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?

Comments

Betrayed by your spelling

[Percy_Blakeney]

Your onto my plan.

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 repeat HAHAHAHAHAHA!

[zogger]

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

Re:I repeat HAHAHAHAHAHA!

[jedidiah]

Speaking of Vegas.

If you muck around the network wiring in a Vegas casino and you aren't one of the union electricians they will commit grave acts of sabotage to the network: like sever the whole thing with a chainsaw.

A colleague of mine once got impatient with the pace of work in a Vegas casino.

Underestimating the potential responses of trashling laborers is a bad idea.

Re:Article summary

[Philip K Dickhead]

Work hard, play hard. I recall the parties on the Engineering campus being much better.

Yeah. No pesky girls, or conversations to get in the way of the drinking...
Heh heh! Just me, and my beer-opening robot!

Re:Article summary

[CreatureComfort]

My favorite was the T.A. teaching my Circuits II class. Very nice Tiawanese gentleman, who at somepoint had a practical joker for an English teacher. Every time he wrote a circuit on the board, or worked a sample problem he reversed "off" and "on", and "open" and "closed". Took all of us much longer than it probably should have to realize what the problem was. then we spent the rest of the semester trying to convince him he had it backwards, and he complained to the department head that we were trying to trick him.