don't care and the incompetent TAs contribute to this difficulty, but just about every engineer goes through it. The smart ones get As, the average ones get Bs, and the ones who don't belong in engineering or science get Cs. It's a crappy system but it does its job.
Furthermore, this is not really the reason that engineering is faultering. Believe it or not, there are plenty of people out there who do just fine in enginering. Although the average GPA in the first year or two is a 2.7, it goes way up once the people who belong find classes that interest them and the rest drop out.
I would contribute the lack of interest in engineering to money and respect. Engineers work their asses off for four years and then make 50-60,000 dollars a year. Then they see their econ friends who partied a lot more make 100,000. Additionally, as an engineer you are stuck working in a cubicle for the rest of your life. Your boss, a liberal arts major, has his own office and looks down at you. In fact, every non-engineer looks down at you because you are an engineer. IMO, engineers as a whole are quiet anti-social types who don't command respect, and aren't given much.
Yeah as much as you can babble on about "worthless theory" those computability theory classes help you design well behaved and effecient code. Do you think in a chemical engineering major every chemistry class you take is directly applicable to your job? No a lot of it is theory, because not understanding theory will hold you back from moving on past a certain level.
Although I'm not an engineer (while I like math and sciences, Engineering school proved too difficult for my feeble brain)I can easily understand why certain students leave.
Many of the engineer students (when I was one) whined all the time, and were mostly in it for the money.
So was I, but that's because I was too stupid to know better. Life isn't about accumulating wealth, unless that's what you really REALLY love. It's about screwing up and finding things you do want to do. Mine happens to be becoming a librarian to better serve my community. (go figure...)
These students soon dropped out or switched to a business degree. (as x approached 2.0 GPA, the chances of y becoming a business major doubles exponetially)
The article of course makes broad generalizations and speaks from their own experiences with little to add from graduated and employed engineers. These people find their careers rewarding and even get crappy pay to boot.
I just think this guy couldn't hack it (like me) in the engineer program and is bitter about it (not like me).
Although I have met the rare specimen that switched from engineering despite being smart enough to graduate to another area where they also were adept at.
Examples.
Engineering friend with a 4.0 GPA in the middle of his Junior year switches to English. Still graduates with a 4.0 GPA....
Engineering GRADUATE: no idea what his GPA, but he went to a great (and difficult) engineering program at a university. Decides he doesn't want to find a job in engineering (already taken the first engineering exam and got good marks) and GOES TO CULINARY SCHOOL for BAKING. (it's all a chemical process....)
But overall, most of the engineering program dropouts (like me) just were in it because it LOOKED good on a resume.
a freelancer,
a battle cry of a hawk make a dove fly and a tear dry
wonder why a lone wolf don't run with a klan
only trust your instincts and be one with the plan
I got my PhD at SmartyU, so I have taken a lot of classes and also TA'd one. At least to me, the subject matter was interesting (graduate/advanced undergrad artificial intelligence) and the professor was stellar. I had regular office hours, and was entirely open to meeting students at any other time convenient to them. The majority of my office hours (and the other TA's) were empty. Some people only came to argue test/homework grades. Office hours were only crowded immediately prior to the mid-term and final. My experience was not that students were hungry for knowledge and using every opportunity to learn from their TA's/professors. While it's easy to say how poor educators are doing, the student population at SmartyU didn't show overwhelming enthusiasm for learning (they did show a fair bit of enthusiasm for grades). My father was a professor, and he does like teaching - and his experience was much the same. Enthusiasm for grades, less enthusiasm for the actual learning. This isn't meant to sound high and mighty. I rarely went to office hours of classes I was taking either! I'm just trying to lend perspective that most educators do want to teach (whether they are good at it or not); but most of the time they become jaded when the first question is not "can you explain x" but "can you change this to an A?"
So I have been on both sides of the academic world. I double majored in physics and english as an undergraduate, did an MFA in poetry and I am currently a PhD candidate in engineering. Let me contribute a bit because this is a subject that is dear to my conflicted heart.
I think there is an attitude that everything that we learn has to be digestible and fun, and that is simply not the case when it comes to being a top-notch engineer or scientist. Yes, the ideas are fun and beautiful, the hard work required to finish problem sets and get complicated lab machinery to function properly is not. I find myself staring at the wall of my windowless lab far too often at 4 AM cursing my Atomic Force Microscope and I take a deep breath and reflect on what I am doing and why I am interested in the subject. I got into science and engineering because I believe, when applied ethically, it makes a tremendous number of people's lives better in a very real way.
On the other hand, there is something a bit unacademic that occurs in S&E classes: it requires so much work to become a good scientist or engineer, that it is the rare professor who is able to effectively train students and also to nurture the idealist, the logical dreamer, and *yes* the kernel of poetry that resides in their bright and overworked students. I think in today's world you are probably not going to get that from your professors - if you are in this world, you have to find that yourself. Being a really good humanities student is easier only in the sense that, for the most part, the intellectual excitement is not damped to nearly the same extent by the terrible grind of problem sets and malfunctioning lab equipment, though to be sure there are unique problems there too. I know this post rambled a bit, but I've got pages and pages of partial differential equations to solve by tomorrow, and a stack of papers to read, and far away through the concrete walls are the images of poems I have written and the poems that I still want to write.
While the author raises a few valid points about problems in the teaching of engineering, his claim that flaws in teaching are the cause of "students leaving enginering" is probably wrong. With all its imperfections, engineering education in America remains one of the best in the world. I think the main reason american students have a diminished interest in engineering is that demand for engineers is being satisfied at a lower cost by other countries. The market value of an engineer has decreased by an increased supply of good ingineers produced abroad. As a consequence companies: (1) import engineers from abroad,(2) if immigration hassles and cost differences are too significant, they ship the jobs to where the engineers are. Given this economic realities, it seems the number of engineers in america will continue to decrease. Of course, there will always be a core of elite enigineers who are at the cutting edge, and they will continue to be highly paid and regarded in the US. But that's what they are, an elite. Capitalism cuts both ways...
OK, I'm going to read something straight out of a well-known programming text book:
Command Pattern: "Encapsulates a request as an object, thereby letting you parameterize clients with different requests, queue or log requests, and support undoable operations."
With all due respect to the entire work and the authors (the GoF) who have imparted these few words, along with the many words that preceeded and followed them, these are words that impart knowledge but not understanding. I think one issue that Douglas Kern poses is that if one were to vocalize a phrase like the one above in the presence of people who seek to understand it but fail to, said individual is simply not teaching. My point is this: if you didn't understand this quote than you did't learn anything, but if you did understand it you still didn't learn anything *here* because you already learned enough to understand it. Even software folks will struggle with design patterns, that is until they get the idea that patterns are about people, not compilers.
I'll take a turn at the Command Pattern:
Let's first conjure a mental picture of a button and gather up all the everyday things on which we can find a button. OK, here's one that tests a smoke alarm. Here's one that changes a tv channel, and another that turns on a light, and another that ejects a CD. Great, but where is this going? Well, the point with the Command Pattern is the "pressing of the button", the one action that can be performed on various devices. Although each item yields a different effect, they were all triggered the same way.
Now there is certainly more to teach and learn about how this applies to software, but I think this concept could reach just about anyone whether or not they pursue software. Teaching this way takes an effort but promotes learning and this is the element that is sorely lacking in the classroom.
Its not like there arent bad teachers in other majors. I'm sure if you go talk to liberal arts majors you'll find bad apples here and there.
Its really about making engineering interesting (not necessarily easy). One or two bad teachers over say, 45-50 classes to get the BS is ok. But 6 (I can easily figure I had six poor professors/classes for my CompE degree)? Between TAs and professors who didnt care about teaching or fucking powerpoint poisioned us (reading from slides != teaching -- why do I bother showing up???), its enough to make kids want to quit. Unless the kid really likes engineering and doesnt have any better carrer field they're interested in (law, medical, etc), they're going to choose a different path.
And thats the problem. We lack engineers because we scare/chase off everyone except for the ULTRA dedicated. Yea, sit on your high fucking horse and tell this guy how stupid he was. But not everyone learns the same way, and inteligence comes in many forms, and 99.999% of people arent capable of teaching themselves multivariable calculus. They need someone to help them through the final points. Its in the interest of the engineering discipline to make it more available to all types of students. Learning isnt binary - some of the responses here act as if anything other than reading from the book and doing sample problems is "coddlng" the students. Its as if you want the engineering field to be devoid of talent - maybe to reduce supply and raise prices (eg. your salary).
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
If I were smarter I think this would be easier. But I'm not, so I have to work my ass off. I think that my overly easy high school gave me an overinflated idea of what I could and could not easily accomplish.
Great teaching is hard and teaching badly is easy to do but the author of the article is correct. Many engineering, physics, and math books and professors are very poor teachers. The percentage is much to high and is probably the result of the way these folks learned these courses, in terms of symbol juggling abstractions that de-emphasize what they meaning. So the sins of our "parents" are passed onto our "siblings" keeping these subjects more complicated and mysterious than they should be. Does this style of teaching really "test" those taking these classes so that they'll be made safe to "release on the public." Nonsense, it's more likely that it filters in those that can barely adapt to this style of presentation (or lack there of) but at the same time filters out talent that can't stand obtuse materials and lectures.
A simple door off a hinge repair, and NO ONE does it in a year?
Never heard of a UNION, have you? You're NOT ALLOWED to do things like this in most universities. Physical plant services are unionized in every university I have ever been in.
Nevermind most fundraising goes into a collective pool.
..don't panic
As someone who has attempted an engineering degree is found it uninspiring. Too much maths and physics, not enough application or these.
The structured education system I fairly broken. I know a lot of smart people who dropped out in high school (because they couldn't hack the bordem) and a lot of complete idiots that have degrees (how someone can go through 3 years of education, pass all the exams and get average marks and come out with a degree but with no real grasp of the topic amazes me.)
I would much rather learn a concept and pick up the maths formulas as they are required.
- Jesse McNelis
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
I'm currently a PhD student in a top college in the US. I can attest that the article is basically correct regardling underdgraduate eduation.
Most top colleges are research schools. Research schools (as the name would imply) have one primary motivation: research. The professors they hire tend to reflect this. Most of these professors are very, very good at research and are often not so good at teaching. But this doesn't really matter. In the day to day business of these schools, teaching undergrads is a burden, not a serious responsibility. Many of them do what they can to try to get rid of non-optimal undergrads. Not because the undergrads show no promise, but because it simply takes too much time and effort to help them. To be fair, there are a good number of a very dedicated teaching professors and lecturers, but these people are not well supported by the administration (and are in the minority).
There is a LOT more that could be done to further teaching of engineering in the US. Sadly, if you want an engineering degree, the best places to get them are often the second tier universities. Live in California? Want an engineering degree? Many people think the best place in CA to get a degree is the UC system (and this IS true of grad school), but the truth is, the CSU system (Cal State University) is often a better place for undergraduate learning than the UC system. Placing undergraduates above research would be a HUGE step up for much of the US college system, but undergraduates have not (until recently) paid as well as research. In the CSU system, you are often more likely to find professors who are dedicated to teaching, rather than research. In the UC system, research is the #1 goal, and anything else (including teaching undergrads often) is a bit of a distraction.
To blame TAs completely would be unfair, and to blame professors completely would be unfair. In my experience, most of the blame lies squarely with the top administration, and their funding priorities. They tend to want to hire professors who ONLY want to do research, and view teaching as an ugly chore. Many of my undergrad classes had 200+ students (some as many as 800+). Physics was all about weeding out the weak (first semester core physics contained 350+ people, 5th semester contained 25 people). The whole atmostphere was one of destroying all but the ubermensch. Those unprepared (or not perfectly motivated) were left to fail.
Luckily for me I do well in such circumstances, but if the US wants to do well over the long haul, it would be best not to get rid of everyone who isn't just like me. Most of my colleagues in grad school are either Chinese, Indian or German. I wish all of them the very best (they are all incredibly bright and motivated), but I wish that more of my own countrymen were here as well. I know that many of them are quite smart, but I also know that many of them are defeated by poor professors, and poor support. Not to mention (of course) very good pay outside of the engineering/science world.
Impossible = A fun challenge
Education all around the world needs a boost. It certainly needs some make-over. The way we handle(or should I say "should handle/tackle") are current business problems are changing, So we MUST prepare youngsters to get more excited about learning.
Scott McNealy to Michael: "Suck my Sun!" Michael Dell to Scott : "Lick my Dell!"
I have to say I agree 100% with this guy's case. I have had the exact same experience at my school, the only difference is I was a slacker in high school because I never cared about high grades and would rather be well rounded between academics and the rest of life, so I never put in more work than needed. Because of this, I was perfectly fine when I got to my discrete math course. which I got a C in after being the #1 math student at my high school and one of the top 2000 math students in the nation for my age group (3 years on either side). I did however run in to a problem for my Programming Languages course in which I actually dropped it a semester because the professor was entirely incomprehensible because I still had the notion of actually learning something from a college course. The next semester I failed it with a professor who couldn't teach any better, but graded harder. Finally the third time was a charm. It was back to the original professor who I stuck it out with, giving up on any naive thought that I should actually learn the material in a required course for my major and I got a B. Not because of any great feat of mine, but rather because a 20% curved up to a B because the course was simply that poorly taught. I have had very similar experiences in a number of other courses and would assume that it is the same in most of the country as my school is ranked within the top 20 for computer science (my major) in the nation.
Computer science curricula is not supposed to teach you how to write shitty business apps for shitty corporations. It's about COMPUTER SCIENCE. It's about analysis, computability, and getting your ass kicked so hard that you either learn how to come up with your own solutions to problems, or drop out.
The teaching style is to tell you what you need to learn, not how to learn it. They don't hold your hand. It's your own responsibility to figure out how to learn the stuff.. because once you graduate and have to work there's no professor with office hours to tell you where your problem is. Have the discipline to do it yourself, great. But I doubt many folks have the discipline to cram the high end theory down their own throat without prodding.
Funny, computer science classes usually do not start to get really interesting until AFTER the discrete math/set theory courses, when you actually have the basic tools to understand what the fuck they are talking about. You obviously lacked the imagination and perseverence to stick around long enough to see it. Computability? Efficiency? Architecture? you dropped out before seeing that stuff in force. Without understanding it, you can't possibly write code to leverage the full power of the hardware.
Bill Gates may be the world's greatest business man ever, but he dropped out of computer science well before he got the hardcore theory...and the mess that is the windows architecture under the hood is a direct result of his not getting exposed to it.
You want to know why they didn't tell you shit about how corporate developer jobs work? It's because corporations do it WRONG. Business is about maximising profit, not advancing the art. Advancing the art is what computer science is all about. And professors know that just like in your 400 level courses, you are smart enough to figure out what to do to make it.
A lot of businesses actually have a vested interest in minimizing the use of efficient algorithms. After all, if you build reliable, efficient software, you can't double the price next year and change the splash screen and have it sell just because hardware has gotten faster and consumers are morons, because what you shipped last year actually still works. I mean, why raise the bar by which your own success is judged? It's business suicide to push the state of the art unless your competitor does it first.
Once you know how to DO THE MATH, everything else is easy to figure out. Sure, you've never heard of xyz that some company is asking for. Usually because xyz technology is a flaming bag of dog shit created for someone's short term goals, and that industry doesn't know any better.
And yeah, there are folks who cheated their way through. And they can't code their way out of a wet paper bag. But you get that shit in every field. If you cheat your way out of your college education just to get the paper, that's your own problem; you'll eventually get stuck coding the reports and other menial business software that is all you can handle....
As for your "jerk off" professor who was bitchy about students who don't understand calculus, I had one too. Yeah, he is an asshole. He's also a fucking genius. The man is a human compiler. Is his style appropriate for business? HELL NO. But you can learn a hell of a lot from him if you try. Writing scheme interpreters interpreted in scheme interpreted in scheme is a pain in the ass, but it gives you a lot of perspective on how and why and when to build interpreters. It's supposed to inspire you to to use interpreters and create scripting languages _when appropriate_ in your own software designs, not teach you a marketable skill directly. Like all the other courses in the program.....
In short, if you thought CS would teach you how to be a Microsoft code monkey.... you had the wrong idea to begin with.
Cheers
have far too much faith in engineers. Every time I get in any sort of elevator or building, I fear for my life.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
I think the biggest problem with focusing on "computer science" rather than a "software architecture/engineering" path is that it teaches students to create algorithms....not to manage projects. And what is really needed >90% of the time in software development is a well-managed project that will be developed and maintained in a thoughtful manner. Someone does have to come up with the algorithms, but in most cases they aren't hard; someone has probably done the work to find the optimum solution to that class of problem and the only requirement is to understand and implement it; the cases where original algorithms are needed are better suited towards people who are mathematicians and not programmers - programmers are doing the work of translating from math language to machine language, with the secondary requirement of making the translation understandable by other programmers.
I just started my upper-division work at a uni similiar to Smartypants U. My earlier experiences, however, include:
1. Top AP scores (5) on Calculus AB and Physics, and a really good (4) score on English Lit/Comp.
2. Four semesters of partial failure at my first Smartypants U, much of which didn't transfer.
3. Computer-type vocational training at a Community College (that didn't transfer at all), and finally:
4. 30 or so hours at another CC to finish up an Engineering Associate's and make damn sure my time at the uni was minimized (i.e. no GE, nothing at the uni that I could take at the CC).
What I've learned from all this is that the CC is the best value for the time and the money from both a hours-treadmill perspective and from a "what you actually learn" perspective. Period. Too many full-on universities (or at least uni profs) ignore the educational needs of their students, and Engineering, CS and other Math and Science-related degrees are too damned hard to entrust smart students to people who don't care.
Community college instructors, on the other hand, generally have no writing/research requirement, and often have interesting day jobs that directly relate to their material. They are generally better at teaching (as opposed to researching), and there are never any TAs that the class is pawned off onto. Lecture-hall classes of hundreds of students are unheard of (common in lower-division at big unis), and class sizes are generally smaller overall. At best, CC instructors match up nicely with the better uni profs, and at worst, they're at least waaaay less expensive and distracted.
Furthermore, if you live in a state where the CC and uni systems are tight (like in California), there are things like direct course articulation (e.g. http://artic.sjsu.edu/ and general ed certification, so you can plan for and avoid transfer pitfalls. And CCs are at least an order of magnitude cheaper. As long as you stick to stuff that will transfer, you (and whoever's financing you) WILL be happier at a CC than slogging your way through lower-division at a big uni.
I enthusiastically recommend CCs to all incoming freshmen and to anyone returning to school with lower-division left to complete, doubly so if their planned major is tough. CCs might not get much respect in the academic world, but they are far and away the best bridge from the generally conscientious (and professional) educators in high school to the part-time, often lackluster educators in big unis. While not necessarily all CC instructors are top-drawer, they're far better as a class than those at Smartypants U, and far cheaper.
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." --Groucho Marx
Not that I'll ever get that far in academia, but If I did; I do consider it perfectly normal for 50% failure/drop rate with 35% not able to advance in the field without retaking the class. In fact I consider it perverse for anything else to happen.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Implicit in the whole article and most of the comments is the resentment that people with managment degrees are earning as much or more than people with engineering degrees. People say you should just get a business degree instead and not do all the work. However the successful people you see with MBAs, aren't really successful because of the MBA. If you think computer programming is something you don't need college to learn, take a look at finance or accounting, you can literally pick it up over a weekend. The rest of the business curriculum, managment, marketing, [whatever subject the school calls "learning Excel"] are UTTER bullshit.
If those business kids who are drinking 5 nights a week are making more money than the hard working engineering kids, its not because of how awesome their education is. It's because they have that alpha male, street smart, charismatic personality that allows them to get ahead. If you have an engineer's personality, I would not recommend business, as you're going to end up as some asshole's personal assistant. Even if you have a alpha male personality I'd still say do, engineering, because a business curriculum will teach you absolutely NOTHING. I guess you'll be able to enjoy college a bit more, but your left brain will definitely atrophy.
Take engineering if you can, if it ends up you have the potential to be a great businessman you still can be one. If you take business, and it ends up your potential is as a great engineer, will NASA's not letting you design the next rocket with your BA in marketing.
It is his job to blame others.
FYI, Japan is not in SE Asia.
I'm an ECE undergrad student at CU Boulder. Being an engineer is hard work. My roommates complain about having to read 30 pages and write an essay once a week for 'Women in Aincent Greece'. I have to read every bit as much for APPM 1360 (Calculus 2 for engineers), but the difference is that I am not told what to read explicitly, I am expected to read and understand the material myself. And, of course, instead of writing essays, I do problems. It just takes me six hours a week instead of two.
The reason that there is so much engineering attrition is that engineering is HARD. I'm not saying that other degrees aren't valid, but the fact is, at CU Boulder, the engineering majors have a higher average incoming SAT verbal score than the English majors.
If an English major screws up, little bad will come of it. When a doctor, lawyer, or engineer screws up, there is significant real world impact. I want the person defending my liberty to know the law. I want the person operating on me to know medicine. And I want the structural engineer who certified my building to know his trade cold.
That's why engineers, lawyers, and doctors are held to such strict standards. Not everyone is cut out to be a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer. That's OK.
Typed and sent on a Treo 650. Made possible by engineers like myself. I'm proud to be a part of a trade that makes such a big difference.
"When you do things right, no one can be certain that you have done anything at all."
uber leet engineers of de phtasmagorikal futah can't sneak past a snoozing "union" janitor and fix a door on a hinge.
HAHAHAHAHA! Can sneak over to someone elses college and steal a mascot, figure out how to beat vegas, dissasemble and reassemble the profs car inside his bedroom, stuff like that, but a DOOR floors them!
teehheee hee, take yer razzin! No engineers street cred until you can brainstorm your way to fixed desks and doors! In the real world you have to deal with marketing weasels and deadlines based on when their car payments are due, clueles bosses who order you to do three different things simultaneouylsy that conflict with each other, government regulations that only make sense to people who are required to eat with spoons only, and all sorts of other impossible crap, yet the work still needs to be done, and it gets done. Figure it out, it ain't rocket surgery!
p.s. I was in a union long time ago, wouldn't have bothered me *one bit* if my work mysteriously got done when I wan't looking, because the CHECK would still show up!
hehehehehehe, engineers, whooo hawww1one
This guy is absolutely right. I wanted to make a post about "teaching Schools" as opposed to "research schools", but he said it before I could.
One of the posts I read recommended being on a "first name basis with your professors". Well, I work closely with several of my professors doing research. I've had these conversations with them. The one guy even TOLD me, the reason he's working at Kutztown University, an all-but-unknown state school in PA, is because it IS a teaching school. He went on to explain to me that the University he used to work at (which was a research school) didn't even care if you were doing interesting research. They only cared that you were doing research that was making the school alot of money. Professors were praised for making money, and they were flamed for doing good research that didn't make money and/or actually teaching students.
He went on to tell me that working at KU is not only more rewarding (in reguards to research and being merited for being a good teacher), but he also has more time to spend with his family.
Recently, he, another professor (who I'm currently working with now), and a student published a really cool paper on using genetic algorithms on the set covering problem . . . I wish I could find a link to the article.
I'm a freshman at a very respected college of Engineering in a university in Ohio. (It shall remain nameless!) As a freshman in Computer Eng, I am finding myself wondering if I even want to finish this major or just hop onto music or computer science. My reasons for debating on leaving computer engineering is that, at least here, I hardly get a scratch at my specific major until my junior year. Thats right - for the first two years, I will hardly touch a computer program for more than one semester. My current semester was cookie cutter for freshman in the engineering school. I have a science, a math, a religion, a history, an english, a mandatory engineering studyhall, a EGR lecture where we can discuss being engineers and learn about the school and how it works, and a EGR 101 class. EGR 101 is when we learn the fundamentals of being an engineer, without a good chance of touching our specific major. The class is random placement modules. Although there is a computer engineering module, I didn't get to get into it. Instead, I'm building composite bridges and writing technical reports on them. Although that may be helpful, it didn't spike my interest in civil engineering enough for me to want to switch over.
In two weeks, I'll switch modules into a mechanical engineering module. No, I won't be working on cars, I'll be taking apart a toaster, writing a report on it, then I write another report on how we can make the toaster better. Thats it. We don't actually put that plan into action, we don't even rebuild the toaster - they do that for us.
I'm a very hands on person, and in my first few months of being here, I won't actually have a computer class. Next semester, I'll take an intro to computer programming class. Just one. Then rinse and repeat the gen eds, and in place of the classes that I'll have finished for my four years by that point (chemistry, history, religion), insert Engineering Ethics classes. My friend who is a sophomore Engineer says these are mainly reading and writing technical papers and basic ethics for being an engeineer (do good for humanity! be cost effective!).
Anyway, back to my point - it isn't interesting. Sure, I didn't pay 30k$ to goto college to have it be interesting - I paid to get an education... but where am I really gonna use the History of Engineering in real life? Do I really need almost 12 credit hours worth of ethics classes before I can start doing what I want to do with my life? I really just get the feeling that I came to college and I'm just getting a generalized education out of it. At least where I am going, there isn't a thrill of creating a robot yet, or even learning c# code. Would it really kill colleges to toss us a bone of what we came to do our freshman year? Visual Art majors are painting, music majors are playing, sports medicine majors are already getting hands on experience on the field... and the computer engineerings are in toaster classes.
I really dislike the whining about foreign teaching assistants and professors. Yes, it can be a bit challenging sometimes but this is relevant job-training experience. You will be working with these people in the future.
Just imagine it from the other side - not only does your TA have to be engineers/scientist, but much of the relevant research is written only in English, and they must be able to speak English to do their jobs. Despite the complaints, it is a lot easier to struggle to communicate in your own language than in the other guy's language. We Americans have the good end of the bargain in this matter.
I would love to see one of these "my-TA-sucks" whiners learn a language like Chinese. It is hard. Really really "#$"#" hard. I live in Japan and know from experience how challenging it is to learn a language whose fundamental grammar and logic is different from your own. I have never heard anyone who has struggled to learn a non-European language complain about not being able to understand their TA. I wonder why......
Several times on this thread, I have seen someone basically say "I asked my TA (insert absurdly complicated, 40-word-sentence question here), and he had no clue".
This is as much a failure on the student's part as the TA. When speaking to a non-native speaker, one should know that it is best to use simple sentence structures and simple words (in-field technical words are OK). It is part of the learning process to learn how to choose one's words to fit the audience.
Every time I get in any sort of elevator or building, I fear for my life.
You probably enter (any sort of) buildings several times a day; surely by now you would have realized your fears are groundless.
Infuriate left and right
Teaching quality usually varies widely within each department, and that won't change--it's inherently unfixable. The reason is that you want excellent researchers for advanced courses, but they happen not to have either the time or inclination to become good classroom teachers (at least they are often still good mentors). The best a university can do is hire as many excellent educators for their introductory level courses. But that's a luxury universities usually can't afford either because universities get evaluated on measures like grant money per professor and publications per professor and everybody has to pull their weight.
In any case, sooner or later, you have to face the fact that you will have to learn from people who are not stellar educators, because you'll have to do the same in the real world. So, it's not even clear that it would be good if you went to a university where the teaching is uniformly good.
If quality of teaching is really important to you, then select your college accordingly; you will have to make tradeoffs--there are some colleges with uniformly high quality educators, but I guarantee you that they will not be the top research universities or big names. And if you blame your failure to complete an engineering degree on bad teaching, you really ought to look for a different field of study.
The article shows perfectly why there is a lack of enigineers in the US.
But not for the reason the authors thinks to be.
Let's look at the story.
The author has a good GPA, a nice school carreer and starts at a high level US university.
Then he notices that the courses seem to be too difficult and drops out.
And this shows to problem of the US. We have here a guy form whom school was always easy because he was smart. But university is different. The stuff is not easy for anyone. If it's easy for TA/professor then it's because they learned this stuff for years, did do this stuff for years and have years of training. It didn't come easy to them. They in fact invested a lot of work. It's only easy for people at the genius level of Gauss. This means that it will never be easy for you, because you are not genius besides your own good marks, awards and super-duper GPA.
And this shows the problem of the US. Your people are not willing to spend this huge amount of work to learn this stuff. Your people are not willing and not able to accept failure and problems.
And this will kill you economically.
Sad. I knew that I would get a reply that basically just called me an idiot in a round about way, thing is I HAD good grades. I got As in all my CS classes besides x86 assembly language which I got a B, I just had a bad habit of mixing up registers on tests, but still a B is far from failing or "dropping out". I also aced the class designed to "weed out" if you will, which was mainly theory and the highest grade on the final was a 52%
I also did good in all of my math classes, I took AP Calc senior year and Calc 2 my Freshman year...........blah blah, that is neither here nor there.
It was just going nowhere, I saw the writing on the wall. I saw that the graduates that were actually going somewhere did so because they spent their free time coding, and NOT because of the 4 years they spent in school.
That professor I mentioned? Never had a job as a developer in his life, I found out he was pure theory, didn't even like to play with PCs at all and if you put him in any kind of real environment I am sure a 20 year old kid that learned how to code in his spare time would do a much better job doing ACTUAL PROGRAMMING and not just padding their ego and looking down at undergrads that had "only" taken AP Calc in high school.
I went to college to learn how to program for a living, and the CS degree program I was in didn't even teach you how to program. After your 4 years of effort and thousands of dollars and hours spent, you still were expected to figure it all out on your own.
A complete waste of time.
Imagine of surgery school was like CS. *shudder*
I recently graduated from a good (not top-tier, but good) Engineering U and now I'm in grad school in one of those Smartypants U's. The author is hyperbolizing a bit, perhaps, but not all that much. My experience was that I had a few professors (and TAs!) and were simply amazing. They were inspiring, insighting and, most importantly, manifested clarity. However, I had more professors (60/40? 70/30?) that were the negation of these things. They used recycled slides from ages long past, answered questions poorly, if at all, reduced interesting topics to trivial exercises that taught little about the real issue at hand. In short, the education was significantly less than educating. The real crux of this problem is that the skill set required to be a good teacher is *NOT* the same skill set that it takes to be a good researcher. In fact, beyond knowledge of the subject area, the two are practically orthogonal. Professors are usually recruited for their researching, not their teaching ability. You can easily identify a research professor after just one lecture, and it's usually not something to be excited about. Nobel prize winner and 2004 U.S. Professor of the Year http://www.colorado.edu/newsservices/nobel/wieman. htmlCarl E. Wieman is one of the more rare individuals that is truly great at both. He's recently been focusing alot of his energies on *scientific* examining of teaching. The academic community possess a great wealth of tools and methods of investigation, but these have never truly been turned inward and examined why teaching is so often lacking in the hard sciences/engineering and how it can be improved. For example, in the Physics Department at the University of Colorado, studies were conducted that determined that students sitting in the back of the classroom scored significantly lower (10-20% lower on average) than those sitting in the front. You think that's obvious, right? Slackers sit in the back and keeners sit in the front. However, these studies were taken in classes where the students *randomly* assigned seats and required to keep them for the duration of the semester. The cause of the phenomena is intimately tied to the problem of the current state of teaching in science/engineering. It must be honestly and deeply examined, not dismissed as "weak whinering students not able to hack it."
I truly hope that Carl can rally more of his colleagues to his banner and take a good, hard look at the state of post-secondary education in science/engineering.
In college I knew several Computer Engineers that didn't really know what the hell their major was until it was almost too late. It certainly depends on your school but most believe it to be about an engineering position that uses computers. Not an engineer of computers. So the focus would be on general design principles. And while they use computers in advanced projects and learn plenty about it; Computer Science majors study computers from day 1 and don't stop.
Once again, this is a generalization but luckily my friends didn't lose any hours switching to MIS and now make more money than I do with my silly CS degree.
You might have done this but I suggest everyone get out their degree plan and read some of the descriptions of the courses.
Remember: Kern = real good at math and science.
Huh? Maybe I don't know enough Kerns, but when I hear "Kern" I immediately think of the really,really depraved porno auteur.
Viper is the preferred editor of the Emacs operating system.
"If you were smart, you would be the one doing the science and calling the shots."
It has been my experience that very, very few engineers actually understand business. I'm not going to defend The Suits, I'm just saying that as a person with a Business degree who works as a technical designer (PCB's to be precise) I have often been amused by engineers who offer naive opinions of what is going on in the business or what the managers should do in a way that makes it clear that they don't grasp all the fundamental concepts. And whats more, I'd have to teach them the terms first before I could even begin to explain why they were wrong.
See, just being smart or having common sense or mastering something that is really hard, doesn't mean you can just pick up something else you don't understand and figure it out. Not without the fundamentals.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
A more accurate summary would be - smart guy realizes in his first year that the only purpose of engineering syllabus is to brutally grind students to dirt leaving at the end a zombie who is only qualified to teach engineering course.
I dont know how it is chem eng when it comes to relevance of what you learn in school to real world work, but in computer science the output of the top schools are the last people you want on your software development team if you actually want to ship product.
The come out of school stuffed with vast amounts of totally useless knowledge, 98% of which will never be used in realworld software (but great for writing utterly worthless academic papers). And when it comes to the skills needed to actually write stable usable software it turns out that almost no time was devoted in the syllabus to such skills as debugging, defensive programming, problem decomposition, real world software architectures, user interface design etc, etc...
Hardly surprising really, as comp sci depts are full of people who just are not good enough to cut it in the real world.
A classic example of, those who can do, those who can't teach..
You know what ? This guy appears to be lazy. He wants to be spoon-fed. Throughout the article, I didn't find a single place where he has talked about how hard he worked on his _own_.
He joins engineering and expect the TA/instructors to teach him the basics ?
I don't like math - never liked it. I joined computer science because I thought I was very logical and one of the first things that the course had was fourier analysis. I flunked one of the mid-terms, but then I studied _hard_ and easily moved into the top bracket by the end of the course.
I'm from India and though the system here is screwed up as well, it certainly isn't easy. If I want to blame anything on the American system (as I perceive it, 'coz in all probability I'm wrong), it is that it is too easy. Engineering may be tough for you because they expect some standards, and that is a good thing, but still not enough. My friends who are doing their masters in the very good univs over there say that it is a cakewalk compared to our engineering.
Bottomline: You need to make it tougher, not easier.
I did an engineering degree, and am now working in software. Large numbers of people from my course went into management consultancy, accountancy, IT, software, biochemistry - basically anything but engineering. So even out of the small number of people actualy doing engineering degrees, a large fraction don't want to do engineering for a living.
Why? The ~50% pay difference doesn't help. Neither does the memory of countless 3-hour lectures by bad lecturers, or the complete lack of status attached to engineers by companies and society.
Supply and demand, it is the capitalist way. If they want more engineers, they should pay for them.
Engineer, 9 years training, top of class: $53,438
Property Lawyer, 5 years taining, bottom of class (that's why he does property): $99,852
Not so strange is it?
Show me the money d1ckwads.
threadeds blog
First of all, let me dispell the "lack of engineers myth". There is no lack of engineers. If there were, engineers would be getting paid as much as, say doctors, or lawyers. Obviously, they aren't. What there is is a bunch of big companies that keep selling this "lack of engineers" idea in order to keep getting more people in the field so that they can keep salaries low and keep their existing emplooyees in fear.
... well its nothing special. The same thing happens millions of times every school year. Some high school kid gets strait A's in high school and thinks he is hot shit. He gets into a good university where everybody is at least as smart as he is. Since he is aboput average in intelligence he rightfully gets average grades. But he assumes that he is still hot shit and expects straight As. He sees his average grades and panics and throws a little tantrum on the Internet.
As far as the sob story that guy wrote
I mean geezus, engineering is a hard major even if you are at an average school. He says that he is at a great school. Well what the hell does he expect. I mean he even takes a genius level clas and then complains about how hard it is. And I love the way he basicaly asks for grade inflation. And I love even more the way he acts as if engineering has suffered a loss because he switched to a liberal arts major. I have news to you buddy, your school has specifically chosen the begining curriculum so people like you will switch.
But please do not listen to him. Engineering is the only undergraduate major in America which can produce an able proffessional (with the exception of some computer science programs). For pretty much everything else -- science, law, medicine, business you need a graduate degree. Lets keep it like this.
If we listen to complaining like this, we will get easier classes, grade inflation, good teachers (which are not actually good engineers) and eventually the major will become as useful as all the other undergraduate majors... i.e. it will quickly turn out that you will need a graduate degree to do anything interesting after graduation. So you will have to spend another 4 years in school because you wanted undergrad life to be as easy as it was for your friends in social sciences.
"What they lack is a work ethic or any study skills."
What would be nice is if these weren't just floaty abstract concepts that get tossed around in any discussion like this.
What is "a work ethic"? There are many, many work ethics. The Japanese have a Shame Culture. Their work ethics are based around the idea that if they do badly, someone else will look down on them. We have a Guilt Culture. In our culture, if we do badly we've committed a sin against the Puritan code.
These aren't good motivations for a large part of the population. In many cases it is our smarter students who get halfway through the second year of an Engineering degree and say, "You know what? School doesn't have to suck. This schedule, this pacing, these testing procedures are crueller than the difficulty of the subject warrants." Such a student has an insight into the big picture that many students who just keep their heads down lack.
I agree that there are weeding out courses, but I don't necessarily agree that the students they're weeding out ought to be. It's Ayn Rand-esque to assume that just because something is too awful for most people to bear, the people who can bear it are the best at the task. They may just be the most willing to accept pain, which is, I think, a huge part of the reason engineers and programmers are so badly mistreated.
Largely, the students who succeed at engineering or comp sci are the ones without the social skills to be involved in an external life, who are willing to throw away the kind of time and effort required to become a doctor or lawyer but don't have the cleverness for either. At any programming job I've been in, I'm competing with the people who are willing to spend four to six extra hours a day working because they just don't have anything else to do. Hourly, these people earn a very poor wage. It's a good yearly wage, which creates the illusion of good job. Just look at the EA debacle.
These personality traits do not correspond one-to-one with engineering ability. To suggest they do smacks of post-purchase rationalization. You bought your education at a higher personal cost than was really needed, and you don't want to hear that it might have been done without sacrificing your social life and emotional health.
That's why the guys are leaving. ;)
I'm only half-joking. I can recall several friends of mine who left the magnet high school they were attending to come to the same "normal" high school as me. Their reason? 3:1 guy to girl ratio.
As a member of the Triangle fraternity, a social fraternity of engineers and scientists, it saddens me to see a great deal of very talented potential engineer types leave the field due to them not wanting to be single-minded robots. The types of people we want in our brotherhood -- the same types of people who would WANT to join a fraternity in the first place -- are diminishing. I fear our fields may come to be totally overrun by the types of engineers who embody all the negative stereotypes.
Skype is too convoluted... Now I'm reverse-engineering the Kyoto Protocol.
I understand the author's frustration. There are many teachers who simply don't have the ability or the desire to explain concepts - their attitude is simply "do like I do and you'll get the results I get". There are precious few teachers who will bother to explain the why along with the how, and even then you have to twist their arm to get them to make the effort. I had my share of such lazy (and/or stupid) instructors. My solution was to say "ok, show me your method for solving this problem; I'll learn it because apparently this is as much as you know or choose to share". Then I would go get some books to understand the why of it. I hated this because of the duplicated effort and wasted time, but sometimes that's what you have to do to survive. This poor guy set his expectations too high. Or else that was a really crummy college. In either case, what he needed was a good counselor, and it looks like he didn't get one.
I studied liguistic science and theory of literature in Poland. I had about 700 pages a day to read (no, I didn't read them all and never met anyone who did), I had to memorize some bizzare tables of changes in words distribution in certain centuries. Only the textbooks for first exam counted roghly 1000 pages, not counting in other texts to read. We hardly had time to party and the usual place of meetings was the library, because we spent there a great amount of time. Now, I understand from stories of my collegues, that other studies, like physics or chemisty or computer science, were also difficult and have taken their toll on students, but still that's what we all more or less expected when we went to higher education. Of course, there were people who left, because they thought it's too hard. They mostly ended up studying economy. :)
Yes, I was full of dissatisfaction, I was full of dejection when I studied. But now I think I am grateful. I studied theory of literature, now I'm in the middle of writing my master thesis in economy (duh! :)), I think I'll try my luck at physics next year, I work as a network administrator, I worked as an electrician and accountant and everywhere is the same - you have to tacle problems on your own. You rarely go to get help from other people, because they are working hard, too.
So I disagree with the thesis, that it's The System that discourages people from taking engineering courses.
After your kid graduates highschool, don't let them go to college, but instead kick them out. Make them get an apartment, and a job, and bust their ass trying to pay rent and have enough food to eat. Make them tired at the end of the day... that long, hard tired where you're just glad not to be lifting anything. Let them do this for one year, and then tell them they can go to school. Tell them that year was what being poor is, and then tell them engineers, and doctors, and lawyers aren't poor. If engineering's the right thing for them, they'll pick it, and every time they start to think about quitting or taking the easy road, they'll think about that year, and how much it sucked, and realize that thinking all day isn't shit compared to lifting boxes.
The problems with education are real, but the problems with motivation in this country are much bigger. We've had it so easy for the last two generations that we've forgotton what it was like to *really* have to work hard
RandomAndInteresting.comdefending the world from stupidity since 1979
I _was_ a CS major for a year, but I dropped out. Why you ask? Your first guess would probably be the programming, yes? Not at all... In advanced programming courses, I was in the top of the class. Why did I leave CS? Because of CALCULUS. The course that any programmer you talk to will say they've never had to know, unless they're making physics engines. Why'd I fail calc? Because my failure of a professor had a failure of a T.A. neither of whom could speak english. At least the prof understood the material, because the TA would constantly get the wrong answer. Ridiculous.
Remember kids, tin foil doesn't work, so use LeadHat.
3. Don't let your local community decide what should be taught in schools. Curriculum should be decided by a national panel made up of leaders in each field of study. Education should be a national issue, not one decided based on local beliefs no matter how "intelligent" those beliefs are.
We're walking down the national curriculum road with No Child Left Behind. Nearly every teacher I know hates it. And there wasn't very much I hated more than the state curriculum when I was student teaching. Any individual teacher with a love for their discipline or spark of inventiveness is going to react badly to a lack of freedom in this area.Tweet, tweet.
It's too bad the CS program you were in didn't teach programming. The CS program I went through taught basic programming and data structures to first years, but once you got past the discrete math courses and data structures, you were simply expected to pick it up on your own. And rightly so. I don't know anyone who graduated with me who wasn't capable of mastering a new language in three days. It was simply expected that you would pick up the details to complete your programming assignments on your own. Taking AI this quarter? by the way, we'll be using Prolog. Your first program is due tomorrow. Programming languages? Better review Scheme...and by review, I mean know R5RS forwards and backwards and be able to write optimal tail recursive shit on demand....And if you wrote shitty code, you failed. Your code doesn't execute in a single pass? You fail. Exams of course, are for doing insane proofs in nowhere near enough time. It was just tough.
Whole class failed an x86 assembly assignment once, because the library out of the book we were supposed to use used EAX register even though the documentation said it only used AX, and XP SP2 changed how registers were initialized in the virtual dos machine, (SP1 initialised registers to zero for you). Even took the professor a couple days to figure out what the hell was up with it. Lame? yeah. but we all wrote shitty code that broke and it was OUR fault for not being thorough enough.....and no one bitched about it because that was the truth. And I'm DAMN sure I initialise registers properly when i write assembly now.
OF COURSE the graduates who were going somewhere were writing code on their own. It's exactly like playing a musical instrument.... you have to do it every day to get good at it. It's not enough to only practice the stuff they give for assignments. It's like learning to read... if you don't go to the library at some point and get books on your own, you'll be barely making status quo...
Cheers
As a regular moderator, I'm saddened that I don't have mod points for this.
10000000 comments and not ONE "funny" rated? this MUST be an article about engineering..
I remember having a rough go of it the first few years of engineering school. I applied myself and the grades were certainly not what I was used to getting. I stuck it out- and they got better once I hit my major classes.
I think everyone needs to hit that academic wall at some point- if you don't- your not getting what you paid for.
They're moving away from Engineering because their smart - no money in it.
Even if students don't leave.. I wouldn't choose the same carreer path again.
Engineers are subject to the horrors of middle-management, among others.
Who do you want to be pushed around by today? By some dorks who did a softer
study ("eehmm I do not know what I want to do, so let's pick law or business
because mom and dad expect me to study"), have no particular skills or brain,
thus ended up in middlemanagement, kissing ass up, and kicking down.
Now this sounds bitter and overstated. Still, it's the truth. "They" are
complaining about a lack of engineers, what they basically want is bright
people to do the hard work and be stupid enough to be bossed around by the
people who don't have the brains or skills for it. This is a good setup
for "them". I should have joined them. As long as hands on work is considered
less as any idiot in management, I wouldn't advise e technical study to anyone.
Better all become idiot managers and outsource the "dirty" work to Asia.
LOLLLLLLLLL
Article summary: Math is haaaaaard!
Seriously. As a battle-scarred veteran of Discrete Mathematics myself -a class I've mostly managed to repress the memory of- yes, math is hard, particularly in a class which takes skills you've taken for granted since forst grade, such as counting, and turns them on their ear. Engineering is hard to, largely because it requires mathematical skills. If you're not willing to put in the effort to learn, you're not going to do well.
News flash: Engineering is not for everyone. Clearly it wasn't for the author of this article. Perhaps something in our culture has shifted in ways which make fewer students amenable to challenging subjects. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if that were the case, though I've no clue as to how that would work.
What you don't expect is to get there and be taught by some German TA
Uhm, I did expext that. You insensitive clod. ;-)
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
I have to concur with you, at least to a point. My undergrad degree is from Penn State which has very good engineering department, especially for a state school. I did my first two years at a branch campus which provided an atmosphere very similar to a community college--small classes, professors with an active interest in your education, the same excellent teachers from semester to semester providing excellent continuity. The classes were not easy by any means. Many students who couldn't cut it washed out, but it was not from lack of effort on the instructors' part.
The classes for the last two years were only available at University Park, so I transferred to finish up. The quality of professors there was staggeringly worse! And these were teaching the "honors" engineering courses (Engineering Science). Many of the points made in the article struck a chord with me. The mindlessly excessive homework (which spawned mindlessly excessive cheating among 80% of the students) just sucked the life out of me, since I was unwilling to cheat. I had one chemistry class that had 300 people in it. It was pointless. There was no opportunity to interact with the professor at all and the fresh-off-the-boat TAs barely spoke English. With a long lot of effort, I finished up my required courses in three semesters and returned to the branch campus to take my humanities/art requirements and graduate. I graduated with a respectable GPA and, in spite of the quality of instruction, did manage to learn something. But I am eternally grateful that I started out my college carreer at the branch campus. If I had to take four semesters of calculus and physics in that environment, I may well have washed out too.
I always planned to study engineering. I had a natural aptitude (competed in national young engineers comp) and was a keen amateur. By 16 I could already program microcontrollers and was getting quite experianced at C++. But the grades needed to do engineering were just to high. The main reason was that the courses in engineering just looked really boring. Because so many applicants have clearly never taken much interest in the field the course had to start from the beginning and teach the basics. The thought of having to spend two years of my life on the basics just sounded boring. If you have a natural aptitude for engineering you will be able to apply it to whatever field you go into. You see many people in every day life who would have made fine engineers. But that doesn't mean that they are not making a valuable contribution to their own field. The fact is that designing and building new stuff doesn't need an engineer. It needs someone with basic technical skill who has intimate knowledge of the problem. The job of engineers should be to build tools for these people (like MITs FABLAB). Certainly we will always need engineers for the big problems (like bridges), but the need for need devices is so keen that there will never be enough engineers to go around.
America doesn't have a lot of engineering because engineering is hard? Get over it.
Lazy so, and so? Light weight? Lemon? Letterman? Lady-boy? Life-haver? Liberal Artist!
Studying engineering is just too damn hard. While your buddies are out pledging and drunk out of their gurds, you are cracking the books. You don't sleep at all, and all of this while you keep reading how your labor sector is getting hit by offshoring.
Your friends in liberal arts are having the time of their lives and you are living on 2-3 hours of sleep. If you are not an engineering (or science) major you will take much simpler math and natural science base courses. Back in my school we used to call these the "poet" courses. For example, somebody will bitch about a calculus test, and you would automatically ask if it was real calculus or poets' calculus.
Sometimes the curriculum makes no sense. Waste two semesters learning engineering mechanics statics only to me told "well shit, remember all you learned in statics? it was a crock of shit. You have to relearn it but with deformable objects." This is after you already had the proper physics and calculus background to understand the whole picture. Or maybe the first introduction to programming course is in Fortran WATFIV instead of something relevant to the market today, like C++, Java, etc.
My hat is off to anyone that survives a mechanical engineering curriculum and sticks around in the field.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
Just accept the fact the U.S. is f*cked. I feel for this guy, but I feel more for my friend that got a 3.8 GPA as an EE at reputable state U back in the '80s. He busted his ass, and his reward was that he couldn't even get hired for a sh*t engineering job. A rule of thumb is that its takes 5 years of experience before an engineering scrub can even do anything useful out of college to be worth his pay. American business will not make that kind of investment in an employee anymore; even though its critical to long-term survival. He did what all the other educated people did (BS in astronomy, physics, biology, comparative lit, etc.); made money back in the PC gold rush as a programmer or analyst. The last thing in the world I would do is encourage a brilliant student to enroll in an engineering program. As bad as I feel for the washouts because their educators are research whores and academia is a lie, I feel sorrier for the students that can excel despite that environment, and end up (at best) an insignificant cog while some connected jerk can feel good about being able to hire productive talent for peanuts. You snot-nosed punks just don't see it. You vote for a clown, and now you don't realize that the U.S. cannot fund an Iraq occupation and rebuild a hurricane devastated region for the people screwed by the lack of adequate preparation. You don't understand that our military is becoming hollow, because we're engaged in a conflict that cannot be sustained by a volunteer military. You can't see the choo-choo train of economic bankruptcy from the national debt, and you're worrying about the nation getting enough engineers to drive manufacturing progress??? Who cares? In a country that insists on teaching I.D. as science? You won't have a student body capable to doing jack.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Defense comapnies complain all the time about the lack of American Engineers. Defense contracts can't be outsourced to India because of national security.
Eventually all 'American' engineers will be working on military projects.
Oh -- and for the record, I'm currently in graduate school at a public university, and I got my undergrad from a private university (or more accurately, a real estate company who was obligated to teach classes), where I also worked for 7 years, and saw an amazing amount of graft. (and before someone claims this is libel, the fed agreed)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
You can sleep when you're dead! Also, I had one professor that wrote on the lab desk in front of him, that only the first row of people could read, when he ran out of space on the chalkboard.
I want my! I want my! I want my Eee PC!
For your undergrad work, attend a good, accredited, state college. Real professors teaching in the class room instead of TAs. A place where the concentration is on teaching, not research. If you do well there, transfer to a research biased university for your graduate work.
Save your money, get a better education, save your sanity.
Not getting through engineering school doesn't make anyone stupid. But not even trying to figure out why is stupid. This guy has no distance and no perspective on himself. Not strange he failed. The problem is clearly that today people expect to get everything served.
I have gone through one of the top engineering schools, and my experience is that it is not much more difficult than high-school, but it does take more time. Well, not more difficult than my highschool was.
So what does that mean? Well, maybe I am smart (a bit yes, but not that much), or maybe, I learnt study discipline in highschool. I was in a public highschool, with drug dealers and gang fighting and everything, I have never been to a private school. All you need is ambition and discipline. I was lucky and had teachers who asked us to work in highschool and this is what makes the difference. Of course if you pay your way all the way and are pampered all the way, you probably wont know how to make an effort.
Bad professors is not the problem. They have always been bad, and always will be. What you need is to take the initiative, read the literature and do your own studying, preferably with the others in the class.
The lectures finished in 25 min, and he was to afraid to prolong them asking questions. I bet half the class didnt understand, but they coped with it. But since they all looked so geeky he never asked them to find out.
Engineers aren't suppose to fix anything. Get together with your buds, with some buds, and create a 40 page plan with very specific directions how to fix these problems and what materials to use. Head over to the business dept and get an MBA wanna be, like Dubya, and get it budgeted out.Then call some contractors for estimating the repairs and see if any are within the budget. When the contractor tells you the outline is preposterous and there is no way the project can be completed in the proposed manner and shows you how it can be done by doing an outline on a Burger King bag, that will work quickly, at 1/4 of the cost of your proposal, you'll then know you are well on your way to being a Professional Engineer that your peers will look up to ! Choooo! Chooooo !
Read sample of their "journalism" here:1 2.confessore.html
http://www.techcentralstation.com/070505Q.html
Read about Mr. Glassman here:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/03
The present article is all noise too - which University? Which research supports author's observations? What about other universities? And, if any students were his seniors, wasn't it only him having problems? Etc, etc.
It sounds like the author is really saying that liberal arts courses are too easy. But if liberal arts courses were made harder, we wouldn't have any football teams!
It is a rare company that does much engineering any more. I was an Aerospace Engineer at Boeing. It was a "love team" in that the people were very competent, had a great work ethic, cared about what they did etc. Other areas in Boeing (structures etc) and in the automotive industry (GM, Ford et al) there is not much engineering going on in proportion to the bodies in the buildings.
By engineering I refer to the processes of decision making and analysis that require an understanding of the fundamental physics of your discipline and insight into its application to a design solution. The fun and exciting work that requires thought has been smoothered in mindless multimatrixed useless organizational structurers. You could take a typical group of 100 employees and replace them with five. Four to do the work and one to say no to useless requests. The amazing thing is that these people could come from the original organization! Since companies compensate management on the size of their empire rather than their ability you will not see this happen.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
From Dr Biritz, physics professor at Georgia Tech, as to why he doesn't offer "partial credit": "I have a car, that was built by engineers, who passed on partial credit"
This guy seems to be whining "but engineering is HARD. We should make it easy so more people will like it". No thank you. If we made engineering as easy as he'd like it, who'd get my fries at McDs?
The problems go much deeper than a few instructors. First, four years of liberal arts education that waste tons of talent.: how to you add to the grand body of knowledge if 80% of your courses have nothing to do with your field of study? Second, a job market that spend almost no money on R&D and that forces bright people into dull jobs. I can't count the number of CS majors I've seen who decided on a career switch after being slotted into a brainless position with no chance at real accomplishment.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
In the '70's and '80's the dropout rate at Stonybrook (SUNY) in the lifesciences, typically premed or the more estoteric pure genetics research program for the undergrads was over 75% in the first three semesters.
My own experience in SUNY Albany in the chem program was similar. Many young people took the chemistry route as an alternative to the bio premed program but soon discovered that the TAs were grading on a reverse curve. Bang your head against a lab practical for 15 weeks only to discover that a 94 was a C at best.
As an aside let me mention that my linear programming prof did not actually speak any English. He was French Canadian and never felt the need to communicate with us verbally at all.
Question everything
From the article: "Meanwhile, my friends majoring in the liberal arts pulled dandy grades while studying little. "You just wait," I thought, gazing upon them like the ant regarding the grasshopper in the summer. "You party and blow off homework now, but in ten years, you'll be making merely wonderful money as investment bankers and consultants, while I'll be getting laid off from a great job at General Electric." What is the incentive for the college student to major in engineering? In most cases, people do not like to work/study that hard...in others, law or medicine seems like the better choice.
Except for the X-prize (Space Plane $1mil prize,) what incentive does the individual have to engineer something and NOT sell out to the highest bidder? First of all you normally will need a few thousand dollars laying around to get started on any high-tech engineering project, not an easy start up. People like Richard Branson have plenty of time and money, but may not have the most inventive minds or are willing to take million dollar risks.
As one is incorporated, they are told what projects to work on in most cases...ideas are stifled.
Google hired Vint Cerf....what incentive did he have to innovate as an advisor and lobbyist for MCI?
Agreed, it was his choice to live his life any way he sees fit, but let's hope the open(?) atmosphere at google will enable his creativity to bloom once again.
I am not exactly sure how hi-tech engineering environments are managed these days, but I hope there are more open and comfortable workplaces as innovators out there chip away at their individual masterpieces.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
LOL
bravo, *****
because clearly, building a house there is not common knowledge.
The average house of Roman citizen 2000 years ago was more advanced than the hovels the average Indian has.
Clearly, having many engineers does not translate into being able to build the simplest of structures on a large scale.
So, now what?
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Seriously, I have heard tons of engineering wash out stories. The joy of most of them is that the people themselves were ill prepared for college and in the case of this individual sometimes too cocky for their own good. As he put it he was 'too good for some kiddie intro course.'
College is a completely different beast from the previous 12 years or so of schooling that you get. High school is anything but a prep for college and this is by and large because of standardized testing which forces teachers in HS to teach you the test and not the actual material.
Yes, I graduated high school with a 4.0 GPA and yes I was to some degree humbled by my college by receiving a 3.1 GPA and a 3.0 major GPA from a top 25 engineering school. However, anyone who lets one year of bad school scare them off should not be an engineer because it is HARD WORK. My freshman year ended with a GPA of 1.7 overall. You see that turn-around.
There are a few things that you must come to realize when going into an engineering degree: 1) it will be hard work and if you cannot put forth time and effort move along; 2) the curve will become a friend because teachers in college mostly want to weed out the bottom feeders so by making a VERY HARD test you get a bulk of the class in say the 50-60 (sometimes 70 range) and the low ends get in the 10-20 if not lower range, since curves aren't linear you can fail the 10-20s and pass the 50-60s where a downward curve where the 10-20s might have gotten a 70 is generally frowned upon; 3) Most every professor, at most every major institution (especially public) is there because he brings in research money, not because he is a great teacher. It is important to remember these people have PhD's not degrees in education where they teach you to teach.
I think trying to blame the education system for the lack of engineers might be the right motivation. However, I do not think blaming college is the solution. I think the root goes back to high school, which many people try to say is some preparation for college. This should be the case but often it is not. More high schools need to adopt a college like curriculum where students decide what classes to take. Not going into a science or engineering field, ok take less math. I will not go over how much time I still consider wasted in English and Social Studies course in HS. Heck I do not remember 95% of what was taught in my Sociology or Drama courses. Restructure HS to better prepare students for college, and then we can determine if the lack of engineers is really a education problem or just a fact that most people do not want to do what is starting to become perceived as a well paying job (often) with (often) long hours.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
Welcome to education at the baccelaureate level. A Bachelor's degree is supposed to give you a *well rounded* education, not simply teach you CE or whatever your major is. Your complaint about how soon you start taking courses that are relevant to your major is valid, but in the end you take just as many major courses as an English major, if not more.
"The problem with internet quotations is that many are not genuine" -Abraham Lincoln
Engineering is a whole lot of work, not just some of the time, all of the time.
And yes it can be quite thankless; I've had to sit there and take it more than
once from some pain-in-the-a*s boss who knows nothing about computers
or electronics but still wants to tear into me because one of my little bright
ideas didn't work. I've been pushed around by guys who just sat around and
"did the books" (I guess that was their title). I didn't let that bother me, I just
did my job as best I could - if that wasn't good enough for them, too bad.
I'm a skilled worker and regardless of what you say I'm not that easy to replace.
Of course it burns me that I just might have to move to a city with an area
population of half a million to best use my degree. Supply and demand is
spotty for any specialized field, like some surgeons, many types
of instructors, meteorology,often psychiatrists, and a million other fields of study
where you can make a decent living from a skill. Jobs that start at $35,000 and up
aren't falling out of the sky looking for you. And when a doctor or nurse screws
up bunches of people can and do die, they (hopefully) pay dearly for it like
anyone else.
What makes me happy is that I've learned a diverse set of skills and if work
gets scarce I'll find SOMETHING to get me by until the good jobs come around.
Not only that before long I'll be skilled enough where you can't really replace me
and just try to stick me on some 24/7 bullsh*t salary--chew my a*s out then.
If you aren't good at math or physics or whatever goto a trade school or Community
College. Before too many years your salary will catch up to something reasonable.
Discouraging people from going into a specialized field is just wrong.
It's almost as if most of the comments above fail to address what the article is about. I congratulate all of you who graduated from Ivy League programs, had small classes and personal attention, and/or studied with good professors. Pat yourself on the back. Unfortunately, (SHOCKING SPOILER AHEAD) most college students don't go to Ivy League schools.
If someone wants to take pride from sticking it out with the crappy conditions in engineering great. This article is about why the U.S. doesn't turn out more engineers, and it offers the following valid observation (if you read between the lines): students in higher education are basically "customers." You don't believe me? Look at the amount of construction in the last 10 years for recreational centers and sports facilities. College students aren't stupid. Ignorant? To a degree, but not stupid.
The author had options. He went to law school. Law school is NOT easy, so he's not stupid. He made the following choice as a customer: I can leave a degree program which is unsatisfying and will NOT reward me financially for my sacrifices OR I can change my major to something more enjoyable with the intent to get a professional degree that will, in the long term, pay me much, MUCH more money, allow me to buy a better house, allow me to buy a better car, and send my kids to a better college. Think about that.
Make love, not reality television.
I'd say 90% of the responses to his article so far say something like "Sorry you couldn't cut it, but engineering is hard, so you Mr. Kern must be a lazy moron". Well to that I say, he's a successful writer and lawyer who is getting his material published for Slashdot to read. While, you are posting on a silly message board on your lunch break before you go back to your 80/hr week coding job that you hate. I'd say things turned out okay for him. The smartest thing he ever did was leave the engineering field. That makes him smarter than most Slashdot readers.
Firstly it's not hardly just engineering, it's many subjects, particularly hard sciences and mathematics it seems. US colleges are filled with foreign-born professors who simply can't speak English well enough to teach.
Secondly: how often one will pull all-nighters and put up with incomprehensible professors and borderline-incompetent TA's is certainly some measure of detirmination, but it has very little to do with effectively learning anything concerning what subject the course is alleged to be studying. I'd have thought that the will to go 50K or more in debt would count for something.
If anything, lousy teaching only teaches a student to ignore the people in charge and only pay attention to the technical requirements they give. Dare I ask, how long would an employer put up with that kind of attitude?
Famously Calculus, Discrete Math are filters for people without an engineering mind set. If you can't do calculus you shoud not design bridges or airplanes. For the author in specific he would have been slaughtered by Organic Chemistry and dropped out his junior year. I knew many many many chem-es who switched to civil engineering after they could not hack O-Chem.
gb2/4chan
-Anonymous, who does not forgive
Can't we all just snuggle up with a copy of Office Space and laugh it off?
Now that is a masterpiece. Truly a masterpiece.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
This mistake is exactly why I dropped piano classes as a kid. I wanted to learn something that I could enjoy playing to myself and friends early in the game. No one seemed interested in teaching me anything of the sort.
all the best,
drew
--
http://www.ourmedia.org/node/64732
Paper Plane Design 002 Video
CC BY-SA License
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
This guy didn't have it too bad. I had professors tell me to quit. Most of these professors were Indian in origin. Their claim was that either my parents or my country should pay for my schooling. I had neither, I was working for a local power company while going to school. Sometimes I worked as much as 40 hours a week, while having a very demanding school schedule. I wasn't able to keep my grades up like I wanted to, I just didn't have the time that I needed to study. What really gets me is that I was learning more stuff at work than I was at school. This is the reason for me ultimately leaving the electrical engineering program at ULL. Why should I pay a college, and possibly make bad grades, when I can get paid and learn more, faster, and much more interesting things. It actually payed off for me as I now am working for one of the largest companies in the world, doing what I do best.
neilgx
Honestly, a ton of the stuff in an undergraduate education may never be used by a practicing engineer.
Some of the issues the article raises related to workload are understandable. A person with an engineering degree shows they can perservere through the physics, math, chemistry, then get through the even tougher engineering classes.
Bad instruction also forces you to learn on your own or in groups, a useful ability.
If you want spoonfed technical classes, consider a degree in "technology" or MIS or something else but engineering.
"You asked for it, you got it, Toyota"
..toyota
Outsource more of your engineering overseas,
Your company will save so much money.
Layoff 3/4 your workforce and continue the beatings until morale improves.
Your company will save so much money.
Import all that product from overseas and cheap labor.
Your company will save so much money.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
In Asia most smart guys are encouraged to be engineers. In the US its considered geeky and low-paying. The last two presidents of China were engineers. Perhaps thats why their economy is growing at 9% and the US is staying even with inflation.
He also enrolled for the genius-level course, then complains about it being too difficult. Genius-level... it's where you DO have to be a genius to figure it out, you idiot!
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
The first year of "engineering" is pretty generic ... math, physics, rhetoric ... just trying to get everyone up to the same level. This guy never got to see engineering because he washed out.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
....seems the same as mine, except I am still working on my Comp. Eng. degree. I am going to LSU, where we cancel classes because a hurricane delayed a football game from Saturday to Monday, so I understand that academics are not what the university is focused on. Still, a 'C' grade (read passing) in my second physics class was a 50% and that was after the curve and extra points. In my third physics class they just gave out lots of points, for instance they would give you points for writing down the correct formula to use for a given problem (they gave us formula sheets), I wrote down four formulas for one problem, two were wrong, but I got half the points the problem was worth. The intro Circuits class has a failure / drop rate of 50%, but one thing that sets those who want to be engineers apart from the liberal arts majors is that if we fail said class, we will repeat it and to better, as many do around here. Once you get pass all of the intro classes, you get into the classes that are more fun, and teachers that aren't bent on you failing (though if they are, it comes from the department), but actually want you to understand the material. My experience with the low level math classes with just grad students teach is about the same as his, and this really doesn't help students learn what they need to survive in the intro engineering and physic classes, those that can learn it by themselves survive, otherwise, the rest become liberal arts majors. These classes don't help produce any more engineers, and it is all the university fault for not wanting to pay for anything more than grad students (do they actually get paid?).
I am sure some engineer from India would not complain as much about his teachers and coursework and classmates grooming as this guy. So you can take grade-inflated psychology and communications classes? I know a high GPA in a class that doesn't teach jack is worth less than a low GPA in a class that teaches a lot and I'll hire accordingly. You take that 2.7 gpa in Chemistry or Physics to people like me and you won't have a problem. American businesses are able to adjust to accommodate Indian engineers, I think they can adjust to the changing ways of teaching at American colleges.
And yes, we know some teachers speak English that is inscrutable. Yes, we know that other majors are the gravy train. Yes, we know about the 30 or 50 point grading curve and ambiguous partial credit. Yes, we know about low-skilled TAs given responsibilities way over their head. Yes, we know about oversized classes, low personalized attention and limited office-hours. And yes, if you are the hard-working science and math whiz you say you are, we will be able to figure it out and hire and pay you accordingly. Just tell it like it is, and don't worry.
But don't give up.
I know a lot of experienced CS / EE folks (oftern with advanced degrees and 10-20+ years experience) leaving the field. Went into teaching, optometry, real estate, retail, and carpentry. I know some that just retired early. (Mostly) wasn't burnout - just tired of getting laid off. Or couldn't get a resume past the HR event horizon and gave up. Does not bode well for the U.S. economy's long term prospects.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Let's see.. difficult problems, lack of examples (you mean it's NOT all laid out for me?! The HORROR!), heavy work load (no life), and high expectations. Uhm, if he's complaining about this in his education, what does he think the actual jobs are like once he graduates? As I like to say "It takes a special kind of insanity to do this kind of work". You have to love it, that's it. The money isn't worth it. If you're doing it for the money you're going to be absolutely miserable. He made the right decision to switch majors.
Yup, I can relate to this guys stories.
But at least in 'the south' we didn't see too many foreigners.
The first year chem and physics courses are weedout courses no doubt.
And yet, look at all the Indians and Asians who come here and pass those courses.
And I agree with parent here, from my view, US corps are ACTIVELY trying to get rid of engineers. They want to force low pay, long hours, no recognition, treatment as 'resources' and not a human being. At this company, it was the maverick runnings of 3 engineers, who despite managements repeated screwups pulls in $8 mill(US$) a quarter and growing. And still we are treated like crap.
I am hoping my kids will choose a medical or other professional field. Tho honestly, they could probably make even more money selling burglar alarms or cell phones.
They Live, We Sleep
Does that count as the obligatory "breasts" comment?
Ten years ago, in a previous life, I was an Air Force Recruiter. My area of responsibility was northwest Nevada and west into California as far as the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Because of the post-Cold War "peace dividend," recruiting had slowed down and I was given the additional "goal" (quota) of finding at least two qualified applicants for the Air Force Officer Training School (OTS) per fiscal year.
the basic educational qualifications for OTS were: a bachelor's degree from an accredited college or university, a minimum of a 2.5 GPA, and qualifying scores on the Air Force Officer Qualification Test, similar to the GRE exam. An applicant also had to provide a resume that showed "leadership potential," through work experience or holding leadership positions in student organizations.
I quickly learned that exceptionally well-qualified applicants with non-technical (i.e. business, history, etc.) had little chance of selection. For example, one applicant had spent three years enlisted in the Army, worked his way through university on the G.I. bill to earn a B.A. with honors in Financial Management, and was holding an executive position with one of the major casinos in town. He was rejected - twice. In contrast, another applicant, with a B.S.E.E from Chico State, no leadership experience (unless you counted his six months as assistant night manager of the Taco Bell in Susanville, California), and no engineering experience outside of college, was picked up on his first application without question. Another applicant, a dual math/physics major, also with no management or leadership experience, was also selected on his first try.
Both of these applicants successfully completed OTS; the E.E. major was assigned to Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, to work on the AIM-120 AMRAAM air-to-air missile program, the dual math/physics major was sent to the Air Force Research Laboratory's Directed Energy Directorate at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, to work on "stuff".
Pretty good for a former Taco Bell assistant night manager and a guy who stocked shelves at the local co-op.
If you're a U.S. citizen (by birth or naturalized), have a degree in engineering, meet the physical and moral (i.e. don't tell and we won't ask and nothing worse than a juvenile misdemeanor in your record) requirements, then there's a very good chance you can get that "five years of experience" employers are looking for with the U.S. Air Force.
If you don't meet all the requirements, or have a moral objection to serving in the Armed Forces, but have an engineering degree, then you might consider applying for the Palace ACQUIRE program.
What?
Also - Computer Engineering rarely includes C#...you'll get to do much more exciting things like Assembly, C, and C++
-- Proof by analogy is fraud.
Hell yes it's hard. But in the past, there were usually high paying job opportunities awaiting engineering graduates.
Really? When? Maybe during a brief window when the high-tech bubble was in effect, but other than that, engineering jobs have been pretty unspectacular pay-wise. A good deal of my family are engineers, and it seems that at best, engineering jobs have typically paid slightly above average salaries.
Shinya Nakano? Seriously?
Do you ride a Kawasaki?
Blessed be he who reads this post, Cursed be he who tells my boss.
Nobody likes being a pawn when the game doesn't even make any sense.
As far as the guy could tell, a good portion of his grades were beyond his control, viz a viz the utter inability of the teaching assistants to describe the concepts.
No one likes learning something wrong, and the textbook generally doesn't straighten you out. It's not like the textbook can double-check your understanding of, say, electrical reactance and its role in the total impedence of a given circuit; that's kind-of what the human personnel who run the classes are supposed to do.
(Admittedly, the guy didn't expand his thinking appropriately. There had to be other ways to get around this problem, such as finding like-minded individuals in his classes and forming a study groups, or reviewing some of the concepts on his own time. A student in college today could conceivably (gasp!) GOOGLE for some help.)
Thing is, in the end, I do in fact believe in locker-room justice with respect to engineering disciplines. But the original poster was well aware that the TAs were not deliberately being difficult, they were difficult because they didn't know how, or didn't care, to properly explain anything.
There are those who want to encourage young Americans to become good engineers, but turning people who reek of incompetence into instructors is not the way to go.
"The Devil does not know a lot because He's the Devil, He knows a lot because he's old." -- unknown
They thought that a Computer Engineer was an engineer that uses computers? Wow... just... wow. Did they think that other engineers didn't use computers?
Exactly what kind of engineering did they think they would be doing? Civil? Electrical? Industrial? Cause they have their own majors.
I'm sorry, that's just dumb. How long were they taking classes before they decided to look at the course requirements for their major?
Hmmm witty sig or funny sig? Maybe elitest techy sig!
I can really relate to the problems that the author faced. I faced some of the same misery at Berkeley 20 years ago. For example, I had a professor who discovered the proton. He was a Nobel Lauriate. He could not teach worth a damn. However, compared to the essay, I did reasonably well, or was reasonably lucky, in somehow getting decent professors. However, again, this was 20 years ago. Nowadays its even worse, as you have to pay an enormous amount of money to even stay in a decent college. For example, Berkeley, now being an out of stater, would cost me $40K/yr, I kid you not. With that amount of money I could go to Princeton. I really feel for the student of today. All of the deck is stacked against you.
...let alone me. I remember professors desperate for tenure videotaping themselves in class, while reviewers in the rear of the room openly laughed at the (lack of) classroom communication skills - such a gracious display of tact.
I remember professors in screaming tirades hurling materials at students, all over the question of where a final would be held.
Where was the concern about my education in this? Where was the focus on my learning to think? As far as I know, it was nonexistant.
Perhaps you are imagining things, and the degree is more of a line item than you would like to admit.
I know that we didn't go to the same college... are you sure that we even went to the same school?
p.s. The only time the issue of my GPA is raised is when an interviewer is trying to talk down my salary - it is a sure sign to head for the door.
> When he gave a "trivial" example, at least half > the class would understand what he had
> been trying to explain for 15 minutes.
And when are we going to get manpages with
trivial examples? At least, I would understand
something.
Background: ChemE undergrad, Biomats grad. Yes, engineering profs couldnt care less about undergrads, at least until they become upperclassmen and can at least be useful in the lab. But I found that once you passed the "weedout" classes (usually by the start or middle of junior year) the profs started to actually care. We started with 30 chemE's and graduated 11. Most of those who left either: a) couldnt pass basic math. If you have trouble with basic calc/DiffEQ you shouldnt be an engineer. or b) just didnt find the subject matter interesting, and therefore weren't willing to suffer. I found the stuff interesting, and was happy (for the most part) to put up with it. Some really smart people cant stand the site of blood. They shouldnt be surgeons. Likewise, engineering isnt for everyone.
Take it from a engineering professional, the rate at which engineering is being off-shored is staggering. One reason so many of these companies have layoffs is becuse they just opened a facility in China and hired as many engineers as they needed. China is graduating over 100,000 engineers a year that work for wages less than $400/mo. How can the US compete with that? Business is business and saving money is what they are all about. People at my company constantly ask senior management about reversing or slowing offshoring and they just say too bad, get used to it. Take my advice go into system engineering and back it up with a business degree, that will be the only important engineering left in the US until the wages in other countries rises.
We aren't here to teach you things - we are here to teach you how to think".
I wholeheartedly agree with that statement. But i think you should just go for a harder degree like physics or maths and then step down to engineering. Unless you have a very specific career in mind that would require the specific skills that a certain specialised engineering course teaches you, you can learn the method of thought at university in a harder subject and then apply this to the engineering domain.
I did it.
KNOW THE FUCKING LANGUAGE!!!!!!!!!!!!! I went to engineering school at the University of Cincinnati. Every single day of my freshman year, I had to sit through a 5 hour 8AM calculus class, and each one was a different TA, and each one couldn't speak english. When the TA is turning around and asking the class, "Who do I say blah blah blah," there is a HUGE problem. Sure maybe over at Purdue, they don't have that problem, and I was accepted there too, but at UC and at most schools this is a common problem. If I do not know the subject matter, how I can I possibly give you the words to teach me something I do not already know? I am so thankful that my public high school had one hell of a math program, or there isn't a snowballs chance in hell I would have ever made it through those classes. Is it really too much to ask, when you are paying thousands of dollars per quarter/semester, to have a teacher who can SPEAK THE FUCKING LANGUAGE?!
I graduated from Penn State with a BS in Electrical Engineering. And it certainly is BS. In my entire engineering career the classes, with exception of perhaps four (not counting liberal arts classes, folks), proceeded similarly as Kern describes here. In fact, my junior level electromagnetics class was more of a "history of equation derivation" course than anything else and was literally based on a problems solutions set manual that was originally written in Japanese and translated to English.
How's that for a noggin' scratcher?
Most professors could barely teach, it was more of a relaying of slide shows and, yes, even directly reading from the text book in class. These professors cared far too much more for research than instruction. One professor I had, who was actually good at teaching --bless her heart, got so frustrated with them that she left the university to return to her industry roots.
To be fair, half of them were much more helpful when you could catch them at office hours (but let's not go there with how often they weren't around and the TA was left...). And they were smart. Very smart.
I agree with many of the replies here. It does take a certain insanity to enjoy this line of work. A creativity and drive for finding solutions to problems. The grand fixers of the worlds woes. Forcing nature to yield to your will and design. But that doesn't negate the horrid quality of instruction in the classroom. The major difference between my highschool (where I did take many AP courses) and college was the quality of the teacher; the kind of time and effort they put into the class helping convey information, IE: teaching. Not reiteration.
And just for the record, while not stellar, I did graduate with a GPA of 3.01 and I still agree with this guy.
For castles made of sand must eventually return to the sea.
i'm in engineering, and guess what: i don't want to build bridges. so why weed out people that don't want to build bridges at the calc I level? wait until bridgebuilding 101 to do that.
having said that, i agree with the sentiment here that engineering is kinda difficult, and you just gotta suck it up and do it.
it is unfortunate that the reward that awaits us is rather pale, however.
mr c.
This is a tough room to sell these concepts, but I agree with many of his comments. For two and a half years, I was a Genetic Engineering major. I loved biology and my meticulous attention to detail complement the research process. The problem is that science and engineering instruction at the university level is built to obtain a very specific type of individual. It is an artificial construct that has very little to do with science and everything to do with bureaucracy. Specific types of individuals are retained and everyone else is thanked for their contribution and kicked off to the Liberal Arts. It is arrogant (in Science and engineering??? NO!!) to assume that there is only one way of doing things and that the system currently in place finds only the best and brightest. That's like suggesting that the Billboard charts reflect the best music in the country because only certain bands are willing to jump through the 'right' hoops. Teaching is still wildly uneven in this country but there is no way that's going to change anytime soon. The beauty of college is that if you've got a movement to organize, just hold it at bay and wait. They'll graduate soon enough. Besides, education is rapidly becoming a secondary pursuit at the university level. Research and real estate are where it's at. What else are they supposed to do with all that money?
From reading the other comments sounds like this guy is a whiner, a sour grapes kinda guy. I knew I was too lazy to become an engineer so I stuck with computer science. I think the problem these days with any high-tech field is that you spend a lot of money on an education for an uncertain personal future. Though the future is bright the reality of it for most techies is pretty dim. If you don't believe me, take a look at Philip Greenspun's Career Guide for Engineers and Computer Scientist. And he wrote this before the tech bubble burst.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Professors who either won't or can't teach should be expected by any prospective college student. The reason can be summed up in one word... tenure. Guaranteeing anyone a job for life is stupid.
Too bad, the workload was heavy, the problems were too hard, my teachers weren't handing everything to me on a plate and I would have to put forth some effort to survive. Welcome to the big city you pussy. Now, go flip your burgers.
Anybody else ever heard that before. Seriously, those that can't manage to keep their head above water in industry, decide to teach.
I also think that teaching (University level and below) requires way too much for the work required. At a university, you're required to teach 2 or 3 classes every semester plus manage to keep a few dozen grad students under control, while supervising and being thoroughly involved in all of their work, as well as publish a half a dozen professional papers every year. This is way more than can be reasonably expected in a 40 hour workweek. The result is that the teaching suffers.
Non tenured professors don't teach well because their tenure depends very little on their teaching. It mostly depends on their research and publishing. After they achieve tenure the teaching still suffers because now it doesn't matter what they do, they can't be fired without a great deal of effort.
The whole system has some serious flaws, at least if you were under the impression that the primary goal of a university was to teach.
Kern,
I read your 'article' on the state of Engineering Education in the United States. Sounds familiar. I have a degree in Electrical Engineering from a well known engineering school on the East Coast. I have been through it, all the way to the end.
I'll be honest, it sounds to me like you just need to whine and bitch because you couldn't hack it. That is the short of it.
Engineering classes are not easy, certainly not for Freshman. They are intended to weed out the people who don't really have it in them. The people who figure, 'Well, I did decent in high school with math and science, I guess I'll be an engineer. It shouldn't be to hard, and they will probably help me along with anything and everything that I have problems with.' Guess you found out your were wrong.
Yeah, I have been there, I was in the advanced classes in High School, I had a straight 3.0 average at high school graduation. You might even argue that you are smarter than I am. I received C's and D's in my AP Calculus class, B's and C's in chemistry. But my intention was to take all those tought classes again when I got to college.
I busted my but my freshman year. I read the text books in order to learn (I know it is a strange concept), did the homework and I walked out at the end of my freshman year with a 3.5.
Sophomore year was actually tougher believe it or not. I recall one particular class with 10 hours of homework per week (Differential Equations). But for those of us who did the homework, we learned the material and I walked out with my GPA higher still.
By the end of my sophomore year, a full 1/3 of the freshman engineering students that I started with were gone. They were like you, they had been good at math and science and thought, 'Hey, I can be an engineer.' But they partied to hard, didn't study enough and most of them left peacefully to pursue a liberal arts degree.
But there were a few who, like you, were disgruntled and pissed off. They didn't realize that it wasn't the University that had failed to lower the standards enough to let them slide through the introduction engineering classes.
You are out of high school now, no more babying, if you want something you have to work for it.
So I wish you luck in your endeavour to do liberally artistic things, after all it is people like you that keep my salary high.
Signed,
David
B.S. E.E.
Business managers will *always* say there is going to be a shortage of techies, it would be stupid to say anything else. Of course businesses want a glut of techies. From a business standpoint, what else would make sense?
I've worked in IT for over 25 years. I know, IT is not engineering, but the recruiting scam is the same.
As long as I can remember, there are always these articles about the upcoming shortage. Yet, except for the 1995 - 2000 period, there was never a real shortage - usually just the opposite.
I don't know what school this Kern when to, but I can assure anyone out there who is contemplating an engineering degree that there are very good schools in the US. I'll be receiving an MSCS from Stanford in 2006. I have continually been amazed at the quality of the education that Stanford offers. The instructors are incredibly gifted at teaching and I sit in rapture when I listen to each and every lecture. Stanford also has top-notch TA's in each and every class who not only understand all the materail, but will take great pains to explain it in any amount of detail that is necessary. Mabye Stanford is the exception, but I seriously doubt that. Please don't let the bad experience of one individual turn you off from an engineering degree in the US.
On a side note, is there really a lack of engineers? I went to a pretty good school, and surely did not notice fewer engineers. At the job fair, companies were not on their knees searching around for whatever engineer they could scrounge, there were so many that they could be highly selective. There does not seem to be a shortage of engineers to me, does anyone find basis in that comment? Also, if there are fewer engineers (at least in the computer engineering world), i'd say its because the demand for engineers has leveled off. So many people rushed to become computer engineers because the pay was so high, that the field became saturated. Now salaries have leveled off, and mostly people who are genuinely interested in computer engineering apply.
Let me sum up what I'm trying to say:
"Hard" != "Good"
From what I hear, rushing a _fraternity_ is "hard."
Tired of Political Trolls? Opt Out!
Just to get it out of the way, I did go to a very highly reputed undergrad program, and a very highly reputed grad program (both engineering), and I did OK. I mean, I got As in everything, but I can't say I understood everything, but hey, sometimes just short of perfect is good enough. But this one time, I thought I should learn some practical stats, so I took the introductory stats course in the Psych department, and I've got to say, I had no clue from day one. I'd missed only the first class because of some mix-up, but that didn't explain why I didn't understand one word that was said. The instructor spoke in SAS, or so I assume, because there were words in the SAS-based problem set handout that were similar to words on the board. There wasn't any discussion about what real-world problem we were trying to solve. I mean, this wasn't "SAS for Psych" or something, it was an "Introduction to Stats in Psych" course. And at this time, I was TAing a course in engineering that was heavy on simulation programming and stats at the same time! I didn't even bother going back, I figured they weeded me out in one class, that was way more efficient that any engineering course.
I couldn't agree more. I started my Computer Science degree at a smaller university, where the teachers actually taught and cared about teaching. There wasn't any research to do. Teaching was why they were there. And while I was not particularly challenged in the computer scinece courses (I passed out of the entire first year), the math teachers were good and I actually learned Calc I and felt I understood the subject.
I moved to a larger, more computer-science-oriented university, after 3 semesters at small U. The math teachers at big U were abysmal. I couldn't understand them, their TA's were even worse, and I got a D...twice...in Calc II. I went to class 4 days a week, mostly with the TA, I studied my rear off trying to comprehend the "why" of the subject, but never really "got it".
I took a full-time day job and went to Big U's night school, and there again were teachers who taught. I loved it.
Big U with Big Bucks and more focus on research than teaching didn't care about me, and I failed. Small U and nightschool were populated by both teachers that wanted to teach, and students that wanted to be there, and I excelled.
Saying that the author of the article was just lazy or had no aptitude smacks of superiority and is really unbecoming. You have no idea what that guy is or isn't capable of, and he certainly writes better than any of the posters in this forum, myself included.
Blaming everyone else for his own problems. My advice to him: suck it up - you get out of an education only what you put into it. College-level Engineering isn't high school anymore. You can't sit on your laurels, announce how great your are, and then expect everyone to admire you in awe.
Well, a second hand story from an elder...
I spent 3 years doing development and validation of computational fluid dynamics software at a major jet engine manufacturer. While I was there one of the guys who had beein in aerospace for 40+ years befriended me.
The real reason is that there aren't more people becoming engineers is that we just aren't treated like he was when he was my age. His salary when he was 30 was comparable to a medical doctors. It used to be that people who had the brains and passion to suceed in any field would often choose engineering, now, if they want money, they avoid engineering. Engineering is left to folks like me who really love solving problems, and would probably do engineering even if it paid less.
Companies that scream bloody murder everytime a government regulation interfiers with the free market in any way that hurts their bottom line (complaining that capatalism is te american way) want permission to hire engineers differently from all other professions because engineers are scarce. Well you're the ones demanding a free market.
Pay us more, there will be more of us!
My older friend I mentioned before forbid his children from studying engineering... I will advise my kids that a career in engineering is a bad finacial decision, but if they think it will make them happy...
This is the problem.
How many of you would tell your kids to become engineers?
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
I started college at a midlevel state school as a Computer Science major. I did well in high school but was by no means a superstar.
None of the CS, Math, or Physics teachers knew English that well or were, indeed, very good teachers. The classes went by at a VERY fast pace compared to high school. You were covering stuff in 2 weeks that took 2 months in HS! I could barely keep up. Every teacher assigned homework like his/her class was the only one that mattered. I was struggling and my first semester was a wash.
This is where Kern's story ends, however my story ends with me realizing I needed to work harder. It felt like a new, interesting challenge like I never got in HS. I graduated at a different, much better school, in arguably a harder major (Math). But the work never got easier (it got harder), the pace never slowed down (it got faster), and the teachers never learned English.
The things I learned in school were wonderful and valuable intellectually and I pride myself in not giving up. Why do high school superstars like Kern give up so easily and then blame everyone else?
This is simply a rant from someone who chose a poor college to learn engineering. I've got a B.S.E.E. and haven't been taught by a T.A. a day in my life.
Let's see..
Sunday: 7am-830pm
Monday: 6am-1130pm
Tuesday: 6am-10pm
Wednesday: 630am-9pm
Thursday: 7am-10pm
Friday: 7am-10pm
Saturday: 8am-11pm
All on salary, no comp time. I can't imagine why there aren't people flocking to this line of work.
Sounds like this guy just got a bad school for (learning) engineering. There are plenty, and it can be hard to tell ahead of time. A lot of high schoolers would like to know SmartyPants' real name, both techies (run!), and liberal arts types (easy, prestige degree.)
I'm okay with engineering school being hard: it's a tough subject. People go to Stanford or NCSU knowing they're in for a rough ride. Hard classes should translate into useful knowledge gained, though. My own college was famous for chemistry: no TA's, but tough classes, a legendarily bad faculty member or two, and a Zen-like culture (if we like you, you'll pass.) They did, but I quit anyway.
OTOH, the grading policy at SU reminds me unpleasantly of my experience in the US Navy's elite nuclear submarine fleet: the standards were impossibly high, but with a little finesse you didn't really have to meet them, most of the time. That turned out to be very bad for my morale, after a while.
News of fewer people going into engineering saddens me, but makes me happy at the same time. I'm in an engineering school, so that means less competition for me when I get out of school. I think one thing that would get more people, atleast guys, into engineering would be more girls. There are very few girls in the engineering programs. Even fewer hot ones that aren't grungy and always reading a book from, say, Issac Asimov (no offence to those who like that author). You make killer money in engineering professions, but when you are at a party and talking to a girl, the first thing they hear is "engineering" which is immediatly followed by the thought "nerd". Yes it is a hard professions to get through school with, but so is the medical field. There is no shortage of medical persons getting degrees (I am including nursing and doctors, et all in that). I do think the glamor and the social perception of the job also has a factor in it.
Computer science curricula is not supposed to teach you how to write shitty business apps for shitty corporations.
But that is what we end up doing! Ok, maybe not everyone but a lot of us. I actually miss my college comp sci work, because it was at least interesting, 90% of what I do now is web based database stuff.
I don't understand the people who are saying that he just wasn't cut out for an engineering program. I, too, am an engineering school dropout (computer science, though). And I'm the first to admit that I _didn't_ work hard enough at it -- mainly because I discovered I just didn't like it all that much. BUT. Even if I had, I believe I would have had an extremely discouraging experience. The teaching was horrible, like he described. The TA's English skills left a lot to be desired. And many of the TAs that I knew as friends complained about students "bothering" them for help; nevermind that that's what they were supposed to be doing.
There's something really wrong with less than 50% being a passing grade, too, which was common.
And the particular university I went to was definitely not friendly for women. (I don't want to blame sexism for my failure in the subject, but it definitely played its part in various ways.)
I've been reading The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman. He has a lot to say about the state of science and engineering education in the U.S. today. Relevant to this article/discussion. I recommend it.
We NEED more scientists and engineers in this country. Weeding out those students who don't excel immediately doesn't make sense in that context.
I love what I study. And I study very specific things(B Prosthetics/Orthotics, and got 2 years to go to get my B Electronic Eng/M Biomedical Eng).
But I also believe it takes more than specific knowledge to make it. I want to go into management. Engineering is a step towards that. Being able to talk to doctors, surgeons, and engineers in their own language is something that can help me towards that. If there is anyone qualified to advise or direct on engineering matters, it should be people with engineering(or related fields) experience. And it seems to be rarer, and rarer finding people who can balance the two.
Problem is, if people haven't put in as much work understanding that, then for the most part they simply can't comprehend what it means, and fall by the wayside. Knowledge and skills, are tools to achieve your goal.
As we learn more & more about engineering (particularly Electrical & Computer) there is more & more material to CRAM into a "4 year" program. Nobody completes a 4 year program at a good school unless they take summer classes (still pushing it though). 5 years is the norm. The problem is virtually NO university wants to be the one to be honest with the incoming students that it is realistically a 5-year program because they fear this will turn students away to a school with a "4 year" program.
So professors are forced to cram far too much material into one semester, and students are asked to take far too many solid engineering courses in a semester (3 is ok, 4 is pain, 5 is insane). What I would like to see is courses being split out and the undergrad program in Electrical Engineering stretched to 6 years.
My background is Associates degree -> BS Electrical Engineering -> MS Computer Engineering
Going to a community college first REALLY hurts you, because you burn all of your electives and are stuck taking all engineering courses when you get to the big university.
And as others have said, if you are not in it because you love it, you will fail.
Nobody is going to hold your hand through everything. You are expected to learn on your own for the most part. They are not "teachers" they are "facillitators of learning".
That doesn't sound much like my Freshman year at a well-respected Engineering school in Ohio. Granted, my experience started a quarter century ago...
Two semesters of Calculus, two semesters of Physics, tho semesters of Chemistry, Chem Lab, a Social Science intro (I chose Economics), a Humanities intro (I chose music theory), a Foreign Language (I continued the German I had taken in High School), Computer Science, and an elective, Energy and Society. But then again, we weren't expected to choose a major until the end of the Freshman year. I started with an advisor in the Mechanical Engineering department (I thought I wanted to design and build robots), and he steered me to Systems Engineering.
Now, I write software.
College is for generalized education. And a bit of specialized training.
The "high scoring" comments do not appreciate engineering for fun. Don't get me wrong, I don't work for free, but money is not what got me into engineering. It was the challenge. I don't need a teacher or a T.A. to study. I learn on my own through books and forums. The learning doesn't stop after you get your degree.
You say want to remove any and all religion from school, and yet it would take a miracle to make your list happen.
Many things written are true. Little time for social parties. Not all professors speak well and that can be a challenge at times. As for being tough I think engineering should be that way. It is a very serious job that can effect untold number of lives. Someone that can not handle pressure, and even defeat, should not be an engineer.
I finished my degree in Chemical Engineering from one of the SEC universities. Perhaps not a big name, but atleast one people might have heard. I managed to graduate with a little over a 3.0, did the grad school thing for a while in the same area. Unfortunately I got Epstien Bar and slept for most of 6 months starting my second semester of grad school. It completely screwed over my chances in Grad schoool both financially and academically.
So going to the real world Jan of 02, and trying to find a job I get caught in a cycle of need experience to get a job, can't get experience without a job. Unemployment is a horrible feeling. No one would hire me for small jobs because of my degree. No companies would bother talking with me because of my grades in grad school while very sick. I have no connections for technical jobs. (my entire family is in education or agriculture)
Being unable to use what I worked so hard to earn, was by far more humiliating than anything I faced in college.
I want nothing more than to use my degree, but time has buried me. I can not afford to go back to grad school and complete my masters. It has been a long time since I've graduated (May of 200) and people would rather take a chance on a fresh grad than one down on their luck.
I know several other people who have graduated engineering and want to use their degree but are unable to get the experience to do it.
Right now I'm lucky. I managed to put an end to my unemployment cycle by being a computer tech at my old high school. The job is fun, the pay is a complete joke, and it lacks any sort of challenge or reward. I miss challenges that took over 5 mins to find and fix...... Maybe I'll get lucky with some of my attempts with the government jobs...
It is much better than working at Papa Johns being a cook. (Yes I do know of someone with a degree in Chemical Engineering that can find no other job due to experience)
Anyway... if companies want a solid engineering force they need to find better ways to bring in recent graduates. I understand that it is a better investment to spend more on salary and get experience, but eventually this is going to deplete the number of experienced engineers and leave an even smaller work force. Students in college see troubles in getting jobs and figure the work to earn the degree is not worth it. Especially when you can earn a degree in another area that will require little effort, have an easier time getting a job, and still be able to make a comfortable living.
Engineers made good money in most fields, from civic engineers to electrical engineers. And yes this was way before the 'tech bubble', duh.
Dont know about your family, but maybe you santitation engineers just dont compare.
However, the author of the article couldn't even get the "slowly" part, since he described himself swamping his unknown with its pH opposite not once but seven consecutive times.
I don't care how many shiny stars he got in gradeschool, nor that his parents had a "Proud parent of an honor student" sticker on their bumper. If he couldn't even manage a simple titration procedure, then he's obviously not the type of person for a chemical engineering career.
In my opinion, this is a good example of where the system has succeeded. The weed-out worked.
There's also a bit of complaining about the poor state of advanced education, which has some validity as well. While there is always room for improvement, there is a reason why a full two-thirds of all science and engineering graduate students in the US are NOT FROM the US.
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
"To work in any modern corporation, one must interact with many differant langauge backgrounds."
you know what though? there is a HUGE difference between being able to work with people of different "backgrounds" and trying to learn some complex concept/idea (read:cs, math, engineering) from someone who cannot communicate in a way you comprehend. Once you get past the initial learning curve in a given subject, life is all gravy... but when you're trying to learn something new that is already difficult enough, you NEED to avoid every hinderance you can.
I don't know about where you have worked, but I have repeatedly had to learn completly new concepts on the job. An engineering education shouldn't make you a robot who can solve problems within the parameters of what you have been taught about. If that is what you get, you will be useless in 20 years, or less... One of the things you should be learning is how to learn. You should be mastering problem solving thought processes, not thermodynamics solving, or circuits solving.
If you come out of school with a BS in engineering and you can't pick up completly new concepts from foreigners, your shcool has failed you.
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
I entered Cornell as a physics major, thinking I was hot sh** because I had the high-school physics lab named after me (the teach promised that to anyone who got a 5 on the AP and 100 on the NY State Regents exams). I also planned to take a lot of CS.
;)
I proceeded to get butt-raped by Calc 192, "Calculus for Engineers," as a first-semester freshman class.
Twice.
I don't think it was as much the fact that I could not understand the material in the allotted time- curiously, I got most of the bonus questions (which tested actual understanding) right on the prelims, but not the bulk of the actual test- I think it was the fact that I had no prior experience at the kind of discipline it took to plow through 6-hour problem sets on a biweekly basis (the kinds of problem types which, of course, made up the bulk of the actual test).
Regardless, that class was a requirement for both a Physics major as well as a CS major... My ego was so shot that I told Cornell I'd leave for a while, and they said OK, I could return within 5 years. I ended up joining the USAF and living in California for 4 years, which both bought me time to consider a bit more what I really wanted to do as well as allowed me to mature a bit more as I was a bit of a late bloomer (wow! girls!)
I returned as a Psych major taking a lot of CS courses as electives, did quite well for myself, except that my earlier experience totally humiliated my cumulative GPA. I joined a fraternity (don't scoff... they were actually mostly engineers and alpha geeks and a lot of them are currently entrepreneurs) and I actually had time to party, both of which provide their own set of underrated educations and opportunities.
My first job was the only one I could find at a good company where they didn't ask me what my GPA was... thank God. They could also tell that I was genuinely interested in their product, which by the way goes over extremely well in interviews.
I am now a web/DB developer with a love for good UI design, good architecture, and pretty code. I do work for a consulting firm, however
Having made it through a couple of schools, one for undergraduate and masters, the other for a phd, in mathematics, I realize that most of the people that complain about how hard courses are are lazy, fat, tv watching americans. The year I received my PhD from the University of New Mexico, I was the ONLY american to do so. None of the foreign students had any problems getting their degrees, but somehow I was the only american student which didnt wash out of the group i came in with. There is MUCH to be said for higher profile universities having shitty TAs teach all their courses while the Prof's travel the world chumming it with colleagues and working their tails off doing research. What should be said is SHAME ON YOU. People pay good money for a real professor to come teach their class, and I would feel like I got the shaft if I didnt get that. This happens most often at high profile universities. Dont want this? Then dont go to MIT or Berkeley etc... A great education can still be found at the smaller colleges and universities. I know, I am now a professor at one and work hard at making sure my students get a good education. I guarantee you though, I still have alot of fat, lazy american students whining when they take Discrete Math from me. I guarantee you though, they watched all the latest reality TV shows last night though, and Leno or Letterman too. Last but not least, sorry about any spelling and grammar mistakes, I cant stand proofreading these sorts of things. -karl http://karlfrinkle.net/
-karl says 'disregard the spelling and grammar mistakes!'
I won't comment on the quality of professors or the facilities on the engineering campus at Rutgers, but I studied Computer Science there (both undergraduate and graduate) and I had a *totally* wonderful experience. In all the undergrad and grad courses, I can count on one hand the number of mediocre or bad professors during my five years there. This includes CS as well as all the other classes that I took.
If you have problems with shitty teachers(I have had my share in my CS study), just don't attend class everytime- it will only get you frustrated. Instead, organize a student group of 3-4 people, meet up and discuss and work on the problems give for each week. You must of course still read all the material thouroughly to be ready for the meeting with your group. Then take turns going to class, just to be sure nothing terribly important slips by you.
Other tips:
- seek alternative material to get other perspectives on the problem.
- use your TA.
- don't be afraid to ask some of the students you know to be clever.
It has worked great for me many times.
- barkholt
Obviously, you do not live in New Jersey. Plus, you have no idea what Rutgers is like...they are so money-grubbing for cash to feed the perennially terrible football team that they create fines for non-offenses, create offenses that don't exist (I STILL get 'parking tickets', for cars that were in the junkyard before I even went there, and I haven't been there in 14 years!) and will expel you (keeping your tuition, of course) for ludicrous things. On the East Coast, there are some simple rules...here's a couple: Rule #1 - Don't f*ck with the unions. Rule #2 - Don't run afoul of the Bureaucracy. What I'm gettin at here is that if you attempt to fix something there, or at any state school in NJ, you will be expelled (for defacing school property or some such BS) and probably fined as well. You don't even put a roll of toilet paper on the spool there, it's that bad. And besides, where the hell do you expect them to get the raw materials and parts to fix this stuff? (you'll probably say some inane thing like "genius engineering students should be able to break into the maintenance facilities and get what they need"...great idea, brainiac, destroy school property to repair school property)
The hard fact is that you have to really study, study, study - to get your degree. You have to be skilled at maths and science, and you have to have some engineering rigor. Being an engineer is about a passion more than about making money. On the other side of the table is a marketing guy. Often clueless, but well dressed, good loking fella that sells stuff to other clueless people, and get a huge bonuses. It is this guy who really drives development of your company product, not you the engineer. And he's got all the parties because it goes with that job position. He's got no passion about science or quality, he's got passion to his bonuses. And chicks love him, too - he is good loking, suit wearing "director of subdepartmental proposition to VIP customers." Now, let's pretend you're a teenager with not so much passion about anything but binge drinking... now, look above. What position's got more sound? ;-)
I noticed similar things when I was in college a long time ago.
1. Professors are not chosen to be teachers. They are chosen if they are accomplished in their field, have published, will bring prestige to the university, and/or will bring grant money to the university.
2. Colleges are not in the business of developing people. College is a place for people who already have sharpened aptitude to prove that they have sharpened aptitude. Getting sharp is left to the students to do before they get to college.
3. Professors tell you what books to read, TA's grade your tests. Anything else is above and beyond the call of duty in the real world.
4. Academic departments increase their prestige not by developing people but by eliminating people so they can say they only have the best. They are called "weed out" classes.
These things would not be bad if universities were honest about them.
In regards to #1 professors who are good researchers, but lousy/unwilling teachers should not be forced to teach. If they can bring in their own grant money they can do research. If not, they should go somewhere else. Tuition money should be used to hire true educators. That is what the customers paid for.
Being honest and warning people about 2,3,4 would solve many disappointments. People who are not ready in aptitude or who are not ready to be focused can take time out after high school, get a job, prepare themselves and then go to college when they are prepared to hit the ground running.
Colleges are businesses. Most businesses will admit they are businesses and will be upfront about what a paying customer will get. Universities will not do that.
My sympathies go to the author for, like me, having learned that the hard way. I got hosed down by having an uninformed idea of the difficulty level when I first went away to school.
If anyone finds themselves in that spot I would advise them not to give up.
Stopping school may seem like a tragedy to many people of that age, but in the real world it is not. Taking a break can be a wonderful thing.
You can use the time to improve your aptitude. You can also use the time to settle other needs ( getting a car, partying, socializing, or just living life feeling free ) so that when you return you can be 100% about studying.
I'm not sure I'd recommend the community college approach to begin engineering. I went to an undergrad that was predominately engineering and found that people coming from CC had a lot of problems. I believe that CC's tend to water down the basic courses (e.g. chemistry, calculus, physics) too much and it really hurts the engineering students. I can't tell you how many times that I saw people come from CC with 4.0's end up failing out because their basic skills just weren't developed enough to handle the work. It's hard enough to learn the basics at a sufficient level if your high school program was "deficient", but to jump into Junior/Senior level engineering classes and have to relearn the basics while also learning the class material is just a recipe for disaster. I think CC can set some people up, who are otherwise talented and capable, for failure by giving them a false sense of understanding. Just my 2 cents.
36 and should break 6 figures this year in Colorado Springs. I think I'm doing pretty well.
What Mr. Kern says may be true in his particular case. A large portion of a person's experience in college will be dependent upon the professors they have. Case in point: I am an Undergrad at a local university just a couple of credit hours away from my Bachelors of Science in Business Administration, Management Information Systems with a GPA of 3.93. One of the required MIS courses I was looking forward to was a basic HTML course. I am not a great web designer, but I certainly know enough to be able to do well in a basic HTML course...who knows, I might even learn some new stuff. My first clue that the class may not go well was the text book...HTML For Dummies (no joke). The instructor (I have a tough time calling him a professor) was a complete idiot. Every week he would hand out the answers to the test in a packet of Xeroxed papers about 1/4 " thick. All I had to do was memorize everything in that packet and I would get a good grade on the test, right? Wrong! The tests consisted of things like: A w_____ p_____ is what you see when you type a URL in your address. The above example is not an extreme example of the tests, it is a typcial example...nay, an example of one of the easier questions on the test. At times there would be a whole paragraph with every other word missing (except the first letter of the answer). After the second exam, even the most dedicated students quit studying. You were just as likely to get a passing grade by NOT studying as you were by studying. Everyone in that class tried to get the instructor to change his testing style...flat out calling it absurd, but he refused and even defended his teaching/testing method. On the end of course evaluation I made comments demanding my money back (hyeah, like tha would ever happen). So, before you judge Mr. Kern, remember, your mileage may vary...
Hmm, I had the fortune of APing out of 192, and started with third-semester math. The upper level engineering math courses were excellent. The only bad professor I had my freshman year (probably the worst one I had at Cornell) was for Chem 211 (Chem for Engineers), and I still pulled an A in that course despite the professor being the ultimate cure for insomnia. As bad as he was, he was nothing compared to my System Analysis professor at Rutgers.
:)
While I didn't join a fraternity, I was in marching band and pep band while I was there. If anything, that sucked even more of my time, yet I had no problem with my courseload and I learned a HUGE amount.
To the guy who said "fix the doors yourself" - I just simply avoid that particular bathroom whenever possible instead. It's still utterly sad that it's been over a year and no one has fixed it, and I'm kind of curious if it will ever get fixed. If I fix it myself, I have no way of knowing how long it actually would have taken.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Seriously, forget the TAs, and if your professor is a dick, forget him too. Find the one kid in the class who knows what's going on and latch on to him. Have group study sessions, and you'll find that other people are lost on subjects you can grasp easily, and others are grasping easily the subjects you're lost on. And by explaining what you understand to fellow students, you'll achieve an even deeper understanding of it. There's also the psychological benefit of knowing that you're not the only one in that boat.
What is the fundamental nature of human beings? We are a social species. We are not mammoth dinosaurs that brave the wild as individuals. We rely on the group for our very survival. It should be not any surprise that our very emotional well being is tied to being accepted into a group (ie have friends). Second, we are a species that reproduces sexually. As such, our bodies change to accomodate this task and again, our emotional well being is tied to accomplishing it. So, with this in mind, why would spending endless nights alone in a dorm room reading a textbook seem natural. You are not being social or having sex. In the modern age, all our knowledge has evolve to a high state that the very complicated concepts must be mastered first before we can contribute to todays problems. This now means years of the long sexless antisocial nights studying a textbook. All a persprective American engineering student have to do to see option B is turn on the TV. You see young people being social and having sex. They are happy. They are sure of themselves. The problem why American are not producing scientists and engineers is because we have to suppress our very nature to achieve the level that modern society needs. Any improvement of that situation would therfore require that we address our very nature.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
He writes well, uses good grammar, and knows how to spell. How could he possibly imagine himself in an engineering career?
Remember: Kern = real good at math and science. You will have cause to forget that fact very soon. I had three options for a chemistry class: the intro course, the accelerated course, and the genius course. My high school chemistry background made me a good fit for the accelerated course, but my academic advisor warned me not to take it.
Academic advisors are there for a reason. They get paid to fit you into the classes that you need to take. When an advisor tells you not to take a class, they are basing that advice off of seeing the experience of other students in similar situtations. And just because you had umpteen honors and a 4.0 gpa in high school does not mean you can waltz into ANY college course and expect to do well. It's a matter of swallowing your pride and taking those foundation courses. Even if you've had simiilar material in high school, the refesher will be good, you WILL learn something new, and you will learn how to learn on your own - a skill that isn't learned in high school and a skill you don't want to have to gain while taking a "turbo" class.
1) It's hard. Hard work is out of style these days, when many competent engineers have not seen a pay increase in five or six years. Smart students see the rich getting richer and everyone else getting poorer and ask themselves, why should I put all that sweat in just to be replaced by someone in another country working 90 hours a week for a fraction of what I get? They'd rather go for the gold, even if their chances of success are less.
2) No respect. The esoteric glamour of IT and related fields has faded. After more than 50 years of commercial computing, computers and related miracles are beginning to be taken for granted as much as airplanes and automobiles. So the "wizard" gets much less status than before--she's just another member of the skilled working classes.
Originally, I had a similar experience as the writer, but I tough it up and now I am one course away from receiving my masters. I think he brought it to himself though for being too cocky. If you put yourself on a pedestal you will fall from that much higher. Nevertheless, I do concur with a lot with what he wrote.
Another problem that the reader perhaps didn't get the chance to experience is that of making enemies with a well established professor. I am one of those unfortunate students. I once took a course with this professor who was known to be hard. Anyways, this professor's research brings a lot of money to the school consequently; he has a lot of power in the department. To make the story short he lowered my final grade from a B- to a C just because I complained about my grade when I noticed that B- was the grade he gave students who did not complete the requirements. Since, I completed all the requirements except for a ridiculous one I thought I was in my right to complain. One of the requirements was that the java program was to be presented in the UNIX lab. I presented it on my laptop running windows. I was sure he will understand given that I had very limited time due to my other responsibilities which by the way I never got a chance to explain. Besides, this was java and I am a UNIX guru, but all he did was smile at me as he lowered my grade. I was so furious; Still, I ate my pride and beg the guy, in the end, I left the room before I punch the old guy. I took this to the chairman and even to the dean who basically told me that there was nothing I could do about it since it was his word against mine. I am not sure if this happens in other Universities but there should be some kind of entity in place to protect students from professors abusing their power.
Another problem is that way too many professors are too lazy to change their material from semester to semester. The above professor was one of those. What he did to make his class hard was to ask for increasingly more difficult projects from one semester to the next instead of coming up with completely new projects. As a result if you did not have willing friends who took the class before you were handicapped already. This is usually made worse by those students who have the material and help each other a little bit too much. For example, the Asian students they help each other so much that the professors are then forced to make the courses harder and harder since they have those stupid quotas that limit them from giving too many A's. All that does is alienate and discourage the honest student who is working trying hard an unfair obstacle course. That's why there are people with very high GPA's that are completely incompetent in their field and people like the writer who just give up. This however has further consequences, as American engineers are not very highly regarded. Since a lot of engineering graduates graduate due to their ability to master and play with the system instead of mastering the knowledge acquire through out their student careers.
Oh, they wouldn't spoon feed me the course material. Boo Hoo! Why do you think you spent all taht cash on the books you whining loser. Suck it up and learn how to read!
I have to get ready for work, so I'm too lazy right now to see if other commenters have said the same thing, but here's my $0.02- don't underestimate that "history of engineering"... don't worry about getting a "general education"... one of the biggest problems with college graduates these days is *too much* specialization... people are bloody useless at anything except their specialty... you'll find in 10, 15 years that having a solid background is imensely usefull...
to wit: i work in IT; my college background is in art... I love it... I've got a mac SE 30 sitting in the hallway, and while my first thought was to put linux on it, i'm now leaning toward converting it into a planter box... any skills you can get a shot at: gobble them up... the broader and more diverse your general background, the more long term benefits you'll feel
trust me
I didn't have extensive Japanese, but I had introductory and did well enough in the class. I've had incomprehensable TAs. Not just too much accent, but also too-quiet and won't speak up (I was in the second row of a 5-6 row classroom). I dropped that class like a hot potato needless to say. Oh and I'm more familiar with accents than most americans at (large university in IL): I lived in England for 2 years.
I have a friend who also complains about non-english-speaking-TAs, and she took multiple years of college Japanese (as opposed to my high school) then taught english in Japan. She's qualified to complain by your definition and does.
The real problem: Universities don't give a shit about teaching. Thus, TAs, as part of the teaching equation either get paid crap or treated like crap. Why waste your time TAing when you could RA and be getting cozy with a prof who'll be approving your thesis/dissertation? Heck, you likely can even overlap that RA work and you thesis/dissertation work.
And it isn't always the TA's fault. I'm sure I wasn't that great a TA when I got to teach the compilers course here: I was signed up as a student for the course and got told by the department to drop it. Oh and teach (assist) the intro parallel programming course too while you're at it! That's only roughly a double load of students and material you were set to learn this semester, shouldn't be a problem right?
Needless to say, I got myself a RA shortly after that.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
sounds reasonable!
I gotta agree, lot of colleges don't really give you a good idea what the major is until it's too late. I also kinda gotta agree with the article, mabe I'm baised because I left the engineering school and went into MIS after a year, but I found the same thing. Allot of people just don't learn well without any help or even basic teaching. Plus it al=ways seems like allot of engineering schools rushed students through things and gave them crushing class loads for no reason I could ever see. I dunno don't seem like the best way to learn at all.
This article made me sick. This person either a) got carried through joke classes in highschool or b) never cared enough to finish what he started.
Throughout college I had:
1. a professor that said on the first day "They dont call me the bitch of the department for nothing". Everytime there was a bad paper, she would say in front of everyone 'ANOTHER HORRIBLE PAPER [insert students name]
2. a professor who said 'last semester, i gave out 27 F's and 3 A's'
3. a professor who would laugh out loud for putting trick questions on his test even though they would fail people.
4. a professor who was so hard, that he is actually no longer allowed in my college to teacher physics for engineers 2.
5,6,7,8,9-20: ALL MY TA'S BUT 2 COULD NOT SPEAK ENGLISH! NOT TO MENTION HALF THE TEACHERS COULD BARELY SPEAK ENGLISH.
21. (just remembered) a professor who said when half the class failed a test "well the truth is i just dont care about you. if you need to pass, you will find a way"
22. Had to take a test which 83% of all first time takers fail in order to take upper level courses
But you know what? That motivated me even more to finish my CS degree. Im not going to let some guy who has an ego problem or someone who's first 3 languages was not english. I did what I had to do. Did I repeat courses? yes. with the same professor? sometimes. Did I have 20 hour study session? yep. Did I sepnd 3 weeks studying 8 hours a day for 1 stupid test just to take upper level courses? yep. Did I still drink and party? yep. All of it is still possible and still get a good degree that isnt the joke known as liberal arts. If you want the damn degree, you will get it. No one wants an engineer who is going to complain 'OH ITS TOO HARD! I CANT DO IT!' Its nice that you blame the professors because you are unable to stick it out.
There are also classes known as "weed out courses" and in my eyes, you walked right into it, face first, and now you were weeded out. And thank god. Because that makes me degree that much more better and respectful. With colleges pumping out engineers who slip through the cracks, it just makes me sick. Ive seen jackasses with a CS degree who couldnt program to save his life, nor do they understand the theory. But because of people like you, who whine and complain, professors end up passing them.
Hope you enjoy your lackluster job, liberal arts boy.
In my DiffEq class that was really great. I'd already had all the basic (non-calc) physics, and as he's setting up the heat transfer equations I'm going, "I see where this is going. Now the physics equations make sense!"
But be aware: not everybody is an engineer. My fiancee (Econ PhD. student) would have gotten nothing out of the DiffEq class. Econ (at the grad level) is amazingly math heavy, well beyond what I delt with in CS. There are problems they could work that would probably be similar for them, but it won't work for everyone.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
I gotta kind of agree allot of schools really don't give people a good idea what they're teaching in a particular major early on. Although that's compounded by the fact that lots of people do work that has little too do with their degrees. But the general impression on engineering schools from the article, I went to a hug university with a big engineering college and I only lasted a year or so until i went to MIS instead, much easier, jobs, were better, but I have to say the stuff I learned just seemed much more practical to all the jobs I wanted to Sysadmin, network engeeing, IT work. Hist first year in engineering college sounds just like mine, I mean that kind of teching style is just not going to work for everyone. Also I always though allot of engineering schools tend to spend little if any time really teaching students. They just seemed to expect you to know everything. I dunno that may work sometimes, but overall it's obviously not working in our educational system.
816 replies. 800 trying to defend their degree choice. haha get off slashdot, and get back to work.
Fully agreed.
The biggest problem with post-secondary, I've found, is that we're sending teenagers into it, entirely unprepared. I can only speak for my own experiences, but up in the Great White North, high school is EASY. Dead easy. It's more of a social experience than anything, and it's just kind of something you do, because your parents make you, but also because everyone you know also does it.
University/College? Costs a hell of a lot of money. Even worse, it might be paid for you, in which case you really don't care if you blow it off. Trying to envision your life 4-5 years down the road when you're 18? Good luck. I've met maybe 3 people in my entire life who could seriously think more than a year ahead at that age.
My story: I did the usual, University straight out of high school. Did a microbiology degree, because it looked "interesting". Didn't think CS had a promising future, and it seemed "hard", even though I was a natural ever since our Vic20, and loved doing it. Needless to say, at 18 you have no clue what you want to do, nor the motivation to stick with anything. I hurried to finish the degree so that I could start making some money finally. As a Micro degree basically qualifies you for minimum wage tech work (at least in the city I lived in at the time), I ended up spending the next 5 years doing something entirely unrelated, and ended up managing a small business.
Long story short, I ended up again doing tech stuff as a part of the job, but for less than half what a CS grad would have made doing the same type of work. Quit the job, went back to school, graduated at 30. Positively ancient. Best thing I've ever done, even though I'm 8 years behind my peers in terms of retirement savings and mortgage payments.
I've watched 18-21 year olds in school, when I was that age. I've now watched them from a vastly different perspective. Know what I realized? University is really friggin easy, IF YOU'RE MOTIVATED. I spent half the time on homework and studying as the rest of the class, and I was 8 years out of high school calculus, etc, so I had a lot more catching up to do. But I was able to focus, and realize that 4 years of my life was nothing. School was a breeze, and I'm not any smarter than I was 10 years ago. Probably less so, because I really forgot most higher maths.
I realize most parents can't handle the thought of being a bit cruel to their children, but I wholeheartedly agree: make your kids WORK for a year or three. They'll work 10x harder when they finally do get their education. They'll also do a lot better, simply because they can finally see the bigger picture.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I worked in Nuclear Power and Aerospace for 7 years after leaving Uncle Sam's employ (USN). I now work for a financial company, in quantitative research, basically doing engineering analysis every day. I've worked in the financial world for 3 years. I MAKE OVER DOUBLE WHAT I WAS MAKING IN ENGINEERING WHEN I LEFT, AND I'M CONSIDERED A JUNIOR TO MID-LEVEL GUY (and I was fairly senior when I left the "engineerin" world). The work is no harder. The fact remains that engineering still requires relatively smart people, and, unlike 40 years ago, there are far more lucrative places to work for those guys. Every guy in my 20 person group is an "ex-"engineer, except for 3 econometricians and 2 mathematicians.
All jokes aside, I am one of the few members that remained in my Tech School's CS curriculum. The plague that haunts many schools (especially in technology) very accurately is lack of teaching skills, the lack of communication skills, and even sometimes lack of understanding of the topic by those instructing. Research unfortunately happens to be a priority. There are many high-school teachers that without knowing the topic can read a chapter a day and teach it much better than all but the best on staff at some of our great tech schools. I guess the people who want to "make a difference" are not enticed to come to these places.
Why of course. Civil Engineers are civil people. Electrical engineers use electricity. Industrial Engineers use industries. Mechanical Engineers use mechanical things. It makes so much sense to me now.
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!
While my experience is dated (in excess of 20 years ago), the authors problem is a lack of commitment. I, too, was subjected to draconian grading curves and grossly incompetent teaching staff (come on, those who do, do; those who can not, teach). However, I did not succumb to my doubt; I learned from it. That is the purpose of an education. I held down a full time JOB, carried an average of 21 units per semester, started and raised a family, and still maintained a 3.95 GPA. And "Yes", I did have a life other than the university. Here I am 256 units and 20 years later, and I look forward to starting as the VP of Info Technology for an international company, very soon. While I did switch majors along the way, I ended up in CS, which is no less difficult than Engineering. The most noteworthy difference I can see is the author over sells his ability and lacks the fortitude to finish what he had started. He wants an easy education rather than one that would have significant worth. He is unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary to succeed. If he was truly that "bright", why did he settle for a liberal arts education? Later, Ray
hey man, do you go to cedarville???
sounds like you do...i was an engineering washout there...yes indeed...finished w/ a double major in comm arts and int'l. relations...
_justin
Thank you Dave Raggett
Let's see now... a smart kid who was first at everything at the local high school without ever doing any work comes to a University full of even smarter kids. Suddenly he needs to *work* to keep up. Oh my god! Work! No! That's hard, man! Wah-wah-wah-wah! And nobody will chew the knowledge for him and spoon-feed him the bits, how dare they. Instead he has to work to understand the problem before he can even start solving the problem. Hey, that's not right! All problems must be presented in a clear and unambiguous way so it's easy to relate them to the page of the textbook where the answers are, because that's how the engineering problems will be at work, after he graduates. Or will they? Oh no, what a terrible thought! I bet over there on the other side one can make tons of money without ever lifting a finger, all those rich investment bankers can't possibly be working hard, that's for these freaks over here at engineering, normal people don't do that. That's it, he's off to where money grows on trees! And guess what, the engineers across the country, and anyone who has to use their work, are better off for it too.
In college I knew several Computer Engineers that didn't really know what the hell their major was until it was almost too late
... They wouldn't let me make the switch.
This is my experience to a T. It took 2 years of "can you hack it" classes to get into basic circuit theory at my SmartyPants U, another semester after that into the basics of comp. engineering. It was at this point where I discovered a terrible truth: I Didn't Enjoy Comp. Engineering.
Of course, at that point there's nothing a college student can do. I had 89 hours by the end of that semester, and I desperately wanted out. Of course, SmaryPants U wanted me to stay put, seeing as I'd already invested so much time & energy in one major.
Once again, this is a generalization but luckily my friends didn't lose any hours switching to MIS and now make more money than I do with my silly CS degree.
Lucky bastards
checking for libvirus... no
ERROR, libvirus.so not found, terminating
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http://www.thing.net/~pomaga/macClassics/
I just graduated in Computer Engineering so I have a fairly fresh perspective on this still. I also had fairly exceptional high school credentials, as did a lot of people, but that isn't a very good indicator of how smart you are. I found the key to getting through my engineering classes to be the ability to sit down at a test and figure out how to solve problems you'd never seen before, which is a skill that can't really be taught. Hell, I even stopped studying for tests my last year or two as long as I had a list of equations to use. Graduating in engineering doesn't really require people to be a complete nerd either. I've been a slacker throughout all of my schooling and always went out partying instead of doing my homework (even did some of my work while drunk!), as did a very small number of my fellow engineering students. The only thing you really need to get a degree in engineering is the motivation to stick it out when it gets tough... and it gets pretty freakin tough.
I spent much of my undergrad time puttering around community colleges doing computer science. There were some really great instructors at the community colleges, and a few not-so-great ones.
When I (finally) transferred, the percentage of good professors dropped drastically. There were quite a number of them that were downright incomprehensible. Something about research and tenure. Here I was paying more for tuition and getting less out of it. Incredible. Is this a system that makes sense?
The funny thing was, all the community college instructors were generally so good at what they did, that I had assumed all teachers were good, and that every shortcoming was just my inability to grasp the subject. So at the University, when I got my ass utterly kicked by a first semester statistics course, I was completely disheartened. How would I ever face the mountain of work in all those math classes and physics and ... oh, man.
Well, the good news is, after independent verification, that the stats professor I had was SHIT. Not worth the price of his shoes when it came to instruction. I took statistics again the following semester with someone everyone recommended, and got an A without undue effort. Half the effort, and I get an A instead of an F.
This wasn't my fault for not studying enough, and it wasn't the math being too hard; it was simply that the quality of instruction was worthless.
I completely disagree with the idea that a prof teaching up to bachelors levels needs a PhD. This limits the pool of profs to people with PhDs, and a smaller-than-normal percentage of them are going to be good teachers, and a larger-than-normal percentage of them are going to want to be teachers, because that's one of the main things you do with a PhD. Better to draw off the pool of MSs, as well. Of course, this doesn't make the institution look as good, so it never happens.
What we need is a system whereby profs are ranked on their teaching ability instead of their credentials and their works. (How do you change this thinking? People want to send their kids to MIT because of the reputation, not the instruction. I don't know.) Some people are crap racecar drivers, and they don't get to play in the Indy 500. Some people are crap teachers, but why do they get to play at the University? It makes no sense.
I eventually got an MS in computer science. The computer part was cake. I attribute this to the excessive amount of time I spent getting As in computer science classes at De Anza Community College for years longer than I had to. That was a great computer science school.
I think there's more to it than that. He also - rightly, IMO - skewers the professors distracted by their research, the TAs who have no aptitude to explain and inspire, and the abysmally low class averages on tests which raise legitimate questions regarding how well engineering is being taught.
Some people envision finding a profession as a process of discovering that extended exposure to a given field has a motivating and pleasing effect on them. By contrast, my engineering experience consisted of getting terrible scores on tests that happened to be less terrible than average, and enduring many people who couldn't teach (and I attended one of the top 5 engineering schools in the country; it was not a question of the school's resources nor the quality of their student body). If I hadn't had so much romanticism about engineering during my highschool years, I would never have survived the college gauntlet and managed to actually become an engineer. And that is precisely this guy's point; he's not focused primarily on griping about his own experience, he's laying it out as an example of why more students aren't being drawn to engineering, which he feels is becoming an increasing problem for the US.
I for one agree.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Me, I like solving problems. Hard ones. Learning theory offers such challenges.
For the record, Carnegie-Mellon granted me a B.S. Physics. Immediately thereafter, I solved problems at the top level of the world's most complex embedded electronics system. Multi-mode radar, navigation, guidance, terrain following, all those fun challenges - with limited computing power. My second job included the challenge of integrating and standardizing multiple such platforms. With teams of many hundreds-- thousands--of engineers.
Does any of that give pause to re-examine how we train engineers? Of course.
Lessons many of us have learned in 21st century engineering include:
I prize the workload we endured at CMU. It allows me to know I've been tested to the max. I have no problem looking at a U.S. Marine who's been through "The Crucible" and saying, "Fine. Stress your mind to its limit for 4 years." It follows: if I meet an engineer graduate from the U.S. Military Academy., I know I've met a man (woman). So, yes, make our students work.
But I also feel my education was designed in 1960.Engineering schools should teach in ways that allow students to learn smarter and harder. This thread could rise to a higher level of discussion of how.
Should Doug Kern have been an engineer? Maybe, maybe not. Yet the U.S. today grants only 5% of its BS/BA degrees to engineers. China graduates 39% engineers; Taiwan 23%, and Japan 19%. Of our 5%, many will take their degrees back to their native countries. Many will transition to other career fields.
We should be looking to see if Kern doesn't make a good point, and asking, like good problems solvers, how to make things better.
The higher education system has been working on that assumption for generations and its still as patently false now as it was when the first person started to ass/u/me that. The real truth of the matter is that most students can perform highly if they are willing to be dedicated and the instructor is willing and able to Stand and Deliver
Because there's no incentive to be a scientist anymore. None. I don't want to spend 40 years toying with obscure equations that 10 people have heard about so that the next light-weight passenger airliner can have .02% less drag. Especially since I'll have to go home and live in a shitty house with a shitty car, cause I'm "dedicated to my field." The money isn't great, and the glamour blows.
I'm a politics major, probably going to law school, where I can make money and move up quickly. I did the advanced math path through high-school, took AP physics / chem / bio. My math/science background will probably create more wealth for me as a minor for a lawyer than as a major for an engineer.
And before this discussion turns into my generation being a bunch of lazy, spoiled, stupid slobs, let me remind you that you're generation created the system we were born into and that you were the ones to raise and educate us.
Anyway, I have to get going to my Chinese class, so I can be prepared to follow the economic growth there in a few years.
And have the same salary, 2-3 years earnings, and no debt.
paintball
I guess you did not learn the skill to take it up the ass.
I think if you are particularly bright, going to a school that is undergraduate focused may be short sighted.
If you can read the book, go to lectures, and figure things out for yourself, then you want to be in a research focused school. If you need lots of help with office hours and such, go to an undergraduate focused school.
The reason I say this is that I went to a reasearch focused school and was really inspired by dealing with professors who were on the cutting edge of reasearch.
Some of them were also good at explaining things and really excited about the subject.
But you couldn't count on it. Some of the big researchers had big egos and were not
helpful.
I managed to figure a lot of things out myself and was never bored.
At my alma mater (UC San Diego), we used to call it a "self-taught" University.
I was able to take classes from Scripps Institute faculty as well.
But if you need the help of professors who are good at explaining things, you might be frustrated at such a school.
I should mention that my degree is in Physics, not Computer Science. The Computer Science program in the early 80s was impacted (over full) and had lots of "weed out" courses.
YMMV.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
A school with "engineers" and millions for so called amature sports, and no one can cob job their own desks back together?...not trying to flame, but really............organize a dang fix up party with your buds
Because the stuff being broken was really the cause of the bad education, not having teachers who didn't care and were incoherent. It's of course absolutely impossible that someone could be mentioning such things as broken desks and leaky ceilings merely to show an example of what the school's priorities are; they must have been complaining about the broken stuff. Of course, getting together to fix broken desks is a great idea because it will cause all the root problems to just disappear!
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Just about all the slashdotters have missed the point.....again...or could it be that the unseen hand of editorial interference has mis-'guided' this 'discussion'. This often went on when we old military types had 'conferences' which never seemed to be really relevant. All the really relevant discussions went on behind closed doors among senior staff in secret. It really takes a smart person to act really convincingly stupid and threaten critics into silence at the same time. The point is in this letter that probably sink out of sight as soon as it is posted, is that engineering pay in this country is very bad and especially so for new grads. The glowing so called average starting pay reports are really scandalousely unattainable. Let the average new grad go to a small market engineering shop in a medium sized city like Battle Creek in Michigan. In 1984 these companies were paying degreed civil engineers without professional registration less than seven dollars an hour. Many engineers quit to go to work as construction laborers where they could make over three times as much per hour. I worked for such a company in Kalamazoo, Michigan until I went to the local credit union one day and happened to see a forgotten job application left on a writing counter by a patron standing in line to get his check cashed. He was coming back for it because he also had left his car keys and pen and other stuff there as well. It was a small credit union. I only saw the application for a few minutes but those few minutes were an eye opener. This fellow was applying for a job at a local business as a supervisor. His experience consisted of 18 months at a local hamburger chain for nine dollars an hour. That was a dollar an hour more than I made at the engineering company. He had gone on from there to a paper company where he worked as a collator operator and made eleven and a half per hour full time plus time and half for overtime on an average of 15 hours a week overtime bonus hours. I had to work overtime at my 'shop', but got NO pay for that as my work was considered 'professional' and not covered by the Federal Fair Wages and Labor Standards Act! It was at this point that I realized that my time in college had been a waste. My efforts had been squandered on an industry that could not care less for them. In fact, many engineering firms today are hiring foreigners as fast as they can get them. It is rare not to find at least one english speaking (barely) foreigner in any given company. These people have displaced the American low paid workers with still lower paid workers. Many of these come here on special programs and subsidies from the various levels of governments. The result is the same. If you study engineering, you are living in a fools paradise if you dream of a high paying job at the end of your hard work and are not going to an ivy league school and were'nt born with a silver spoon in your mouth or related to one of the principle partners of the firm that you would like to join. Add to this the fact that in our new digital age there is another danger to your pay. Your desired job can really be performed by foreigners that don't even have to leave their native land, file Federal 'H1-B Visas' or do anything but go to work in the same sweatshops that they are used to working in for the same pay. Their work product will be sent over the internet to distant customers that their local employers have contracted out their services to. Outsourcing via the internet was not a factor when I was working for those low wages in Kalamazoo and taking second place with my hard won bachelors degree to a tenth grade dropout stamping out hamburgers in a greasy spoon. I can only imagine what those people are working for today. Maybe they are not. The only real engineer that most companies need is one that carries Professional Registration. That is the one, the only one, that can sign plans and the only one that carries pecuniary responsibility for malpractice. In reality, the PE is often a paid 'legal prostitute' and is
Excellence in teaching is treated by their "peers" as well as excellence from students is treated by their "peers" and it transcends to the workplace as well.
I have to agree with the article writer. The university system has not changed at all. When I was going through the slings and arrows of higher education back in the late 70's, the books were the same. Pages and pages and more pages of reference material. We were never really taught how to use this and where it is appropriate. Even when I asked my instructor's (TA's who had no real world applications knowledge) where something was to be used, I would either get an off-the-cuff remark (caught off-guard or not knowing) or "This is the basics, you will get it in your next semester's class." Well, it never came. I had to figure it out on my own. In retrospect, I had to teach myself how to use the stuff. Now lets move the clock forward, to the present. Engineering jobs are, unfortunately, being treated as a market commodity. People want stability in their professional life but since companies treat engineers as cattle, the outcome does not surprise me in the least. Up-and-coming college students see this and don't want to invest 4-6 years learning a profession where, when the project is done, they are sent to pound the concrete trying to find another job. Companies don't want to hire experienced engineers because they can command top dollar and that is too expensive, in their minds. So the companies whine that there are not enough engineers available so they hit the global pool for cheap, educated labor. Problem is that the global pool isn't that experienced and many issues creep in because the talent and experience isn't there - the degree letters are there though. The fix to this will be long and hard. Companies will have to treat engineers as a valuable resource and hold on to them through the ebb and flow. Once that is realized, then hopefully students will get into the programs again. But will the universities replace the clueless instructors and TA's with seasoned people who know the ropes to help up-and-coming future engineers learn the profession? Probably not. This issue takes partnership, the companies and the universities. As long as the almighty dollar is king (companies - low bottom line employment $, universities - high incoming research $), we will never get out of this. The companies have to retain the talent, the universities have to properly teach the talent.
Yes, and if you are lucky, you will get all that money. As a politics major, you likely will find plenty of meat for your pessimism. You will, though, miss learning and seeing some cool things.
Now, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln...they were surveyors and builders and optimists.
Best of luck.
Ed
I know there are a lot of computer professionals here, but unless you have a P.E. License, you aren't recognized as a professional engineer. This whiney article is proof as to why they have the boot camps, this "I got great grades in a watered down school" crybaby couldn't hack it when he had to work on his own without supervision. Could he even pass the E.I.T. much less the P.E.? There are more engineers out there than jobs right now, no matter how much american companies complain. Civil Engineers, Chemical Engineers, Mechanical Engineers and Aeronautical Engineers, I know of none of these positions where having your license and ten years of experience will get you interviews at even half the companies you apply for.
Just some rambling from a ticked off M.E.
Wow, someone took my joke way too seriously... Degree in data entry, huh? lol... Call it what you want, but I'm making good money programming fresh out of college and getting my MBA for FREE on top of that. I guess I'm pretty happy with my "Data Entry" degree. =)
Funny... What you don't understand is that you don't need to be a straight A student to be an engineer... In Fact, don't think you should.
:) ), get out of the lab.
And the failings on the system are exactly in the opposite direction you are pointing: on your high school. Think of your high school (for what you describe...) like learning to use Windows. You don't have to think, you just have to follow directions. It's easy. People get addicted. Suddenly, they can't think anymore. They will be shocked to learn that the real world needs something beyond that.
That's exactly when we can really separate "engineering" material (or any other tech, physics, math major), from people who should not be there in the first place. The first ones will adapt... and learn as much as they can. The second, well, they will cry like babies and go back to their mamas... Mission accomplished! If you can't take the heat (or cold
By the way.... Yes, I am an engineer. No, I am not a native English speaker. No, I don't have any problems understanding my classes on my PhD program. Not, it's not easy, it's not supposed to be. And, yes, I am very happy with my A-'s and occasional B's.
The author of the article had one simple problem - he was too arrogant and got burned.
From high school he had awards and gold stars. Big deal! Consider how many high schools there are compared to the number of "SmartyPants Universities". If you are in the top 10% in your high school that MAY make you in the top 25% in SPU for all majors, not just engineering. If it is truly a nationally recognized SPU, then being in the top 10% is the minimum for getting in. Congratulations, you are in the top 100% of the freshman.
After arriving at SMU, instead of saying: "I'll take the basic courses so I have a good foundation and know what's going on.", he jumped into the genius course and complained that he didn't understand it. That isn't the engineering schools fault - it is his for not taking advice from counselors who couldn't possibly know more than him.
Boo hoo, I would be an engineer and might get laid off. Oh the horror of it! Guess what? Everyone can get laid off. Make a bad move at a brokerage house and you are gone. The bottom earner for the company? Gone. And no one at another high powered financial institution will hire you - you just made a career change. Do you think many people who go into finance think about running a small town bank? Probably not. (But I could be wrong.) But I know there are far more small banks, or small branch offices than there are huge corporate banks where you will handle millions of dollars a day.
So I think the problem with engineering education in this country isn't that the curriculum is bad, or the professors are particularily bad. I think it is with whining students who say it's "Too hard." and want to go to a major where they can BS their way through an assignment. It is hard to fake a Fourier transform, but not too hard to fake an understanding of a historical event, or at least enough to get an easy B.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
I must sadly confirm this. Sadly, because I was once a rosy-cheeked award-bedecked student at the then-top-rated engineering program in the U.S. (now I'm a crusty has-been geezer). I started a consumer product development company recently, and I take conceptual specifications to my partner companies in Taiwan and China for development. These companies willingly design and prototype my concepts and send me samples in the hope that we can both win by having me sell these products. There is a wide set of companies there who are willing to do this. I haven't yet found any in the U.S., though if pay scales continue to slide it may be cheaper in the future to design here rather than there.
I graduated from a State School in 1998 with my BS in Civil Engineering. I know, Civil engineers are often among the lowest paid engineers, but that is if you don't know how to work the system. After being in the field for 7 years, I have my PE, I am working towards getting my LS (land Surveying License), and I own my own small company and am loving it. I did not get the best grades in college. My Technical GPA was just a tad over 2.5. The only way I survived was to band together with my fellow students and study with them. The best piece of advise I can give you is to look around your math and physics classes and find out who is also an engineering major. Try to get together and do your homework together. If you have a big enough group, chances are if you don't understand a concept, some one else will. On the flip side, there is no better way to understand a concept yourself by trying to explain it to some one who does not. This was the only way I got through structural engineering, and some of the advanced math courses. don't worry if you don't get a 4.0 gpa in engineering. I have worked with a lot of engineers over the last 7 years, and I can tell you that I would rather hire the guy who got a 2.0 and learned to work well with people than the 4.0 guy who doesn't even think to bring his calculator to work! My last peice of unread advise. Don't try to do it in 4 years. If you are a mechanincal or civil, learn CAD, and get a part time job in an engineering office and take 6 years to finish your course work. It may take longer, but you will be light years ahead of everyone else who finished in 4 years. C. Alan, CA RCE 63332
The consensus of opinion when I was in college was that all Psychology and Sociology majors needed a psychiatrist, thus their interest in the fields. Only people I recall not making this observation were Psychology and Sociology majors.
Of all my friends who did CS at about the same time, there's roughly half of us now working in real CS fields. The other half are doing odd jobs elsewhere that aren't CS.
The same people I would have said were really into CS in school are those who are now working CS related jobs. I don't buy it is all coincidence.
It's also not a diss of friends who aren't doing CS related work. I just don't think they were as passionate about it as some of the others (up till all hours programming for fun during high school).
I also should note that none of the people who are passionate about their field (mostly CS, but does include one hs/community college math/english teacher) have had trouble finding work.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
A few years ago I was a foreign graduate student in a tier-2 American university, which means it ranks about 20-30. I'm not very familiar with top 10s, but from what I've seen, most American students lack basic math/engineering skills to solve problem. In the classroom, Chinese, Indian and Russian students can easily follow what professors' instruction. Although American students are most interactive, they mostly ask a little "dumb" questions, rather than the root cause, or broader view.
I had talked with an Indian friend before, who knew a lot about SAT. It seems SAT standard is far less than Chinese and Indian counterpart. I heard Russian has an even better mathematics background. I kinda believe what he said, because I saw many Chinese migrant students easily got very high SAT scores.
China's rigid test-oriented education system has great disadvantage later in creativity and freedom in thinking, but I think American K-12 is too liberal to care about basic skills. I'd think a perfect one would be an Asian-type, more test-oriented K-12, plus a creative,vibrant research-oriented college-level system.
The real problem I see in the working world is that management at most companies has no repect, if not out right contempt, for the more technically minded staff. Given that, I don't know that I would recommend engineering to anyone today. I enjoy the work, but the lack of corporate respect makes it a less than rewarding experiance.
Think Deeply.
Two stories from when I was a TA:
1) I taught the lab of a second year digital logic class whose prof. might have been good at research but sucked as a teacher. I didn't believe the comments the students made about the class so I sat in (second row, left side of class room that had seats for 50 people) and I couldn't understand a word the man said. He basically faced the board and muttered while making scratchings that sort of looked like K-maps. So, I got my hands on the class syllabus and started taking the first 45 minutes of my 2 hour long lab to teach digital logic. At the end of the semester, I had a lot of people thank me for doing that.
2) Communication is key. If students turned in homework, a lab report or a test that was incomprehensible, I gave it a zero. Engineering is all about communication and I quickly taught my students that being engineering students was not an excuse. If they didn't write legibly and clearly, I didn't care how brilliant their work was because neither I or anyone else could understand it. Oddly enough, the foreign students usually demonstrated better written language skills. (I did have to occasionally to convince them that a thesaurus is a dangerous tool.)
I've been working now for 10 years and communication is still key. I'm in the process of learning Mandarin.
As noted elsewhere, a true undergraduate experience is not spoon-feeding, it's learning how to learn. My engineering classes were just as described until upper division. Those that could hack it could hack any curriculum at any school anywhere. Those that couldn't, well . . . .
In the time of chimpanzees I was a monkey . . .
Engineering and Science are TOUGH! The author is not tough enough.
It is because of millions (not every one of us) of tough minded people that Western world surpassed Eastern empires in engineering and science, and dominate the modern era. Here, my philosophical hypothesis is always that Democracy is a by-product of the advanced technology.
Does anyone want to put more intelligent design theories into the text books? Go ahead. It demonstrates how a strengthening religion power can blindly choke up the air of engineering and science. Take a look at the dark medieval period.
^(oo)^pig~
1) NEVER take honors courses. You work extra hard for the same number of credits. Nobody will ever look at you transcripts and say, "His GPA sucks, but look! Honors classes!"
2) I taught computer science for two years at a top 20 university. The main reason I observed why my students dropped engineering in their first year or two is they expect it to be sugar coated and presented on a silver platter. Bad news for you son, your professors and T/A's aren't any smarter than you. They taught themselves when they had bad instructors and you should take initiative to do the same. The textbook sucks? Buy a different one. The math is tough? Learn to use MATLAB. So many would-be engineers lack the ambition to truly learn because all they ever did in public school was regurgitate lessons learned from repeated feedings.
3) Based on my rant in 2), all you engineers who made it to the real world explore and implement new concepts everyday. Is there some super-genius teacher out there to show you how to design using whiz-bang-technology-X? Nope. You do research, read white papers, try, fail, and try again.
I majored in EE and it was a similar nightmare. I literally had nightmares related to my coursework for about 5 years after I graduated...which my wife, a journalism major, could not fathom.
Anyone who thinks that med school is hard is fooling themselves. Med school is a massive exercise in memorization of facts and logic trees. My physical electronics or optics classes were so obtuse that they would have made a brain surgeon cry...requiring the student to perform significant high-level math just to even formulate the question...let alone answer it.
Engineers should drive Porsches and doctors should be in Dodge Neons. Anyone who thinks that the guy who writes you a prescription for an MRI is more valuable than the guy who built it is beyond naive.
BTW, I personally worked as part of a two man team that doubled the accuracy of the GPS constellation (by refining algorithms in the ground-based processing part of the system)...and I drive a Jeep Wrangler.
I started as a music major at one of the best music schools in the US. After 3 years of playing in every ensemble I could and practicing every free waking hour it was obvious that I just wasn't good enough to do what I wanted to do as a performer. Trying to find something else music related I decided on musicology. (for those who don't know musicology is the scholarly study of music). There were no undergrad degrees in musicology but music history is considered perperation for a Master's degree in it. I took my first semester of music history from the head of the musicology department. The professor was encyclopedic in his knowledge and his lectures were brilliant and inspiring. One thing the prof blated on about is what he called "grade inflation." He told us that he didn't believe in awarding a passing grade because a student shows up for class and tries hard; they have to produce. He said, "if you get a 'D' in my class it means that you know the minimum amount necessary to continue work in the field, if you get a 'C' in my class it means that you have demonstrated that beyone just learning a lot of facts you are beginning to be able to combine facts to synthesize your own thesis and observations; if you get a "B" in my class it means that you have demonstrated scholarship in the field; if you get an "A" in my class it means you should be teaching it. I took this as a challenge; some semesters this professor doesn't award a single 'A' in any of the classes he teaches so I was going to earn one of his few but coveted A's. I cut back on my work hours and studied and listened to the material every free moment; often 4-5 hours/day for this one class. I took the mid-term confident that I would get 100 or close to it. The test was *HARD* but handing it in I was still confident; I got it back and I scored a 78, 2 points short of a 'B.' At this point I decided I just wasn't tallented or smart enough to do anything in music so I took the easy way out and studied engineering.
should have been:
"Kern == real good at math and science."....
but seriously... regardless of how good/bad the teaching at a particular university is, the main thing is that students need to learn how to work on their own. Many high school students with exceptional grades get really frustated in university, because they are no longer spoon fed anymore, and nor are the tests/exams merely asking you to regurgitate what you were force fed. As corny as it sounds, in university the most important thing you learn is how to learn, and a lot of it you have to do on your own.
I am unique, just like you, and you, and you...
What would I be missing? My brother is an engineer with a masters, and he's got a crappy life lined up. I've talked with dozens of professional engineers about what they do and how they like it, and the answer is all the same: "Well, the pay sucks, and I hate my job, but, you know, engineering is cool."
Here's a different question: Why should students want to be engineers?
Ummm... well, ok, it *is* a 4-letter word. But you all know what I mean.
Kern blames engineering schools for giving out too much work and then complains that foreigners are taking up the available engineering jobs. Didn't these foreigners have just as much work to do as he had?
There's just no substitute for hard work and study. That's why engineering school is made for people who like to build stuff and work hard. We don't need engineers who shy away from finishing the job at hand.
Instead of blaming engineering schools for giving out low grades, why doesn't he complain about the grade-inflated liberal arts programs that are graduating all our future dog-fXXXers. You know, those people at work who are too lazy to figure out how to solve their own problems themselves?
I had a CS education from a school with an inconsistent quality of professors/TA's.
Your education is what you make out of it. I had parents from India, and I understand the work ethic they *tried* to instill on me. It was very safe and left-brained - which was periods of brute force, all work and no play. I noticed my white friends who were successful - they had raw passion which translated into periods of all work and no play as well.
Neither of these people were whiney pussies when they had to struggle. They didn't rely on their TA's English skills, didn't rely on professors to spoon feed them, they didn't blame their high-schools. They had Google, library cards, and man pages. BTW, the good professors don't spoon-feed, they challenge you in the right way, open your mind to topics, and help you understand.
If your professor is being a disrespectful, lazy asshole, you have every right to ask for help, even if it makes you annoying. Be a thorn and stick it to the man. Flood their email with the appropriate questions. Complain to a chairman, or a dean. Kindly, ream them a new asshole if your school has teacher evaluations. Use http://www.pickaprof.com/
You are not entitled to success or money. You have to do it yourself. Maybe it's a Emo Gen Y thing to be a whiney doofus?
Where I went, I took a BS _physics_ degree, and had exactly one shop-type course--two sessions each week for eight or so weeks, one for basic electronics (read: soldering, desoldering, and a small project), one for basic shop (read: milling, grinding, what to do when you slip up and cut a finger off). Now, I also took a BS _engineering_ degree, so I got to see what some other engineers were doing (I was optical, so we only spent a modest amount of time working with our machine shop tech). One of the freshman year ME courses was a kind of shop course--really basic, but there. I think that they probably had a few more project-type things after that. We (OE) had a course devoted to thinking about what the guys on the floor would have to do (sorta--it was also what the guys in the lab next door needed, and all), and that was during a transition period for the degree from "applied" to "engineering" optics.
So maybe the problem is that some schools just don't realize that hands-on is so valuable. It's not all of them, for sure.
(Disclaimer: I went to Rose, like a few of you.)
I'm not combing through 900 posts so forgive me if this is a repeat but hollywood is just as guilty imo. What does everyone deep down inside want? To be accepted and "cool"(well this point may or may not be true depending upon the individual but for a good portion of the population it is true). Are you cool if you are a math/engineering geek(by pop culture standards)? Of course not you get looked down upon and called a nerd. So until society changes its perception of math/engineering foks and/or more incentives are giving in becoming a math/engineering major, don't look for any miracle breakthrough or changes.
I don't believe the universities with poor professors or TAs are the problem. The problem is the K-12 school system. The problem is that the K-12 school systems in this nation are not preparing our students for college. College, at least in my little world, should be a place where a student goes to school on his own initiative. It is expensive, it is demanding, it is most importantly, self-taught. The universities in this nation should not get into the hand-holding business. They should basically say to the students, "You need a degree. We can give it to you. Make us give it to you."
If I attend a university expecting teachers to actually teach the material, I should be flogged. It needs to be the responsibility of the student to take the initiative to teach himself. Really, the university just needs to be there to set the pace and tell him what he needs to teach himself. Given a good solid book and a few faculty on stand-by for extraordinary questions, there is no reason that a student on the college level shouldn't be able to teach himself all the information needed to earn that degree.
But this is where the failure lies in the K-12 school systems. How many of our high-school graduates enter college with the expectation or even the ability to teach themselves? I have met less than I can count on one hand. And this is because our K-12 system is being geared towards getting as many kids through the system as possible as opposed to teaching these kids how to survive in the world that is Earth. Of course, some of this blame falls on the parents of these kids too. I guess I should rephrase this to be that the kids are not prepared for college because the parents and/or schools are not preparing them.
And, on a note slightly off to the side, some universities are doing this (making kids effectively teach themselves either by accident or design.) These universities need to keep it up. Because the students that come out of these programs will not only have learned the material, but have also shown that they can handle the task of teaching themselves, learning without instruction (or with minimal instruction) and are self-sufficient. These are traits that can be seen from graduating college seniors by employers. I have never actually heard of employers preferring graduates of a given college because they know the material well. They almost always like them for their ability to adapt to situations and get the job done well. This is the ability that should be taught in K-12 and perfected in college.
Maybe. But when I look around and see my friends, many of whom dropped engineering for economics and business/finance degrees, making 2-3X more money than me at this stage, I wonder why *I* work so hard. They go home at 5pm. I work until 10pm regularly. They have social lives. I don't.
And don't even get me started about college lifestyle. My engineering-dropout friends were out partying with their fraternity brothers Thursday night through Sunday night every weekend, while I worked away diligently in the computer clusters and electronics labs. One of my old friends kept asking me, "Dude, why do you do this to yourself?"
I justified the work in several ways. First, I value designing and creating more highly than managing or analyzing. The engineer's status in society, in my view, is noble. Second, I assumed that all my hard work would pay off in the form of a good career, while all the partying hooligans drinking away their most productive years would have a rude awakening when they hit the workforce.
But when *I* hit the workforce, it took 11 months to land a very entry-level job. By contrast, one of my friends who started something called the "12-hours club" (the minimum number of credit hours to remain a full-time student) got a job immediately as an "investment analyst" at a major Wall Street firm. 5 years later, he makes roughly 3 times what I make, and the gap is growing. We're both smart people, but there is no question (he'll readily admit it) that I worked much harder in college.
I was wrong. They were right. I'm just willing to admit the truth. I still feel morally superior, in that all of my hard work produces things which add value to human life, but when I compare the relative benefits to my life (social life, financial life, stress, etc), I still feel shortchanged. But it's no one's fault but mine: I chose this profession. And I chose poorly.
Honestly, a ton of the stuff in an undergraduate education may never be used by a practicing engineer.
Look, you go to college to get a college education, not a vocational education. A college education includes things like English and History as well as Math and Science. College is not a 4-week job training course.
The previous poster was bitching about having to take a bunch of classes other that computer engineering. Well, boo hoo... Everyone else also has to take a bunch of classes that they don't want. If you still don't like that, then just think that it's good to be exposed to other fields since you're likely to be working with people from other fields on the job. And, you have to be able to communicate with them in their language.
If you want spoonfed technical classes, consider a degree in "technology" or MIS or something else but engineering.
No, if you want spoonfed tech classes, consider ITT or Devry.
I had almost the same experience as the author of the article. I spend a couple of years in Engineering before switching to Liberal Arts (journalism). I was never that good in math, but various problems made engineering harder than I thought it would be. Math instructors (TA)whose only experience was having taken the class the previous semester and not speaking very good English was a real problem. One of the big problems I had was that I worked my way through school. I didn't qualify for scholarships or grants and working demanding jobs really made it difficult. (Imagine after spending three hours in a hole that you dug with the light from a propane latern to fix a broken water pipe in the apartment complex where you work and live and then filling up the hole, trudging back, home to do four hours of homework.). In journalism, it was similiar but different. If you got everything right on a test or assignment (like a print news story), you got a C, very few got Bs and almost no one ever got an A. It killed many people's scholarships.
Ironically, now my title is software test engineer after I left journalism, when into tech writing and then into testing.
I went to the top secondary school (high school to some) in my country. I excelled in Mathematics and many other subjects, so much so that I seriously thought that I could be an architect.
Then I took the voluntary, 2-year physics syllabus class when I was 14.
That class ripped me a new one. I flunked that class for a year before I swallowed my pride and asked for lessons after class with a different teacher who I can understand. With hard work, I was able to pass the class at the end of the two-years with a B, while getting A's in everything else.
Thing is, I wasn't the only supposed brainiac in this school of nerds who was 'beaten down' by the school. We had another voluntary 2-year chemistry syllabus when I was 16, and at the beginning of the second year, the Inorganic Chem. teacher give an exam that everyone failed. I mean every single chem student that year, including the ones who had just scored 1450 - 1600 on the SATS. This phenomenon wasn't limited to the sciences. I never knew a Spanish oral exam could be so difficult until I was told that I would be arguing the benefits of marijuana with my tester...5 minutes after my exam started.
This secondary school has these ultra-difficult courses for a reason - if you do them and fail/give up, you weed your way through what careers you want to do. If you fail and try again/work your butt off to pass, you've been given a taste of what college will do to you to make you think, solve problems, and manage yourself to make the solution work. Even more props to you if you can do this creatively (and legally).
All this only sunk in after my friends went to US colleges and said the workload wasn't as bad as they imagined, combined with the fact that the local university knocks a year off of most 4-year degrees if you do the voluntary courses and exams. And I thank the school for these tough courses - I'm certain I'd be an unhappy 'burnt out' architect now if Physics hadn't flayed me earlier. Also shuts some annoyingly smug buggers up when they have to remember a high of 27% in some classes.
Let me traslate Wallstreet corporate fat cat speak to Engineering English:
"Shortage of Engineers/ITs/whatever" = "We want cheaper labor, open the flood gates"
1) How many Slashdotters are not either CS/Comp engineers, or EEs?
From my understanding, that's the majority of jobs that are being offshored. Y'all sound pretty (understandably) bitter. But worth keeping in mind that this guy isn't necessarily "better off" not being in engineering.
2) Engineering shouldn't have to be painful.
Why *should* I have to have TAs who barely speak English? The Chinese graduating from Chinese engineering schools, I imagine, have all Chinese-speaking TAs. They seem to be getting on just fine without "toughing it out" through the "typical" engineering curriculum. Also, I go to a school (Olin College; was Slashdotted at one point when we first opened) whose entire mission is to make engineering useful, applicable, and not just a washout program. I got my butt kicked by freshman math and physics, sure, but combining it with *actual* engineering, immediate application, and teachers who gave a damn sure made it worthwhile. I don't think I'm learning that much less. I'm just learning it without needing to go on Prozac in the process.
3) The nature of engineering
Last year's president of the ASEE (American Society for Engineering Education) is also one of my school's VPs, and I've heard her talk a lot about her beliefs in engineering. One of her key points it that we need to get out of the mindset of cut-and-dry, plug-in-crank-out engineering that is so prevalent and fits much into the stereotypical state school engineering mold. We have to get into innovation, design, and the business side of things, because those are the things that are the next step in engineering. Education machines in India and China are churning out millions of engineers who can do the things computers will be doing in 20 years. We have to stop whining about not being able to keep up with the numbers and look forward to the next big thing in technology and science. Pity parties and "In my day" reminiscing don't do us any good.
heh... And you believe, that simply graduating a law school is going to make person earn money fast and easy? You wish! I don't believe that higher education has anything to do with being a customer. Thinkink that way - you'd only have to pay enough to get good grades, am I right? Because I know people I studied with, and I did study two quite different courses, and most of them just wanted the paper - bachelor or master - because it's easer to get a job with that in your CV. There are schools out there that won't expell you when you simply pay the fee. And guess what, these are quite popular even when the fee reaches half the typical wage.
This guy was a struggling engineering student. If this was his destiny he could have changed colleges or learned to deal with his difficult professors. For example, he complains about his discrete math prof - let me tell you I took discrete math, my prof could hardly *speak* english - she literally communicated with the class in symbols - Was it frustrating ? yeah at times - but honestly - I remember more from that class than many others I have long since forgotten.
This guy comes off sounding like a complainer looking to blame someone for his own outcomes. Grow up and face it - the world is full of difficult people and obstacles. I have found that many times I have learned the most from difficult people - someone once told me "Everyone has strengths - observe them and try to learn from them" With this frame of mind you can discover and learn from the strengths of even those you may despise.
The only thing that I have a problem with in Eng programs here in UW is that we are not taught to crtically think. Sure, problem solving is a HUGE part of engineering, but to become a great engineer requires a lot of soft skills. One of my profs said that engineering is 65% communication and 45% technical. I was also told by my prof that a statistics of graduates was done to see what types of jobs they earn after a number of years (I believe +10). Engineers ranked one of the lowest in earning upper management positions such as CEO. The main reason why is because of communication skills.
As someone from high school that is obssessed with math and science, this was a shock. I hated english classes. But now I realize just how important writing, speaking, and LISTENING is. Now I am working hard everyday to improve these skills that I lack. I remember trying to write an essay for a tech./society course and I didn't know how to begin (since it required critical thinking of society and technology). My friend had a similar problem and stated, "Damn, we think too much like engineers." In high school, essay writing was easy. Now it has become so much more difficult.
In university, I found out that soft skills are not taught in the curriculum. This is the largest downside to my education. UW engineering students are bombarded with science and math. But when it comes to communication, there is barely any. Now you can argue that our Co-op positions give us those skills (I agree that they help), but I think they need to be taught formally. It's as if our university just pops out a bunch of machines that output data.
Also, our university barely gives us the time to take electives for more arts related courses. Almost everything is pre-planned for us.
I think there are ways to pop out Engineers and not machines: 1) Teach less (counter-intuitive), learn more 2) integrate soft skills into technical courses 3) diversify optionals for degrees or double degree.
On 1), I recently attended a seminar with one of the teaching resources directors from Oxford Uni. He said that by decreasing the amount of information students learn, students canwill comprehend more. Thus, students will most likely retain and understand the information given to them. I believe the person's name was Keith Trigwell.
On 2), I would like to see more design projects for math and science courses. That means a large assignment or project that is worth a hefty grade. Not only will it improve a student's design skills by allowing them to tackle real life problems(material considerations, design criteria, etc), but it will improve writing skills. If there is a presentation portion, that would be helpful too. Though UW has design courses, they happen in 3rd or 4th year. I believe that there should be constant practice of these soft skills through projects. Now because all programs have pre-planned courses, course co-ordinators can schedule projects so the students are not presured to work on multiple design projects.
On 3), UW currently faces the problem of uniqueness. We currently have the largest co-op system in the world. But the problem is that other universities are starting to either offer co-op programs or double degree options. The uniqueness of UW might not last as long as the administration thinks. If we were to offer degrees that diversify our engineers, we can have extremely powerful generalists graduating. For example, engineers with medical background can work on robotic surgery. Or engieers with arts background can invent new ways of improving hollywood films, etc.
I think what I pointed out is important to ensure that our future engineers can "think out of the box." I really miss all the critical thinking that is practiced during high school, no matter how much I hate it.
Colby College shows a course titled "198fs Turbo Chemistry".2 006/course_descriptions/chcrs.cfm
http://www.colby.edu/academics_cs/catalogue/2005_
Yes cause when I go to mechanics school they hide all the tools and make me listen to incredibly boring lectures about the tools. And the more boring lectures I go to the greater the chance I might get handed a working screwdriver. Jeez you're an idiot.
Math, physics, etc are fucking tools not life lessons. Gimme the tools and make the actual engineering courses hard. I'd gladly take a "Hey you know your math, but you suck as an engineer. Look at that solution you produced. It fails in three different ways you failed to take into account" over "here's another complicated proof that's going to take up 30 minutes of class and teach you nothing when I could be doing examples or relating this technique to real world applications"
Unfortunately it looks like the former never happens judging from all the comp eng people I've had to explain reality to. "I don't care if your code is correct, opening 100k file descriptors is not a solution. Re-engineer it."
kashani
- Why is the ninja... so deadly?
I'm in the same shoes as the guy who wrote that article. Never planning to do engineering again once I get out, if I can help it. But guess what, since I have an engineering degree from Smartypants Public U, I have a cheap degree and when I get a law degree or MBA I'll be making more than him (and won't need to live in Virginia to be comfortable).
The guy had the right idea, but gave up. Anybody who didn't work their ass off for an engineering or science degree has *almost* no chance to succeed in this country. Regardless what kind of jobs are available. All the top guys at most of the companies are either legacy or engineers. There's a reason for that.
And anyone who goes off the edge like many of you have here and says "there are no engineering jobs cuz they're being outsourced" really doesn't understand the key value of a science of engineering degree is learning problem solving, which history/English/liberal arts just ain't going to teach ya.
I may not be adding anything new or interesting to this discussion, but I might as well say it. This guy (and everyone like him), not the schools, is what is wrong with engineering today. People come in with inflated egos and bullshit GPAs from high school, thinking all of their old tricks will work in college too. Newsflash: They won't . I happen to go to one of the much reviled "public universities" (UC-Irvine, specifically). Thankfully, I have yet to have a lecture not taught by someone with a doctorate in their field. Sure, some of them had a less than optimal command of the English language, but you get used to it. Every single class I have taken required more than a last-minute cram session before the exams. I saw a TON of my classmates whine and moan about how the class was "too hard" or "too fast-paced", and that the professor "didn't care" or, my favorite, was "out to get them." All of those people either switched out of engineering/physics/math/etc. or failed. Why? They thought doing the bare minimum was enough, and they were wrong. The entire point of classes where you're working balls to the wall the entire term is to teach you not just the class material, but a decent work ethic as well. If you're not willing to work, especially in engineering, you need get the hell out so the real engineers can do their job.
"1. Pay teachers very well so they are in say the top 5% of all wage earners. This will attract the highly skilled and educated back into teaching."
Funny, Bush's wife is a teacher but he couldn't give a rat's ass about education.
Because we don't want to take classes with arrogant politics majors?
--"Meanwhile, my friends majoring in the liberal arts pulled dandy grades while studying little. "You just wait," I thought, gazing upon them like the ant regarding the grasshopper in the summer. "You party and blow off homework now, but in ten years, you'll be making merely wonderful money as investment bankers and consultants, while I'll be getting laid off from a great job at General Electric."--
I thought it was funny.
At least he touched on a big reason so people I know avoid engineering. In short: Your the "gfy I outsource to save money" employee.
If you really want to be a successful engineer you have to avoid the job that requires dna samples, or photo copies of genitalia, as proof that everything you think of (while at work or not) will be the property of whatever incompetent rich f****r your working for. Get a job at as either a tax/divorce attourney, a dentist/vet, or run for . Sure they all require a heafty amount of money before success (see: G.W. Bush). But, your job will be reasonably secure enough to invest as much income you want for your "ideas".
-- So what's it like to loose all good karma in one day?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Don't forget your purse, Kern
Eventually, Howard's distant relatives beat the medical foundation's board in court, and sold HAC to GM. Thanks to corporate inertia, the new bosses weren't able to screw up the work environment immediately, but it went downhill from there, nevertheless.
Luke, help me take this mask off
kind of relevant - it's a complaint about the article...
i speak british english, and every time i heard the abuse of the word "orient" it urks me. it urks me that before i clarified, i wasn't too sure about this... it had already become accepted usage.
orienting means taking someone or something and making it ORIENTAL. re-orienting is when an oriental person, who's been - for argument's sake - americanized, goes back to his roots.
the word you guys (okay, i'm targeting americans here) are looking for is ORIENTATION. and ORIENTATING. you know, like someone's who's totally disorientated is lost. you can re-orientate objects in general. i orientated myself towards the keyboard so that i could whine about this.
good night, ladies and gentlemen. 'cuz that's the most important thing i have to say right now.
---- I was woken up this morning by a face full of fur. Damn cat thought my head made a good pillow.
That may be the best way to influence an 18 year old who just appeared out of thin air. But more realistically, the best way is to influence your children *from birth* to understand the value of education and hard work. In my case, it was being given the opportunity to work in the yard from a very young age to earn spending money (and very little of it). It was bagging groceries, doing random paperwork at a real estate office, even being a receptionist at a hair salon... those things taught me that the people around who had the money either owned the businesses or had education levels that let them do highly skilled work.
I didn't have to be sold on engineering or college at all by the time I was 15. I knew how the other half lived and I knew that being poor would really, really suck.
people will continue to move away from it. Time and time again in every major company (and most minor ones) an asshat decision from even a minor marketroid will overrule a thought out and researched decision from an entire staff of engineers.
No one wants to bust their ass and see some airhead with a liberal arts degree in Advertising get all the bonuses and perks for coming up with an ad campaign in a couple of weekends for a device Engineering now has spend thousands of man-hours frantically trying to make work. Toss in beancounters more interested in making devices intentionally obsolete in a short time so more money can be made in spare parts or the "next generation" device, and no wonder the field loses interest in the eyes of new students. Your ideas are not your own, and your creations corrupted and subverted by people whom you'd never associate with if you had the chance.
Hard to be a corporate engineer and do anything you can be proud of, and have a sense of accomplishment with, these days.
His entire problem can be summed up in his complaint that the TA wouldn't "Articulate the steps". He's trying to learn mathematics as a cookbook. You learn a procedure to solve problem type A, type B, type C, etc. This works fine in high school and is all most people need to know.
But in engineering, not every problem you come across will fit some easily defined type, and there won't always be someone around to give you new procedure for the particular circumstances you're facing. You need to understand the theory well enough to come up with your own procedure.
Being good at rote memorization is worth crap for a serious engineer. In fact, most of the time, it's better to forget what you think you know. All these stupid idiotic standardized tests only make it worse. It's the lazy man's solution to real education. Leave it to "I'm a fucking moron Bush" to push a solution that is obviously flawed. But who gives a shit about education. Hurray for political stupidity from both parties.
Why can't people understand this?
This article seems to amount to: "Its not for me"
Well the years of study to be a doctor is not for me, so I didn't pursue it. You have to evaluate the options and decide what is important to you. He did get one thing right, there are a lot of options here in the US. Unfortunately our culture seems to cater to the lowest common denominator. There is no value in pursuing knowledge unless there is a high immediate dollar value attached.
I've been reading the comments and I can tell that here are not a lot of people interested in an engineering degree given the difficulty involved. I would say that the value that my Computer Engineering education gave me that I do not often find in graduates of the Business School Computer Science program is critical thinking skills and adaptability.
Exposure to multiple engineering fields early allows a student to see how what was learned in Calculus class can be used to model problems from Statics & Dynamics to Circuits. More than just learning a skill, you learn to use knowledge in ways that are different from the intended purpose.
I feel it is my engineering education more than my Computer Science specific courses that have allowed me to learn new technologies and solve problems more quickly now that I work in industry. My starting salary may not reflect this, but my relatively quick advancement in comparison to my Business Comp Sci counterparts and encouragement by my manager to pursue higher levels at our company I think does.
In an increasingly diverse country you need to get over an aversion to instructors of foriegn origin. I complained about some of my instructors in school, but I now work on a team where near half the members are foreign born. If it really bothers you, get that Phd and teach.
If you enjoy solving problems using mathematics and scientific reasoning, then I would encourage anyone to pursue some type of engineering field. Our country needs more problem solvers than it does more skilled labor.
A few random thoughts
So a lot of folks have been commenting on how engineering classes should be hard. Well, I had to kinda but not totally disagree. I have a few friends who came from below average performing high schools, and the first two years of classes kicked their asses. Most couldn't maintain a gpa above 3.0. One in fact went on academic probation twice and should have been kicked out of school. But for some reason they were hard assed and stuck it out. All the while there were times I wanted to tell them to give up. And to this day I am glad I didn't. Most of them went on to graduate with a gpas above 3.0, one finished with a 3.6, and the one on academic probation ended up in a phd program at the same school (Berkeley). At the same time I had a bunch of friends who left engineering, but I knew they were smart kids who could have probably hacked it.
I guess my point is somewhat a mix off a few posts. Yeah engineering should be hard, but the idea of weeder classes is rediculous. Instead of booting potentially great engineers, universities should help to create and build foundations for students to prepair for more difficult matterial.
The problem is that this system is not conducive for research universities like Berkeley. I would love the idea of professional lecturers for the first couple years of college science/math courses. But the problem is, this style does not introduce students to the rigour and thought process required at the reserach/phd level. It was because I had real reseraching professor teaching my math/science classes that I learned the beauty of proofing and analysis.
And no not all profs are created equal. For the most part (but not always) a lecturer cannot rival the knowledge and elegance of a pdh reseraching prof.
There are many smaller universities (both public and private) with great engineering/CS programs (most university rankings are heavily biased towards size).
:), but should be back next semester :)
:)
For example, I teach CS at Southern Poly (www.spsu.edu), a public university in Georgia, we specialize in tecnology (although to be fair, we don't offer engineering degrees, GaTech has too much clout, so all our engineering degrees are in Engineering Technology), and we do worry about our teaching and our students. We have almost no grad students doing teaching (I don't know of any), and very few adjuncts (this semester, 0 in CS).
I've also taught at a small private liberal arts college (Wofford) and our basic science/math classes were superb (we had a 3+2 plan for engineering, you did 3 yrs at Wofford, then 2 years at an engineering school and got both a liberal arts and an engineering degrees.
I did my PhD at Tulane, in New Orleans and I saw a focus on undergraduate teaching (Tulane is under water now
There are many really good engineering schools for undergrads, it's just they probably aren't the big ones that are well-known and highly ranked, because the rankings are heavily biased towards size (and the well-known universities are big and with big football teams
Years from now we'll declassify it, and the poli-sci folks can read about it in the papers and debate whether we made the right choices or not.
(If it makes you feel better, ask the ex-Soviet generals: 'Who won the Cold War?'. They will tell you it was American engineers - who never fired a round.)
I'm very curios....
Beyond what the other posters have commented about the rigor of engineering there is another truth... K-12 should be looked at as a possible cause of Mr. Kern's failure. He's a classic example of "But I always excelled at school! it must be somebody else's fault I'm failing now!" K-12 is dumbed down to the point of uselessness. A grand 13 year social party for parents to drop their kids off at and give up responsibility for them. Nobody can be held back a year for failing to master content (I know; I have a friend who is a k-12 teacher and eventually gave up because principals and administrators kept preventing her from doing so.) The result is that I see a lot of students who, once they take the math placement test, wind up in remedial math before they can take calc1 and calc2. Do you know what remedial math is? Algebra! ninth grade algebra. You've got A(B+C)=AB+AC type stuff!
This is a total failure of k-12. Many college students cannot handle basic math when they finish k-12. Many students cannot even write properly. We have students who can't point to Mexico on a map. I have students who use "are" and "our" interchangeably!! It's really sad to me. I want to teach my students good programming skills and problem solving and prepare them for reasonably high paying careers with good job stability but I'm hobbled by having to correct all the "self-esteem" mistakes made in k-12.
Utter crap such as "standardised testing is bad or inaccurate", "the emotional damage a student suffers from failing is more important than honest evaluation." or "There are no truly right or wrong answers", etc... This is all the same crap promoted by intellectually weak individuals under the reign of Constantine et al. that led to the dark ages and halted nearly all of our progress for one thousand four hundred years.
To all of my art and music teachers, none of which I remember telling me I was good at either: Thank you! I like art and music; but the truth is I suck at making either and I know that because of their honest evaluations. But give me a computer, some paper, a pencil and tools and I can build the world.
(besides, I like the artistic beauty intrinsic to a well written program or an elegant bridge just as much, or maybe more than, any painting. It's just not something that most people can recognize.)
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
I graduated in electrical and computer engineering at carnegie mellon engineering and *most* of the people I knew that dropped out of engineering didn't have the kind of mathematical mind or discipline to be in a science/technical major to begin with.
This is the way engineering education has always been. In fact it is much easier now than it was 30 years ago. We didn't have fancy pants calculators and spreadsheets so we actually had to KNOW how to do even complex calculations by hand acurately and rapidly without these crutches.
Engineering should be made to be as hard as possible ON PURPOSE. The real world doesn't care if you try or not. The universe is subtle and tricksy, and nobody is going to spoon feed you the experience you need to make a technology work. There is only right and wrong when you build a solid rocket booster o-ring. If it is wrong BOOM. And there are MANY more wrong answers than right ones.
If you need to be spoon fed by professors to learn basic concepts how crappy an engineer will you be after graduation when the real world throws you non-idealized problems not in the textbook, and you need to be able to keep up with new technology on your own?
No, the real problem is that engineering is not valued or esteemed by our society. You need to have lots of Jack Kilbys and John Fenns for society to prosper. But if society doesn't value the hard work that it takes to achieve this level of achievement people aren't going to want to take on that kind of challenge. They will take their hard work and talent somewhere else, like medicine, finance or law.
more jobs/$$$ for me.
You are right about Japanese of course, but Thai is a tonal language, like "Chinese." (I put quotes around Chinese because there are a bunch of different Chinese languages, like Mandarin and Cantonese to name the two most prominent ones.)
My ex-wife is a Chinese Thai. Which means that she looks very Chinese... she's very beautiful actually, sigh... but her nationality is Thai, you wouldn't be able to tell she was Thai just by looking at her. However, my current roommate is ethnically Thai, but she is not someone you would confuse for Chinese, she has those classic Thai looks.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
I really dislike the whining about foreign teaching assistants and professors. Yes, it can be a bit challenging sometimes but this is relevant job-training experience. You will be working with these people in the future.
Uh, no I won't. My small company doesn't hire people that cannot communicate effectively. If the TA sucks that bad at teaching why do you think I would work with someone like that? Industry has just a little bit higher standards then hiring TAs.
However, instead of whining, students need to start demanding better TAs and inform the school that they will tell prospective students about how badly the TAs teach.
I would love to see one of these "my-TA-sucks" whiners learn a language like Chinese.
Who the F cares? What if they did take a Chinese class and their TA mumbled and stuttered. Would you then say don't whine about him not being able to teach Chinese very well...Maybe they should fire bad TAs and say that is relevent job-training. It's relevent because if you can't do the job you are hired for you should be fired.
If you follow the money you may find there is no money in being an Engineer anymore and that is why people aren't interested.
I know someone with an Engineering degree. He never used it and never got any engineering related employment. He did get a job doing C++ though.
-------------------------------------
Technically, we are beyond survival.
A loser is complaining about the system..Nothing new.
Engineering and science do require a high IQ, discipline and motivation. Looks like this guy lacked all three and decided to rant.Think of why India and China produce such excellent engineers. Certainly not because they have good teachers or good facilities - because all their cream is already in the US.
If you're good - no matter how bad your teacher is - you'll do fine. I've graduated from the foremost engineering college in the world and know this first hand. The teachers can only help you so much. You've got to do it on your own.
It can be easy to be funny in a foreign language. I had my Japanese colleages rolling in the floor yesterday when I started calling (not seriously, obviously) one of the women in my group a skank - in front of the assistant professor. Of course, the aburdity came from the fact that as a gaijin I am allowed to get away with such things. We call it our "gaijin license". No Japanese student would use such expressions within a country mile of anyone with authority.
It is not difficult to be funny, but I will grant that it is difficult to understand natives' humor, or to be funny in the same way they are. Humor is often based on subtle word meanings, and therefore requires a deep understanding of the language.
One time I was working COMDEX show, the show had started, the attendees were all inside, time to switch to suit mode. All of a sudden on the walkie talkie we get a call, one of our vendors had some major snafu, I have to go fix it. Problem, the Interface Group had only given our company so many show passes, they were out with some bosses on the floor and they weren't answering their talkies so I couldn't get one to get on the floor and security was being dinks about it.
hmmmmm
One show catalog for the logo and a fax machine and some old show badges and some leet artiste skills with magic markers and pens, etc, later, and I had a reasonably facsimile of what that days badge looked like,stuffed it in the plastic badge holder, grabbed a swag bag for effect, went to another entrance, one out on the docks that didn't have a mag stripe reader (couldn't fake that quickly) and waltzed right in.
yep, sometimes you just gotta do what needs doin'
I am a native speaker, and routinely got hit with questions to which I did not know the answer. It was not unusual for the question to not even make that much sense, and I can definitely see how they would confuse someone who did not have a supreme grasp of the language.
I routinely communiate, in English, with people whose English is as bad as any TA you have ever encountered. I can ask them any technical question in their field that I want, have them understand the question, and understand the response.
It is a skill. Learn it.
I'm old school, this could be fun! Someone messes with the ride, they get the ski mask and louisville slugger treatment. Or 50 of their rides get keyed. Whatever. not advice to anyone, because OMGBBQ that's terrorism and lawyers and homeland security and union mafia goons and.. ha! Who cares now, the US has been de-nutted. But glad I grew up back when you dealt with your own problems.
/me ex UAW and ex United Woodworkers. I quit the UAW because management (this was in the late 60's) was drunk and stoned leet morons who couldn't see the foreign cars looming on the horizon to take market share (better quality, better mileage, cheaper prices, this was a big duh if anyone bothered to look, and I was proven right a few years later), and the rank and file was drunk and stoned rednecks who couldn't see they were striking themselves out of jobs, not to mention the chronic theft that went on. I decided a pox on that industry, I would move on, so I did. I see no future in being stupid, or a crook, although our current business models seem to reward that...hmmm.. anyway, not for me!
yep,
...or maybe he had a natural resistance to an educational system designed to pump out servants of corporate and political management for the mass consumerism dominating our country. "Traditional forms of instruction in America, even before the Revolution, had three specific purposes: 1. To make good people 2. To make good citizens 3. And to make each student find some particular talents to develop to the maximum. " For an American Education History Tour of the NEW Fourth Purpose see- http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/historytour/history 1.htm
Some call it "Human Civilization", others know it as the "IT virus". There is no IT. There only IS.
-Gaia
... graduating engineering is hard. Deal with it.
Everything you describe fits with my BE at the University of Sydney, Australia (although the staff weren't as socially inept as the article describes). I don't have a problem with that.
Engineering is as much about teaching yourself as it is about the staff teaching you. What the writer of the article is describing is how people who do not fit engineering are filtered out. I think that under 50% of my course finished in 4 years, which is the minimum amount of time (I took 5 years, not including a year off). Probably 25% dropped out.
meh
I think it's interesting that the author chose to abandon engineering outright and switch to a liberal-arts major. As a physical science majo r (chemistry) I suffered some of the same problems, but dramatically lower in degree. The experience was similar for other pure sciences: physics, mathematics, etc. The difference was (apparently),by virtue of a curriculum which has been around longer, the teaching in pure-sciences majors is more standardized, so you are dramatically less likely to have professors or textbooks that are totally incompetent (many of them were actually quite good). The ironic thing is that most of the "pure sciences" majors I know are now employed in what are thought of as "traditional engineering" fields: physicists in mechanical and structural engineering, mathematicians in computer science, chemists in chemical engineering, and so on. Maybe the problem with engineering is that it's considered a separate subject matter at all...in a lot of ways it makes more sense to have engineering fields as a subset of pure sciences rather than distinct fields of their own.
...or maybe he had a natural resistance to an educational system designed to pump out servants of corporate and political management for the mass consumerism dominating our country. "Traditional forms of instruction in America, even before the Revolution, had three specific purposes: 1. To make good people 2. To make good citizens 3. And to make each student find some particular talents to develop to the maximum. " For an American Education History Tour of the NEW Fourth Purpose see- http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/historytour/history 1.htm
Some call it "Human Civilization", others know it as the "IT virus". There is no IT. There only IS.
-Gaia
Hey, Case guy!
(I imagine it's one of the more liberal-artsy engineering schools, and rigorous as hell.)
Man, there's no way I'm reading ALL those comments. However, I will contribute to the mass of senslessness that is internet commentary by posting my twenty-three cents about this article. Which, btw, is the first article I've ever come across on slashdot that made me feel impassioned enough to sign up and comment. Yay me. I wish I could come in here and simply say "what a moron, losers are as losers do, if you can't cut it, you don't deserve to waste precious air by breathing". However, I am no genius. I'm pursuing a computer science degree myself, came to it from liberal arts (philosophy to be exact), and haven't looked back. I suppose it could be argued that I couldn't "hack" the arts...but then again the move meant a whole lot more work (his article had that much right). So, I feel perfectly justified in my response to this. Frankly, I feel that if he couldn't stick with it, then he simply wasn't up to it. Period. I'm struggling through integral calculus right now. That's right, "struggling". Yet I don't back down. I took deifferential calculus twice. Because I couldn't get it? No. Because I made a C the first time and knew I could do better. I desired to do better. I had the drive to prove that. I came out the second go 'round with a B. You get what you put in I guess... I find the attitude he exhibits appalling. Professorial incompetence aside, I and several others walk onto the front lines of an engineering education every day and we tough it out. I dare say most of us suffer from the same academic symptoms he mentions, yet we soldier on. We don't turn tale and take the path of least resistance. Consequently, I think this warrants us a small measure of elitism. I'm doing that which you could not. I'm better than you. Let's not turn this into a "science education is better than arts" debate though. That is by no means what I'm saying. (I'm minoring in philosophy and plan to do grad study in it at some point) What I'm saying is, to come to a technical program with the cocky idea that your some super rookie just because you aced a spoon fed lower education curricula only to tuck and run when the meat hits the grinder and you realise that for once in your life you must take your education into your own hands, qualifies you as one thing and one thing only. That thing is not a critic. You get by virtue of US citizenship and the bill of rights. The thing it qualifies you as is a washout. Bitch as you might, the fact still remains that you gave up. And so, I feel those of us who do tough it out, who don't run away from the challenge, those who may go on to contribute to the annals of man's greatest endeavour (science) should take the privilege to proclaim our fortitude and be proud of our pursuit. And we should give neither a moment's thought nor due consideration to the bitching of those that couldn't cut it. But then again, what do I know. I did, after all, sign up and spend the past ten minutes typing out this rant of my own. That's my $.023
You see similar problems in many areas -- the penal system has constant problems because they're torn between the concerns of rehabilitation and punishment, governments are torn between the concerns of social support and economic freedom and national strength -- all concerns that are unrelated and often conflicting.
The university I went to allowed students to evaluate their professors and TAs after every course. As a result, we usually had fairly good teachers, at least until we ran into the tenured ones who could teach any course they wanted (who are still sometimes good, but often not so much).
Nevertheless, your point is well made.
Amen Beej!
... trying to follow some of these PHDs when they are trying to talk to other humans is painful. I had on average, much better teachers when they were NOT PHDs.
... I got a good job before I could finish. In the computer world it seemed that knowledge trumped grades.
Why do we have to stomp on people? Nobody wants to fail at school or feel stupid or lost in a class. Sure there is a lot of "feel good" nonsense with everyone getting an "A" -- but encouragement isn't the problem. I have had a tough life at times and had ridicule and felt like everyone thought I was scum -- and that did nothing to make me strong. No, it is love and encouragement that makes people strong -- every time. If we focus more on better teaching methods than ways to eliminate below par students I think we could actually improve education.
And I'll second your opinion about crappy Teachers at Universities. There is a race to get PHDs at all cost to have credibility among Universities. We had a lot of incomprehensible foreign teachers who must have had a lot of information locked in their educated heads -- because little of it escaped to the class. Enterprising students just created databases of past tests and studied
By they way, I had a 3.4 average, so I'm not bitter or a bad student. I started out having a real hard time in school and later my grades improved as I "figured out" the system. Then, as I realized my grades wouldn't really matter toward a job, I let them slip as I just looked at the college as a resource to get all the computer experience I could get. I didn't bother trying to finish my second degree
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
The problem is, it seems like the engineering departments are getting more restrictive with this "well rounded education". Where I went to school, the engineering department has a specific list of courses that you had to choose your free electives from, and you needed a certain number of each type, and oh yeah, half of them were only offered once a year. And last I heard, they cut that list in half recently. I'm all for a well rounded education, but that's not what students are being given anymore.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Having IRC and AIM in class is preventing me from being a engineer.:(
By the way, the NSF seems to think he's got something right. The National Science Board documents the problems:0 369.pdf
m
http://www.nsf.gov/nsb/documents/2003/nsb0369/nsb
and the NSF is tossing money in hopes of solutions:
http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2005/nsf05519/nsf05519.ht
- Global competition for S&E talent is intensifying, such that the United
States may not be able to rely on the international S&E labor market to
fill unmet skill needs;
- The number of native-born S&E graduates entering the workforce is likely
to decline unless the Nation intervenes to improve success in educating
S&E students from all demographic groups, especially those underrepresented in S&E careers.
It goes on to examine the global and domestic contexts, the flattening of US participation in science and engineering education relative to other countries, and the dismal participation of minorities.I lived the pithy attitude and failed out in my last year of Engineering all while bitching and complaining about how I had been done wrong. Many years later, after life had shown me that there is no free lunch, anywhere, ever, I returned to school. The same profs were there with the same teaching "skill set" and worse attitudes than ever (some actually remembered me ... not in a nice way). Even the classes and building smells were the same which was really unnerving at times. But I worked my ass off and did rather well (got my name on a wall ... and I don't mean graffiti), good job, and now I'm working on my doctorate. I didn't magically get brainier; I just did the frickin' work. That's all engineering demands. And well it should. Do you think it was slack English majors that flew us out of the solar system, allowed us to cross the Atlantic in hours, or made the Internet possible? No, Mr. Kern. It was Engineers (and Scientists) working LONG, HARD hours. And they were used to those LONG, HARD hours from years of practice EARNING their degrees. And when they encountered things that they (and others) did not understand, they spent LONG, HARD hours learning it themselves ... just as they had in university. That is what an engineering education prepares graduates for.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
mankind would still be stuck trying to get squares to roll smoothly.
What a sniveling whining piece of shit crybaby. Nowhere in there did I see this person talk about having to work flipping hamburgers till two AM or vacuuming office buildings till three am with requisite classes always at 7AM and never getting more than four hours of sleep at stretch for months. Or having to work as many as three jobs at a time. Or not being able to afford glasses to see the board. Or, as a scared, unsure freshman having to work all calculus problems twice (instead of just the even or odd) for a quarter to catch up with the other students. Or getting sick, with no health insurance, and loosing forty pounds (when you were skinny to begin with), or having to take quarters off from school to work in a factory to save money. And finally graduate with damn good grades, in 1990, when nobody was hiring and then having to work more years in a factory full of people who's greatest thrill in life was to humiliate the engineer who couldn't find an engineering job, and who had a wife and baby depending upon him - like me.
psssst. hey buddy, i've got a secret for ya... a PE doesn't do diddly squat for most engineers, and doesn't relegate you to lower paying jobs. it's only really required if you're going to do housing / municipal type work. i'm 6 years out of eng. school with a ae, not eit, no pe, and making pretty stinkin' close to 6 figures...
What we need is a system whereby profs are ranked on their teaching ability instead of their credentials and their works.
The problem here is that teaching ability is hard to quantify. Yes, you know it when you see it, but how can you put a number on it, and do so fairly? Research is much easier to quantify: a person publishes X papers and gets Y dollars in grants.
When it comes to measuring teaching ability, student evaluations come to mind. But these can be very unfair. There was a study a year or so ago that concluded that good looks translated to higher evaluations! Often times the evaluations say more about the student than the teacher, reflecting the student's frustration with the book, material, tests, teaching style, etc. Things like teaching style frustrates one student but inspires another.
A person who teaches a class like Calculus for non-Math majors is not going to be rated as highly as someone who teaches, say, an Advanced Networking elective to CS-only students. Also, a "challenging" teacher may be seen as a hard-ass (and get low evaluations) even if he teaches well. And what about the instructor who is known as an "easy A"? Even if he cannot teach well, he is likely to get good evaluations.
I've found from reading the teaching evaluations (these are often publicly available) that satisfied students tend to say little. They may even opt out of completing the evaluations, or fill all answers in with a "3" (on a scale of 1-5) just to finish quickly. (I've seen a few "3"'s for questions that state: "was the instructor available during office hours? Select 1) Yes or 2) No".) A group of 3 or 4 unhappy students in a class could make a big impact on the evaluations (and thus the career) of a professor. This is true even if the professor catches these 3 or 4 people cheating during the semester.
For reasons like these, the student evaluations are not used to reward/punish professors, except in a somewhat limited fashion.
I know this is extremely off topic, but whatever. How was Rose-Hulman? Im starting my senior year in high school, and of course I'm looking at colleges. Rose-Hulman is ranked really high in the engineering programs, but how was it there?
"For Great Justice."
I totally agree with you on the limited usefulness of student evaluations.
I was just wishfully thinking that there would be a way to get people to say, "Yeah, you should go to this University because I hear they have really good teachers," instead of, "you should go to this University because it's name has a great reputation."
Engineering used to make money, but it doesn't any longer.
He pretty much said he was more on a literary track in high school. I just bet he wasn't one of those kids that took everything apart to see how it worked. He just isn't suited for engineering.
This has always been the case and is not why people are avoiding engineering these days.
Pre bubble, we largely had a crop of people following their aptitude.
During the bubble, everyone wanted in. That wasn't really good.
Post bubble, we have even lost some of those with aptitude. Why?
Buisness has presented an almost hostile attitude toward engineering staff. From outsourcing, huge tech visa quotas, to comments from the likes of Steve Balmer saying we should work for $50000 anual salary.
In many ways, Ivy Leauge schools are the "Worst" for teaching. How many of you spent half your semester or more learning from a teachers assistant because Mr Joe Tenure was too important pursuing other oportunities. Obscure theory VS applicable information.
I think an easier fix would be to force professors to get a teaching degree before they receive tenure.
Professors are smart people put into teaching positions. Just because you are smart doesnt mean you can teach.
Yes! Also one sees a big confusion going on in this thread. Maybe it's just egos. People think things are "hard" because the material really is "hard" but seem to miss the fact that much of the material is made harder (unintentionally) by incompetent, obstructionist forms of teaching and textbook writing.
I just want to say that I was one of the people who "fought the good fight" in Engineering school. I went to Mississippi State University and majored in Computer Engineering. This is (or at least has been at some point in time) one of the better engineering universities in the united states. I came from a similar background as Mr. Kern. I made excellent grades in a very competitive high school, and showed a better-than-average aptitude for both english and math. I chose Engineering as a major because at the time I went into the field in 1995, there was an extremely high demand for engineers, and the salary was outstanding.
At first I enrolled at a 2 year technical school because I was worried that I didn't have enough of a background in math and sciences in my high school. I graduated from this school with honors, a 3.7 GPA, and the school's honors award for math, which is only awarded once a year to the student who is hand-picked by a panel of teachers in the math department.
At this point I went on to Mississippi State to finish my computer engineering degree. I only had "two years" to go, and felt ready to take on the entire world. I cannot describe to you how hard I had to work at MSU the first semester to keep from dropping out completely. I studied 18-hour days. I became malnurished. I left my girlfriend, who I had dated for over a year. I had to quit my job. All so I could try to keep up with the material. My first semester at MSU I got the proverbial 2.7 GPA and the first D I ever made in my entire life. I cannot describe how defeating this was. Not only that, but to have my hard work thrown back in my face by professors who didn't care, or worse told me to my face that I was stupid and not worth their time to teach.
A year and a half later, I "washed out," which is just a fancy word for dropping out of college. I took a semester off to work and analyse my life. I had spent nearly 4 years of my life only to fail and realise that it was all a waste. I re-enrolled in college under a new major, only to suffer the ridicule and humilation of my peers. After another semester of abysmal grades, I swtiched back to Computer Engineering and decided I would finish no matter what the consequences.
I just completed my major this past summer, 10 years to the day I first entered college. I don't know how other people handle the stress, but I have lost my soul trying to get this damn major. I've completely lost all love for math and sciences. I have no respect or admiration for the school I went to. I don't really even care about anything anymore. I have devoted my entire life to learning something that I'll probably never get to use. I've send out hundreds of resumes, and I can't get a single interview. I'm so depressed and despondent over the years and life that I've lost.
Most depressing of all is how educated I am now. I feel as though I'm smart enough to do anything now, and I'm not just saying that to pump my ego. I can design a calculator or a clock radio or a USB device from the ground up - MSU has taught me how to do that. Or I've taught myself how to, however you want to look at it. Yeah, I can do that. I know how to program in C++ and Java 2, and I can teach myself any other fucking language you can name in a few months. I can read a book and teach myself how to do just about anything in my field.
University only taught me one thing, how to teach myself. But looking back, I don't think the price was worth it. If I had it to do all over again, I'd have majored in accounting or business or anything BUT egineering. I could write a book on everything I think was wrong with my experience at University. Half of it was my own fault. Maybe I didn't work hard enough. Maybe it was just bad timing. Hell, maybe I was just f-ing unlucky.
But the other half of it was the university's fault - I firmly believe this to be true. I could list a hundred examples from my experiences at MSU that was something that a student should never have to face in their efforts to get an education. One
No, no, no, the species is just failing to procreate. Stop reading this drivel, get out there to do your part!
Appropriately my crossed out human detector word was "fruition"!
I very much disagree with the article.
Engineering is the difficult discipline because it has to be. If anything, it expectations should be raised. Systems are becoming even more complex, foriegn students and schools are catching up to our lead (and in some circumstances, surpassing it), and in order for a young engineer to really make a dent in his profession he/she needs to understand an even larger body of knowledge than ever before.
Instead of being taught a solid background, students are taught a number of ineffective shortcuts which allow for short-term success, but leave out the greater picture of engineering practice. People are taught the practice but not the principles.
It is growing to be increasingly like this in certain areas of science as well. Even in String Theory, possibly one of the most purely theoretical subjects around, most people are working on neat little 'projects' or problems within string theory, without being exposed to the bigger picture.
Too many young physics graduates leave without complex analysis, general relativity, or a decent algorithm/programming background. Too many software engineers never achieve a decent level of programming expertise. Too many engineers can solve problem sets without striving towards truly novel inventions. Educational programs in engineering and the sciences should try to have some claim on excellence. Really.
One problem is that those who excel in engineering and the sciences typically never learned as much from a lecture environment as in working by themselves, or following a book. This is how learning happens for these people. Trying to teach them how to teach is like most students would like to be taught is, most likely, for naught: it isn't natural, it will never be natural. You might get from atrocious to passable, but never to great, and the students won't benefit that much anyway. It's probably simply better to learn to old fashioned way: cramming and working problems with your friends, while thinking and reflecting on your own.
The real problem is probably the money. It's rather disheartening to see people a fourth as smart as you work a tenth as hard and earn an MBA in a third of the time is takes you to earn a PhD while earning twice as much upon exiting. Skilled technical people are hideously undervalued in the marketplace. You can verify this by checking out opportunity costs: people who leave the engineering positions in companies tend to make more money. But this is tricky, and you might not want to bet a career on something like this.
So what do you do?
Unions don't really work anymore. Even though off-shoring, it turns out, really isn't in most company's best interests, they don't know that yet. Raises are capped. Pointy haired bosses rule the world.
Unless, of course, you make damn sure that none of them invade your workplace. Unless you make it clear that the lifeblood of the company is the product, and the product is the brainchild of the engineer. Like Google, for example...
Daniel Alexander Fong
http://www.princeton.edu/~ecouncil/froshhelp/cours es.htm
People aren't studying engineering because:
1. No company loyalty. Your job could be outsourced tomorrow.
2. Being an engineer does not get you laid.
3. The types of girls that WOULD do an engineer aren't the kind of girls engineers want.
Who cares about the ozone layer?...thanks to CFC's I can write my name......IN CHEESE!!!
Sorry, I meant to say "in or around Southeast Asia". I guess "in or directly off the coast of Southeast Asia" would have worked too. Damn pedants...
-insert a witty something-
If I were to win some absurdly large amount of money tomorrow, I would (OK, after a long vacation) spend my life teaching and learning. I would get bored with a permanent vacation.
Unfortunately, the best job I could hope to get teaching (at a 4-year liberal arts school) still pays far less than I will make as a corporate monkey - and that is assuming I can even get such a teaching job, which is not easy. Here in the real world, taking a 40% pay cut is not a very appealing option, especially because I have nothing but debts at age 30 due to grad school.
Engineering is hard!
I'm from the UK, I studied electronics, at GCSE level, (along with Metal work) and have two full GCSEs at a good grade in two enginering subjects,
I went on to study Electronics at A-level, where again I attained a good grade.
I went further on to do muy batchelors degree in electronic engineering, (where again I attained a good grade).
I joined the Institute of Electronic Engineers, (as my course was accredited), as a student member, however upon leaving University, my lecturers wuold not sponsor my applicatiopn to become a full member, saying that people didn't need sponsoring, (though this is exactly the opposite of what the IEE member status registration says.
I searched for jobs in engineering, at a graduate level the most i could apparantly hope for was a mere £14,000.
As you can imagine, I keep my electronics as an interest, (I studdied for 7 years so I'm not just going to give it up!!).
But I work as a computer technician, I walked into my first job as a graduate at £17,000 -which is helping to pay off the debts that I gather whilst diligently studying engineering.
My current affairs with electronics, are purely as a hobbist, my learning in a rtade is going to waste, not because I was not good enough, (as I said my grades were actually quite good). but more because the trade was not good to me.
The problem is not the education, it's not the teachers, and I would argue that it is rarely the students,
It's the people at the top, (like the guy writting the comments in the article) that see a problem and don't do anything about it! (other than sit and bitch -just like I'm doing now).
Yes, even in 1976 that had become the case--not just in large Universities, but also at the "Teachers" University that I attended for the first 1.5 years of my college education. I eventually went back to School at another University and completed a degree in another field. Even at the Colleges, I discovered that "instructors" often could not explain what they taught. And yes, I do have a genius level IQ--point--even I needed help that was not there. There need to be separate institutions for those doing research., not related to Universities. Give Universities back to being places of "pure" LEARNING!
I had a few reciprocal insights to share with Mr. Kern, after reading his article:
Mr. Kern:
I read your article, "Confessions of an Engineering Washout", submitted to TCS. By the time I'd finished the second sentence, I had a pretty good idea what the rest of the article would reveal of your nature; I was thus not surprised by what followed.
Unless you're a really bad lawyer or writer, you're a manipulator of language and people. That's what non-technical writers and lawyers do for money: manipulate people's perceptions, typically using emotion as much or more than logic, facts, or reason. That skill also enables major episodes of SELF-delusion, as you apparently learned during your abortive attempt in the sciences. You were never high-functioning autistic enough to be a natural engineer or scientist.
No doubt you are now doing what you do best, though from an engineer's perspective, at least, the world would be better off with a whole lot less of all that communication wasted for no other purpose than to "persuade". Engineers tend to only speak when there's something important to say; they have no interest in changing others' minds about anything. Changing one's mind is the job of the listener. If the evidence is compelling, there's no need for all that semantic mumbo-jumbo.
Mark
BULL!
... there are no surprises.
Since the mid 1950s, it is obvious to *any* engineering
student that someone with 3-5 years experience makes LESS
money than the fresh graduate.
That is FIFTY years of data from the National Science Foundation.
Unless you are a hypocrite who thinks it is fine for your first year
of work, but bad in the following years
Be good technically, but be ready to become a manager if you want $$.
Quit putting words in my mouth.
The complaint is not the realtivly static salary after entering the workforce. The complaint is the drop in pay relative to other mentally demanding fields. Or did you make as much as an MD when you got out of college?
The point is that if growth in engineering salaries (starting or otherwise) is not keeping pace with the competeing fields, when a BS in engineering is worth 6 figures with minimal experience, you will see a lot more engineers (where the salary goes from there is another issue).
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
First of all, you are a recent college grad. Did you get any resume help from your college career center? Would you be able to do it now? If not, go to net-temps.com and read every article you can find on resume writing. They have some great material that will help you immensely. As if you hadn't already guessed, you can post your resume there as well if you want.
Your resume is marketing material. What does your resume say about you? I'd argue it doesn't say much of anything. If I were looking for a C++ developer, I would have trashed your resume. Why? Because I don't see any C++ experience on it. Sure, I see that you took a course on C/C++ (what the heck is C/C++, anyway? Last I checked, C and C++ are similar only in basic syntax), but what did you do with it? printf("Hello world!");? Or did you do something serious?
Your first piece of experience is "Plan and implement custom software and tools". That's like a car advertisement that proudly proclaims, "Can transport you from point A to point B." Well, no shit. A developer develops and car drives. Tell me why YOU are special and better than the other 50 resumes I'm looking at.
Would it kill you to write something like, "Designed and implemented a buckeye sorting system for the Ohio Department of Buckeye Harvestation using C++ which increased buckeye sorting efficiency by 212% over the legacy system." This tells me a lot. It tells me you have real-world C++ experience. It tells me that you can bring a project to successful completion. It tells me that you know a thing or two about buckeyes and sorting, and while I don't have any buckeyes to sort at the present time, maybe I have shipping routes to optimize? It also shows me that you know how to take something which already exists and improve it substantially. These are all important things.
Oh, and another thing. You speak Chinese. That belongs on your resume. Now. If you don't feel your Chinese is good enough, it's time to find a Chinese friend.
Regarding your job search, can you still use on-campus recruiting? You'll compete well against other recent college grads, but you'll get creamed by someone with 10 years experience.
One last thing. There are two ways to do a job search. The way most people do it, and the right way. The way most people do it is to post their resume on monster.com, get zero hits, then bitch about the job market on slashdot. The correct way to do a job search is to call everybody you've ever known and tell them you are looking for a job. The experts call this "networking". Start with the people you've worked with. Then move on to your other friends, profs, students. Your parents' friends. Anyone who will listen. Attend local technology group events. There is undoubtedly a linux user group, java user group, or some XYZ user group in your area. Go there. Talk to everyone you can. Give out business cards and/or resumes. Do some research on something of interest to the group and then present on it.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
If at 18 you are resourceful enough to put yourself through college, you've learned everything that you are supposed to learn from the "one year off" lesson, and then some. Be my guest.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
As a transhuman you have massive computing storage and power in your brain. It's nice to derive things slowly, but a posthuman will make the same process much more efficient. Engineer your body!
1. If your resume is so good, how come you are complaining that no one is calling you back?
2. If you think that C (a procedural language) and C++ (an object-oriented language) are similar architecturally, you have no business designing in either one of them. They are similar in a curly-brace sort of way, but a good C design will not even remotely resemble a good C++ design.
3. You've totally missed the point. When I'm flying through resumes, I'll never see your tag at the end of your resume. You need your strengths to pop out. Even if I did see that tag, I wouldn't waste my time sifting through your code samples.
4. Pretty much any project can be made to sound impressive. I thought I demonstrated that with my buckeye sorting example. Truly, who gives a fuck about buckeyes... but my example sounded pretty impressive, didn't it?
5. Yeah, I don't speak German anymore, either. But about 15 minutes after arriving in Austria I spoke it just fine. Right after I told you to put it on your resume, I told you to find a Chinese friend if you were rusty.
6. Keep networking.
I don't even remotely care what you think of my attitude. Not everyone is going to be nice to you in life. I may be a jerk, but one of us makes money and it's not you.
If you know all these developers and technical managers, how come you are still unemployed? If they are so smart how come they don't know the difference between procedural and OO design? You can respectfully or disrespectfully tell me anything you want. But at the end of the day, your resume still sucks and it's the reason you're not getting called back. It's up to you whether or not you want to listen to all your laughing "tech manager" friends who can't seem to get you a paycheck.
Cheers!
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
blatent bullshit, written by a person who doesn't know a thing about teaching. When I went to Uni (oddly enough to study engineering), most of my lecturers were also researchers, and I found that they tended to be some of the best teachers for actually being able to relate and re-phrase tpoics until people understood. In contrast the lecturers who were not research doctors, but exprofessionals were able to give great insight into the practical aplications of what was being learned. Now I work in a Uni, (I'm a technician), the department I work in is rated as the best in the country for the courses they offer, and odlly enough it's mostly staffed by researchers. Liek I said in my last comment in this topic, engineering is hard... All that happened is Kern couldn't hack it and he dropped out to an easier subject. Yes, easier. -compare my 40hr week studying engineering principas, electronic principals, programming and complex maths with that of other friends 8hr weeks at Uni studying arts and media, learning how to use DTP aplications... Engineering is hard, yes, the world need more engineers, as in real people who can work through real problems, not a load of pussy drop outs like Kern who run away at the first sign that something might be difficult. IMHO, the reason people don't go into engineering is that the pay is crap.
Well, I went to a smaller smarty-pants U. with fewer engineering degree programs offered, which fortunately, in most case were taught by actual professors. Labs (in engineering) were usually handled by TAs/RAs.
Now, as I recall, in our very first orientation where they have a bunch of the freshman all started directly into engineering together for a little intro(can't call it a pep talk as it clearly was not) and signing up for courses(a nightmare, as I ended up with the most fscked schedule ever) we were basically told: look to your left, then to right, neither of those people will be in your engineering graduating class. i.e. only ~25-50% of us would successfully complete an engineering degree program, the rest would fall into some liberal arts degree program, or out of the university altogether.
Now all of this being said, and the fact that the majority of the professors could usually actually teach the subject matter leaving those most poorly written and approaching useless(and WAY OVERpriced) textbooks as a reference, I guess that I didn't have it as bad as Mr. Kern. All of this aside, engineering and other hard science degree programs REQUIRE LARGE amounts of time and effort to successfully complete, many of the courses ARE difficult(AND necessarily so), and yes the reward is completion of the program followed by a HIGH degree likelihood of being laid off MANY MANY times, while making adequate pay, possibly. (Engineering pay has been mostly stagnant since the 80s and other factors aren't helping.)
This being said, I don't think that, necessarily being smart or thinking that you are smart because you attended sub-par lower level schools and received high grades while doing, essentially, nothing (or conversely even if you attended VERY good schools, worked your but off, etc.) are enough to get you through. Personally, I observed several relatively intelligent people end up opting down to industrial "engineering", computer science or some other even less demanding(comparatively speaking) degree program, while some of the dimmest people managed to complete their engineering degrees(usually through a lrge degree of motivation, extremely hard work, and MUCH helping out by some of their more cognizant friends...).
Bottom line: Students should know what they are getting into when they opt for hard science based degree programs, obviously Mr. Kern was, apparently, entirely oblivious as to what exactly was involved, and, perhaps, lacking in required discipline and motivation. Dumbing down the degree programs, is not the answer, but I'll go so far as to agree that professors should be required to actually teach courses more often than they tend to do at large institutions. (Although this is partially driven by the fact that most engineering professors are pressured to do research as it bring in a GREAT deal of money to most universities, and many engineering schools receive MOST of their funding through what the university skims off the top of such research grants. Of course, much of it, effectively, subsidizes the liberal arts programs, but we won't go there... Also sometimes students are better off with TAs as there is a slight probability of actually getting a native english speaker versus someone else whose comprehension of the language is suspect at best...only had one or two cases of this myself though, as most of the foreign born professors had a better handle on the english language than some of my fellow American classmates...)
Try http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/770788/post s/
I don't know if this was the study he was intending to quote, but it is on the subject.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
To be perfectly honest, my experience in graduating is that they generally won't be banging down your door unless you've personally auhtored a major application or paper (of practical use). You're going to have to spend some shoe leather looking for opportunities. Your best resource is to have done a co-op or summer job with a techical company, but if it's your Junior year, it may be a bit late to do that. Next best are contacts. You probably have friends who have graduated already and have jobs. You probably have relatives who have technical jobs (engineering seems to run in families...). Talk to them. See if there's a hiring position. You've got a good character reference in them after all.
Also, don't be surprised if most companies are requiring 5+ years of experience. *wry grin* It's the usual Catch-22 that you can't be hired without experience and you can't get experience without being hired. You may have to take a job which isn't extremely high paying, maybe not even all that exciting to you, to pick up experience. Again, this is where co-op and summer jobs are handy. Also, consider taking a look at government positions. On average, they pay less for the technical careers, but they're incredibly stable, there's a lot of horizontal mobility, and right now they're in desperate need of younger engineers to pass on information to. At my station, over half of our engineers are over 50. When they die, decades of metrology expertise is likely to go with them. If nothing else, the government is a big place and it's not unusual for them to pass your resume along. I didn't even apply for my position. They received my resume from another part of the Air Force, who'd passed on my contact information.
And, quite frankly, you may not have a job on graduating. I didn't and it was largely because I was expecting someone to knock on my door with an opportunity. I wish you the best of luck though, as the job market is a bit glutted.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
"This would assume that every test is written to perfectly reflect the material in the course. That is an absurd assumption. The fact that the article's author thinks this way explains a lot about his difficulty as an engineering major."
Um. What else *should* the test reflect, other than the course material?
I understand that it's not going to reflect perfectly. But I'd think any engineering professor would be unsatisfied with a test that didn't accurate reflect what it's supposed to measure -- outside a given tolerance for error. Say, +/- 10% worst case.
Tweet, tweet.
The real reason you should stay away from engineering is that it is a waste of your talents. No one respects engineers, and it shows in many ways, primarily the pay and cubicle warehousing. Seriously, take it from someone who knows, and has been there. They will treat you like mushrooms, keeping you in the dark and feeding you guano. They will pay you just a little more than union labor. They will treat your labor like a liquid commodity.
Seriously, if you're smart enough to become an engineer, and be good at it even, then at least pick a profession where they'll either pay you like the genius that you are. Or one where they'll at least let you go outside or have your own office with a window.
Lately, I've been considering pursuing a career in a medical field. Nurse anesthesists make about twice what many engineers make, and Anesthesiologists about 6 times. Yeah, fuck this shit.