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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?
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....
and now I'm in med school, training for a job that can't be outsourced.
Reality Check, let alone potential visa doctor attacks. H1B's are not just for computers.
Snippets:
Three months ago, Howard Staab learned that he suffered from a life-threatening heart condition and would have to undergo surgery at a cost of up to $200,000 -- an impossible sum for the 53-year-old carpenter from Durham, N.C., who has no health insurance.
So he outsourced the job to India.
Taking his cue from cost-cutting U.S. businesses, Staab last month flew about 7,500 miles to the Indian capital, where doctors at the Escorts Heart Institute & Research Centre....replaced his balky heart valve....Total bill: about $10,000, including round-trip airfare and a planned side trip to the Taj Mahal.
"The Indian doctors, they did such a fine job here, and took care of us so well," said Staab...
Last year, an estimated 150,000 foreigners visited India for medical procedures, and the number is increasing at the rate of about 15 percent a year, according to Zakariah Ahmed...
Although they are equipped with state-of-the-art technology, hospitals such as Escorts typically are able to charge far less than their U.S. and European counterparts because pay scales are much lower and patient volumes higher, according to Trehan and other doctors. For example, a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan costs $60 at Escorts, compared with roughly $700 in New York, according to Trehan.
Moreover, he added, a New York heart surgeon "has to pay $100,000 a year in malpractice insurance. Here it's $4,000."
. . . .
True, it may not eliminate the entire need for local doctors, but it could glut the market for a long time.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
Um... no. Professors in my department generally design their test to have an average of about 50%, and a standard deviation in the range of 10-15%. Walking out of a class with a 45% average and a B or C just means you have a typically hardass professor, not even an exceptionally bastardly one. Getting 90% or higher on anything but a homework assignment in an engineering class means you've either found your specialty or your instructor is slacking off. It pretty much NEVER means you're recieving an exceptional education in the class, and is generally a good indicator of the opposite.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
For professional engineers? Many of them already do carry insurance for malpractice.
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