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Does It Suck To Be An Engineering Student?
Pickens writes "Aaron Rower has an interesting post on Wired with the "Top 5 Reasons it Sucks to be an Engineering Student" that includes awful textbooks, professors who are rarely encouraging, the dearth of quality counseling, and every assignment feels the same. Our favorite is that other disciplines have inflated grades. "Brilliant engineering students may earn surprisingly low grades while slackers in other departments score straight As for writing book reports and throwing together papers about their favorite zombie films," writes Rower. "Many of the brightest students may struggle while mediocre scholars can earn top scores." For many students, earning a degree in engineering is less than enjoyable and far from what they expected. If you want to complain about your education, this is your chance."
here is my summary and my thoughts
... I don't think this article is either NEWS FOR NERDS or STUFF THAT MATTERS. Clearly the author should not try to become an engineer and should switch to some other discipline where he gets inflated grades and the incorrect notion that he is bright.
According to the author of the article... inorder for engineering to not suck, we should have inflated grades and beautiful textbooks (whatever that it). He says that the textbooks are awful because they are thick and black and white and contain long equations (i don't know if i should laugh or what).. His other reasons are more related to the school in which he is studying and not with engineering
Seriously
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
Many of the engineering students I know only think their brilliant - until they have to take a science course, and flunk out.
that's more than i can say for my CS degree. All I learned was in spite of my education, not because of it.
you think it has changed in the past 50 years? get over it.
People take a hard major to be challenged and then they are upset when it is challenging!
I wonder what the incomes of the soft majors that got all A's will look like compared to a good chemical/electrical/mechanical engineer.
hey...I resemble that remark!!!!
I am almost done with my MBA (applied bio undergrad) and I plan on being the pointy-haired boss shortly!
Actually, the worst part of being a software engineering student is that the demand for "software engineer" graduates is rapidly dropping in Western countries. Most of these jobs are being pushed overseas. The flipside of this is that CS and Business graduates are growing in demand as "thinkers" and "managers" rather than "implementers" are needed to keep offshored projects under control.
As for other types of engineering (hard engineering disciplines), the demand is relatively constant, so this isn't as big a deal as it is for software "engineering" graduates.
I mean the "Sex Kills! Go To Tech and Live Forever!" bumper stickers weren't created just because they were catchy.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
I always thought being an Engineering sucked because there were no hot girls in class.
Take consolation in the fact that when you step out into the job market you can command a much higher salary than most other majors, especially for electrical engineering and CS majors. An engineering BS is, more often than not, all you need to make a very decent living. Can't say the same for a BS in biochem, math, or psych.
"Brilliant engineering students may earn surprisingly low grades while slackers in other departments score straight As for writing book reports and throwing together papers about their favorite zombie films," writes Rower. "Many of the brightest students may struggle while mediocre scholars can earn top scores."
Who cares? You're not competing against film majors for fellowships, scholarships, graduate programs and jobs. You're competing against other engineering majors. And honestly, the vast majority of engineering majors seem to have greatly exaggerated notions of their own brilliance; engineering profs do give out As, if you're not making them maybe you're not quite as smart as you think you are.
I think the only majors with a higher general opinion of themselves are philosophy majors.
It's been a few years since college, but what I loathed was having to almost learn Mandarin, or Hindi to understand my math teachers.
-ted
The trick to staying happy is to mingle with the women on the other side of campus
chillax137
I've been studying Architectural Design for the past 3 years, and all I can say is engineering is alot more fun. Every engineering class I had to take involved not only designing and building a test object, but doing all the math by hand to prove that it would work (not only that but we also had to test these objects to failure). These people who complain about how much it sucks shouldn't be involved in this field to begin with. However, I do agree that the teacher does have a significant influence on the class. My engineering teacher spent 15 years in the Air Force as a flight test engineer and the guy is a complete hardass in class: he'll let you make a fool of yourself, tell you to sit down and shut-up, then make it a point to tell you why your math failed. That man was honestly the best teacher I've ever had.
#6: It doesn't get you laid.
You're in college to learn. Get over it.
In my experience, engineering school isn't geared specifically for content. It's designed to teach you some basics (electronics, math, logic, assembly language in my case), and everything done above and beyond that was designed to teach you how to solve problems. I may not know how to build an amplifier anymore, but I do know how to build a circuit, simulate it, how to adjust properties, and develop an answer.
I think the same thing goes with Calculus - Everything you did in math was done to give you the 'aha' moment that occurs when you learn derrivatives. You suffered endlessly computing deltas manually, but then you learned what a derivative is, and all of a sudden your world changed. There are other ways to solve problems. And when you realized that, then your approach to math suddenly changed - it's not about slogging through a procedure to get the answer, but to look at problems and see new ways of solving them.
The importance of college isn't what you learn there. It's whether you learn HOW to learn.
I got C's and B's in computer science and straight A's in economics. I make WAY more in the computer industry then as some desk jockey and I get to call the shots. CS majors are hard to come by and have a level of freedom for working there butt off.
5. Beer
4. Beer
3. Beer
2. Beer
1. Beer
We designed and built Potato Guns, for credit, in an upper level engineering class. In another we designed and built autonomous Lego robots. Engineering classes==awesome. I just wish I could afford to go back and take more now.
I have a lot of friends who were in Engineering when I was an undergrad. The biggest complaint that they seemed to have was that they felt like they were just being fed equations and not taught to think for themselves. The second they came across a problem that was a slight deviation from the questions mentioned in class or from the textbook, they had some trouble, because the underlying theory was lacking. I suppose it's no surprise that the students who do the best in math or programming competitions like Putnam or ACM are typically under the math faculty. Don't get me wrong, I know lots of brilliant engineering graduates, but they often feel a little cheated.
It's for this reason why I chose Computer Science, which is a math-based program at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Although I can't recite as many equations from memory as my engineering colleagues, I know how derive them, and am able to handle curveballs that come by way because I developed logical thinking. As a plus, I was able to get a minor in physics with a specialization in quantum mechanics with the extra freedom in courses I had.
I'd really like to see real math and theory return to engineering. Some formula-feeding might need to be dropped, but a lot of that stuff isn't useful in the workplace anyway.
I'd agree with all the points, but in the end, most of them should be expected. After leaving engineering for art (or maybe while leaving.. since a had a couple year transition), I realized one of the things I hated so much about it was how "strict" engineering is. In the sense that, if you're given a problem to solve, there's only one correct answer, and only one (or maybe 2) correct ways to arrive at that answer. If you take an art class (or a writing class, as they use the example of writing papers), when you're given a problem to solve, there's a nearly infinite number of correct answers. You can do some of your own thinking. Even an answer that one person feels is completely wrong could actually be correct and get a good grade.. it's much more subjective. The freedom to break the rules and think outside the box is one of the reasons I left engineering. That, and I didn't want some little mistake in a calculation to cause a catastrophic structural failure of some sorts that led to the death of innocent civilians...
Personally, I really think it is only the first two years of engineering that suck (given a four year institution) I go to Berkeley, and the first two years are hell, physics/math/chemistry/statics/dynamics/etc. but no engineering, but once you move into upper division and start taking real engineering classes, where you are designing and building it becomes worth all the trouble. I would love to be able to slack off and pull straight A's like some of my humanities counterparts, but I can design and build (and have done so) bridges, levees, dams, etc. My humanities counterparts can read a really long and hard book.
If you really want to know what is unfair, it's what is after college, when those guys that slacked off are making 7 figure paychecks doing nothing, and you work your ass off and maybe make 6 figures. Engineering isn't something you do for money etc, it's something you do because you love your work.
...the dearth of quality counseling ...
You've got that right. I'm 99% sure my EE advisor was the antichrist. I don't know how anyone can be that bad with people and get a job as a student advisor.
In all seriousness I'm rather dismayed that I dropped my EE major as a freshmen. I ended up switching it for a CS major, then once I found that to be about as challenging as a race with a snail I picked up a second major, mathematics. I still wish I would have stuck with an EE degree. We touch on the EE side of things on occasion in my CS program but never in any great depth and always very easy. Just a forewarning to all those who think EE is too hard and are thinking about switching to CS, you might want to think about it a bit before you switch.
If you think being an engineering student sucks, wait until you graduate and have to actually get an engineering job!
The Army reading list
while I generally hate taking the stance "if you don't like it, then geeeeeet ouuuuut"
but when it comes to people complaining I make an exception
Lots of pain shared with other students, but coming out the other end with the deep-seated knowledge that if you can make it through that, you can handle just about anything. (In that field, anyways.)
I actually took Engineering Physics, which even the other engineering students thought was hard. So you take 20 people that get 80s and 90s in other courses, and then you put them together for the EP-specific stuff and the college thinks that a class average should be around 70 or so and curves appropriately. We were not impressed.
Write a short story. Write a slightly longer story. Write the story in rhyming verse. Write a non-fictional story. Write this story. Write that story. Writing assignments look boring to me. However, I saw challenges and differences in the engineering stuff I did. Maybe this guy is just ignorant of the necessary knowledge to see those differences.
Why chose a major you have to work for where you can find correct answers, when you can have one where you just have to BS enough that the teacher can't tell the difference between BS and insight? Clearly, you should just chose you major based on your possible GPA. I know they hire CEOs based on what their GPA was 30+ years ago.
Really? I had some wicked smart professors who could help with this. And I heard plenty from other students who thought this kind of thing about their non-engineering courses. I smell an anecdote.
I had encouraging professors. I had interesting professors. I also had boring professors. Why is that every Engineering professor is a stodgy old bore, while the Lit students get class after class of Dead Poet's Society teachers? Oh, that's right, they don't. Besides, maybe if you were interested in the material instead of in it for the $$$, you wouldn't have this problem. You've never seen a teacher engage some students who are interested in the subject, while called terrible by the students who didn't care about the subject? I've seen that since at least middle school.
My Literature textbooks weren't very good at all. I've seen history books that were a joke. There were almost no good textbooks. Blame the publishers, blame the teachers requiring their own text book, blame the difficulty of writing a good one. Again, Engineering shouldn't be singled out
I call blog spam on this. You notice it's just a blog entry, not a real story at Wired.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Quit yer bitchin, babies. Making money after college does NOT suc.
I just got my B.S. In Software Engineering. Yes, at times it was rough, but I would do it all over again. I still plan to give Grad school a go as well.
My assignments were never the same really. Yes they involved programming, but never the same problem. I enjoyed the challenge of the programs and making them work and work well.
The hard part for me was the sleep deprivation at first. But a few weeks in I got to the point where 4 hours was enough sleep. Many times I would go for several days on 1-4 hours. I never got more than 6 even on the weekend. This was too much for many people and caused them to quit. The rest of us banded together and helped each other through. It would be 4:30 am and we'd still be finishing that lab due at 8am. This would be perhaps the 3rd night in a row we had been in there this late. Suddenly one of us would get it and we would be saved! It was a great feeling. We ALWAYS got the work done. Somehow in the 11th hour we pulled it off.
Many of my non engineer friends felt sorry for us. I never missed class or an assignment, I graduated with a decent 3.2 GPA. I slept very little. I still managed to have girlfriend and be a club president at the same time.
Many of my non engineer friends got terrible grades, had no time management skills. Had no idea how to solve a problem where the answer wasn't glaring at them in a book. They also graduated and had a really hard time getting a job. I had 3 offers during finals week.
The friendships made it great. We spent so many hours in those labs that we all quickly became great friends. We'd make sheetz runs at 3am, play Unreal or some other shooter at 2am when our brains were fried. But we were in it together.
I miss those nights...
Many of the brightest students may struggle while mediocre scholars can earn top scores
Maybe you're just not as bright as your mom and dad told you you were.
Welcome to the real world... ain't it a kick in the pants?
Bad professors were a big problem for me. I attended MIT and a state school. Most courses, especially on the bottom rungs, were taught much better at the state school. MIT, like many engineering schools, focuses on its professors' research more than their teaching skills. I failed MIT's differential equations course three times, yet earned an A at the state school. Did diff eq change sometime in the three intervening years, or the 35 miles from one school to the next?
Bad textbooks often follow from bad professors. Beware especially the profs who insist upon using their self-written textbook. That goes double for the ones which can't get the book published, and in turn force you to buy a crappy GBC-bound xerox from the campus duplication center.
I never had a good counselor. Good counselors can give you career advice. My counselors were already-overworked professors clamoring for tenure; not only did they lack the insight a good counselor could provide, but they also lacked much time.
I would not have the non-inflated grades any other way. I also don't trust grades to be a very good diagnostic figure for a student's effort, aptitude, or potential.
And as for homework... engineering is ingenuity (same root word), rooted in math and reality (which we usually call "physics"). The math bears repetition. It's not that I liked doing math exercises all the time, but now that I am on the other side, I fully appreciate its necessity. There were math concepts which I did not totally grasp until I had hammered on them for years.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
Exactly why I majored in psychology instead of something more technical. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll, baby! I still ended up writing code alongside a guy with a degree in mechanical engineering. Go figure.
Yes, but with an engineering degree, at least you're educated and capable of doing actual work and having a career. Just imagine what it's like with a degree the word "studies" in the title (e.g. "women's studies", "African-American studies", etc.) Those are the biggest bullshit "degrees" ever. Completely worthless unless you plan to work at Starbucks the rest of your life.
The shit's hard. That's why it's called Engineering.
If it was easy and useless, it'd be called Art History. Or Sociology. Or Psychology. Or French Literature. Or...
Seriously, though, it's all nice and good that you learn something substantial and useful through much hard work, but those that end up at the top (here in the US) seemed to be lawyers and sales people, while jobs for our ilks get shipped off to Asia and East Europe. Maybe the kid's right after all...
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I don't have a solution but a suggestion: there needs to be a difficulty based "meritocracy" in terms of grading mechanisms and even scholarships that basically shows that if an engineering class is 200% more difficult than say Psych 101, then the grade for the engineering class needs to be weighted appropriately higher into the overall GPA, etc. For example, if the Psych 101 class is worth 12 points (for 3 credits x 4 pts for an "A+" grade), then Engineering XYZ at a difficulty 200% would be worth 24 points (3 credits x double difficulty * 4 pts for an A+ Grade) with an appropriate leveling algorithm that doesn't make a "C" grade in an engineering class an acceptable score.
Thoughts?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
I graduated with a pretty good job while the liberal arts guys were thinking, "Maybe I need to go ahead and get that teaching cert."
But then I went to law school, and now the guys with degrees in art history who couldn't even sit for the patent bar are making as much as I do. So take from that what you will.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Recent grad from a Big 10 chemical engineering program and I don't agree with most of those reasons.
I had many good textbooks that I still reference in my job.
Almost all of my professors loved to teach and would gladly take time out of their day to help you understand the concepts (more true for the actual engineering classes than the core 100-level science / physics classes).
I didn't have any problems with my counselors, but professors / 0-credit lectures were used to convey information about the job market or different things that could be done with a ChE degree.
So what if someone can get an A in underwater basket weaving. The person hiring an engineer wants an engineer, not a liberal arts major.
The one point that I feel has merit is that many of the assignments do feel the same. This was done to instill basic engineering principles into our heads. Once we got the basics we were then able to take on many more interesting projects and assignments.
I hate having to take Statistics and Calculus as an Information Science & Technology major - doing problems very similar to the one in the photo in the article when I'm in the industry to be a developer using readily available tools. It hurts my GPA and wastes my time having to spend 2-4 hours doing homework every other day for a class that is teaching me a skill I will never use (Yes, I'm sure).
New Topic:
Top 5 reasons it sucks to hire the new crop of engineering students:
5.) They expect the Statement of work you're asking for completion to be colorful, fun, and well written.
4.) They can relate how their professor who cave them a B- is soooo much better at solving problems than you.
3.) They are convinced working as a TA is real work.
2.) Untraining the bad habits. I block instant messaging for a reason.
1.) They want me to vote for Obama and incessantly drone on about how horrible life is in the US.
Engineers do the important stuff like "make mathe their mistress and denominate her in bed."
This is nothing new. I got a ME degree from UCONN in the early 80's. My first class had a professor who barely spoke English. His first quote was "I teach you Engineering, You teach me Engrish". His second line (in broken English) was the classic "Look to your left, look to your right. Neither will be with you when you graduate" We assumed he meant ONE of them won't be there, but he turned out to be correct. 2/3 of the entry class flunked out or transferred to PolySci or some other squishy humanity degree. I graduated with a 2.7 cumulative - with a 3.5 cumulative in my non-engineering classes. My roommate was a ChemE who went to PolySci - he graduated with a 3.5... studied about half as much as I did. I ended up going to graduate school because the smarmy recruiters didn't think a B- average was good enough to be a real engineer... Got an MBA in IT and Finance... never looked back. It's too bad because I would have made a pretty good engineer - actually am a "Software Engineer" now... Bottom line is that the grade inflation that took hold of all the other disciplines never translated to the engineering schools... So even though my degree was probably 4 times harder to get, it didn't count for squat due to the costs of inflation. And now America is SCREAMING for more engineers...
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
People take a hard major to be challenged and then get pissed off when they see how most of the other colleges at the school are a joke allowing nearly everyone to succeed (kind of like a drivers licence, nearly anyone can get one).
Yes, some textbooks sucked. Yes, some profs were horrible. Yes, the labs smelled bad.
But the absolute worst part of my engineering undergrad education where the complainers. These were the students who constantly said things like "engineering sucks," "I hate being here," "I can't wait to get out of engineering," etc.
Well guess what, buddy, the door's over there. I don't have the foggiest idea why these students stuck around, but their constant complaining and apparent apathy really cheesed me off.
That's freaken arrogant and spoken from somebody who has no clue about reality. Sorry, but I am an ME (fourth generation) and studied at one of the better universities. Though I also have an artistic background (mother is an artist, father is an engineer).
You really think Math, Science and Engineering students can make better films? BS! Try it, please I dare you to. I paint and let me tell you that to get inspiration for a painting is hard. And please don't get me started on "how I could do that in five minutes." If you think like that then you actually don't understand art.
I graduated 15 years ago, and if there is one thing I have learned is that I wish engineering/math/science students were not so dammed arrogant!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
"A much better solution would be to stop artificially inflating the grades of the weaker subjects."
No, that's not any kind of solution at all.
No one who has an opinion worth a damn will ever look at a Liberal Arts major with a 3.8 and think it's equivalent to a 3.8 in chemical engineering.
They're not the same, it's not high school, and you're not competing against the entire student body anymore.
I admit that's a generalization, but in my experience, engineering students tend to be more whiny than other students. There may be easier majors than Engineering, but there are harder ones, too. I studied both Physics and E.E., and IMO, Physics was harder. I don't mean to offend any engineers. If it makes you feel better, I also think engineering students are much saner and have a better appreciation for good beer.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
How many times do I have to jump through hoops before I'm allowed to actually get back to learning about what I love? Currently, I have a project due tomorrow (well, midnight by email) that I was allowed to use any language for (the second program due tomorrow must be done in LISP), so I decided to use it as an excuse to pick up Perl, which I've wanted to do for a long time now. However, under the time constraints of a paper, two programs and an exam this week, and a make up day taken from Easter vacation, I ended up learning quite a bit of Perl, but not enough to finish the project. So, I sighed and wrote the thing in Java.
Normally I'd take a low grade in order to keep working with Perl, but doing this so many times means my QPA can't afford to absorb another failed project because I wanted to go out of the way to learn something (I've failed for going off on tangents for concurrency, alpha blending, creating dynamic thread priorities, and quite a bit of kernel hacking, etc...). How many times am I going to have to do the same thing over, and over and over before I'm allowed to go off and learn something? How many times am I going to have to "study the test" instead of getting in another chapter from "Code Complete" or "The Mythical Man Month"? Why should I spend nights trying to figure out what curve balls the prof is going to throw at me on the exam, instead of discussing top down versus bottom up design (oh, failed a project doing frameworks bottom up...), or non deterministic garbage collection? Am I the only one who thinks the greater majority of undergrad work is busy work?
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
"Hey baby, what frequency do YOU oscillate at?"
I mean, seriously, complain all you want about how hard the classes are, Engineers are babe magnets.
Freshman & sophomore years: pain in the butt!
Junior & senior years: kicks ass!
grade inflation is a big problem between school as there is no longer an accurate scale.
At my university (Purdue) a C in an engineering class means that you have a solid understanding of the material and should be allowed to move on. A C is pathetic in many other engineering programs I hear about. In a core curriculum class, about 20% fail the first time through. In order for the degree to mean something, it has to be tough. It took me 3 tries to get through differential equations (now that's because I'm bad at them and a couple outside factors). I don't blame the university for any of it. I think a lot of it happens when, at least from my anecdotal experience including myself, get tired of the idea of being an engineer by late sophmore/early junior year. I'm going to be a senior, but I've started to find myself much more fascinated with economics as I learn more about it which makes the motivation required to do the gobs of work that much harder.
As far as the repitition, it's far less repetetive than any engineering job which is mostly figuring out the social aspect of dealing with the same problem 10 times with 10 different personalities.
From what I've seen lately, the hype over web technologies and our service-based economy has degraded the salaries of engineers relative to other professions, and the inflation of our currency.
This is why companies seem to like mediocre scholars, because they can buy them cheaper, throw a bunch of them at a problem and solve it more cheaply than having superstars. They like disposable employees because they never get slowed down when someone quits, leaves, goes into rehab or dies.
Colleges know this, and so they're relaxing standards and caring less about who makes it through, because they're more interested in churning out the inventors of the next FaceBook(tm).
technical writing / development
The brilliant ones who get lousy grades don't make much money. The ones who do what they're supposed to but aren't very creative get good grades & make more money. This particular economy rewards doing what you're supposed to do & not being creative so naturally education reflects that.
No girls... Please do not mod this funny, because it's not :(
I can officially say that the author needs to STFU. We have it just as bad (in some cases much worse). I teach engineers physics, and most of them just sound whiny when it comes to grades and assignments. Suck it up and do your work.
Just because another major's grades are inflated doesn't mean your education standards should drop. Your grades are more important than theirs. And please note that the brilliant engineering students are still maintaining an A average even if you can barely hold down a B.
Barely-passed engineers build bridges that collapse and cages that can't hold their tigers. If anything it should be harder to pass, not easier.
Am I the only one that thinks a degree in engineering should actually mean something? I don't care if you got straight As as an art history major; congratulations on your new job in sales or as a secretary. The engineer with straight Bs will be doing the real work.
Good grad schools and good employers know that a 2.8 at a tough school = a 3.5 at an easy school and adjust accordingly.
Your EIT exam score and grad-school admission test scores will be directly comparable to grads from engineering schools that have followed siren song of grade inflation and easy assignments.
The knowledge you gain, the experiences you "endure," and the projects you are involved it will make you stand out from the 4.0 at E-Z-Tech.
As for people with non-Engineering majors, well, everyone knows
Lim(engineering degree) as GPA->0 = business degree
Lim(business degree) as GPA->0 = liberal arts degree
Lim(liberal arts degree) as GPA-> 0 = Sports degree
Lim(sports degree) as GPA->0 = CowboyNeal
OK j/k about the last one, I think the original was "career at McDonalds" or something.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The issue that I take with science education is mostly that besides spending years learning things that might be likely forgotten very shortly, and scarcely used in the "real world", people come out from universities without the knowledge of their history, literature, etc. Hell, many can hardly spell (or speak English).
Consider a CS student from the 80's who had spent years learning COBOL, Simula, Fortran and Pascal, only to find themselves unemployable 10 years down the road unless they learn new languages. We, now, have hundreds of thousands of highly educated yet hardly employable people who never studied sociology, art or religion, have a very narrow world view, and as opposed to the unemployable humanities graduates, have the burden of having to catch up with the younger generation whom they can hardly teach anything.
I recall being utterly frustrated when after a day of classes, I would realize that I did not have to say one word during the whole day!
I have a well-paying job, while my friend who majored in philosophy is shelving books at a library at age 40. If anyone finds an employer impressed by "can get beer and crepe paper stains out of pajamas" on a resume, let me know. the sacrifice you make while an engineering student while all those party around you pays serious dividends later on in life.
Jealously hoarding mod points since 2007.
It does NOT suck to be an engineering student. If - and here's the big part - if you like engineering. If you're in this because you parents told you to do it, or because you think there's big money in it - there's the door and don't let it hit you in the ass.
Complaining about how engineering is hard work is like someone studying to be a proctologist and coming home from the first day at work and complaining about all the assholes. How could you possibly be surprised by this? Anything that requires you to learn differential equations is going to be a little taxing.
As for myself, I loved being an engineering student. Having a building full of PhDs that would explain anything, absolutely anything to me ROCKED. I miss college.
In fact, you only needed about 8 credit hours of extra engineering classes to graduate out of the electives. I graduated with over 35. Took extra classes in antenna design, digital number theory, non-linear controls...you name it. I loved it all and dearly miss college.
On the flip side, you know what actually does suck? A mortgage. That's what.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
5. Awful textbooks
...LA student trying to get into Engineering grad program, in which case their grades won't mean a thing since they don't have the prequisite classes anyway. ...Eng student trying to get into a LA grad program, in which case your cover letter and other experience/recommendations are going to carry more weight than you engineering grades (the LA program won't care about how you scored in Fourier Analysis)
...see points 3 & 4 above. Again, it sounds like either a crappy school, or a student who shouldn't be an engineer and should look for other degree programs.
Some are good in the popular subjects, many are terrible in the niche subjects. Engineering is a lower-population specialty, with less competition and incentive for quality textbooks to rise to prominence. Some fields have only a handful (2 or 3) authoritative texts *at all* anywhere. This syndrome is just as noticeable in obscure niche Liberal Arts fields as well, you just aren't a LA major and so you don't notice it.
4. Professors are rarely encouraging
Having been in plenty of classes in both Liberal Arts, Engineering, and Science, sucky professor exist *everywhere*. If you don't like your professor, register for a different class section. Good ones not available at your school? Well, you didn't research your program/school very well, did you...
3. Dearth of quality counseling
Same as above point...
2. Inflated grades
This only matters for 2 scenarios...
1. Boring Assignments
----- And all that the Lorax left here in this mess was a small pile of rocks, with one word...UNLESS.
We had an old saying..
The limit of an engineer as his GPA approaches zero is a Computer Scientist.
This isn't to knock com-sci people - they were generally really smart.. But it was impossible to breeze through an engineering degree, whereas, you could usually pick concentrations and hire tutors that would let you retain almost nothing about the science of computers, yet acquire the degree.
In the late 90's I experienced massive grade inflation in the engineering classes that I'd typically only ever seen in my regular bachelor-of-science classes (such as general chemistry/physics/calc). Most bachelor-of-arts classes had no need for massive grade inflation because they just gave you really easy tests (accounting, econ, history, philosophy, etc). I'm defining grade inflation here as a 30% correct exam equating to a 4.0 due to the curve.
Whatever happened to the weed-out courses? The college is really doing you a favor by failing you your freshman year. Find a major that is really worth your intense concentration - both because of your skillset and because of your personal excitement about the program. You really only need one of the two.
-Michael
Some of the profs have no clue how to teach. They don't educate, they filter. Students who already have some background and work hard can pass. Students who are missing even a fairly tiny skill fail no matter how hard they work.
The University of Waterloo used to flunk huge numbers of engineering students. Then someone asked: "If we insist that all our first year students have a high school average over 90%, why are so many of them failing?" Good question. The engineering school appointed a first year czar. He had the power to decide who would teach first year classes. Now we had teachers who could actually teach teaching first year. Guess what? Many more students passed.
I remember the days of: "Look to the left, look to the right. One (or in some versions, two) of you won't be here past Christmas."
I went back to school at 32 to get my 4 year degree in Business Administration. I had to take two classes with one guy whom I had to do group projects for the class(random assignment). This guy pissed me off so bad because in both cases we cut and pasted text to fill in his contribution for the group project( one of them was literally 14 pages from a companies 10-K report) . I was so mad, because I was doing real work and he did not doing anything.
The worst part was I could not do anything. If I ratted him out, then all of us would end with a lower grade, if the professor noticed then he would lower all our grades!
When I confronted him, he said "whatever dude, it is none of your business anyways!"
I am just finishing up my junior year of a university Computer Science Major. I will be the first to admit that CS is easier than Engineering. Bad textbooks and professors are for the most part, your own damn fault or a fact of life, take your pick. I can relate to this guy on the grade inflation issue. I too have felt the urge to punch out some chick who parties all the time, and gets straight A's in her Mass Comm. Major, while I am killing myself to keep all my grades from sinking down to a C level.
1) Many engineering programs take 5 years. Business majors can almost always graduate in 4 years even with Fridays off. Of course, I'm assuming you can get into the classes you need. If an engineer can't, they could end up with a 6 year bachelors degree. My business major firends never had that trouble because their classes have four or five different days and times per year while my chemical engineering classes were only offered every other year.
2) You can't save money or time by starting an engineering degree at a community college. Sure, you could knock out a few core classes as CC, but you can't take a Foo Engineering 101 at CC. Some CCs don't even offer the math courses you need for engineering.
While slackers may be able to skate by in certain courses, they will not get A's forever and despite what our country's leadership might suggest, slackers generally are not that successful in their careers. Bright students, on the other hand, generally end up extremely well after the dust settles. So hang in there, my bright bretheren!
stuff |
The trouble with studying engineering today is that it used to pay better. In 1970, the IEEE reported that electrical engineers and lawyers were making about the same salaries.
I had a quite good undergraduate engineering education. What sucked was going through Stanford CS for a Master's in the mid-1980s. I went through just as it was becoming clear that expert systems weren't going to lead to strong AI, but many on the faculty didn't want to admit it. Yet the expert systems people were still in charge. This was just as the "AI Winter" was starting, and the first-round AI startups were going bust. The whole experience was disappointing. I was fed way too much bullshit, and I knew it at the time. I have the Stanford diploma, but as an educational experience, it sucked.
Stanford finally had to transfer computer science from Arts and Sciences to Engineering and put in adult supervision. It's much improved now.
... that's what I was told when I was investigating a particular degree course in Structural Engineering & Architecture. The university created that course in response to feedback from civil engineering firms, who wished their Structural Engineers had some more "soft" skills. I'm nearing the end of my 1st year on this course, and along with modules on the History and Theory of Architecture, there's a class on creative design, fast prototyping & other presentation and design skills.
Basically, I'm told, employers want their Engineers to be able to Communicate with people who are not, y'know, Engineers. I'm a mature student who decided to nip his mid-life crisis in the bud, so we'll see if I'm employable after this...
(this is not a
I worked my ass off at UC Davis for a computer engineering degree. Students who were in majors would complain about _a_ weeder class that was hard. Well, for CE the entire major was a bunch of extremely difficult "weeder" classes. I suffered from what the article describes in regards to low grades for high amount of effort. I graduated in 2003 with a 3.2 cum GPA. The reason this sucks is because now I am applying for an MBA where your undergraduate GPA matters. Even though I scored a 710 on my GMAT (93 percentile), my relatively low GPA has resulted in refusal letters from schools where my GMAT score was above the average of the incoming class.
tagging schoolSucksGetOverIt.
When engineers screw up, people die. When English majors screw up, we get badly written dross. Engineers should be graded harshly.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Engineering textbooks aren't always dry and poorly written. It's just like every other subject; there are good ones and bad ones. And if you're interested in the subject, chances are you will find the textbook interesting. The same goes for professors. I have some excellent professors right now who are some of the best teachers I've meet in my life. And, just like the textbooks, there definitely are bad profs who have no idea how to teach whatsoever.
At my university, there are excellent counseling services including 1-on-1 sessions for checking over resumes and cover letters. I have no idea where the authour pulled this one from.
Assignments all feeling the same? Well, yes and no. I suppose it is the same in that it's always maths and thinking logically how to apply equations. But again, if you're interested, then you would want to know as much about the subject as possible, and the difference between finding stresses and deflection in a beam is enough to keep you puttering along for a while.
I'd say the inflated grades is probably the most accurate. Living in residence, I am seeing many instances of slackers pulling high GPAs for non-science and engineering subjects. (Here, read a Shakespeare! Read another Shakespeare! Do an open book exam on Shakespeare! Here's your 4.0!)A running joke my friends and I have is that the truly stupid people in our university are the engineers, because we can go into Commerce and get twice the grades with half the effort, then start a business and get paid twice as much. Yes, we're exaggerating, but you know what? When all's said and done, we'll all damn proud to be engineers.
I did my BS and graduate school in Electrical Engineering. My advice. . .
STFU, Study, and if you dont like it switch majors.
And one more thing. A Ti Silver Edition is not a real calculator. It is a toy given to kids who can't do math to keep them busy during math class. I know the 'plus' makes it seem like a real calculator, but it is not. It is most useful for passing notes. Get and HP.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
V=IR
V=IR
V=IR
I've considered getting this tattoed on my arm, because I have never used a single equation as much as that one. It's frequently the only thing you need to say when you're trying to explain a problem to somebody... "So you just do a current loop and then V=IR."
Klingon programs don't timeshare, they battle for supremacy.
In how many other majors does a grade of 39 on a test = a B?
I (EE PhD at a top 5 undergrad and EE university) audited an advanced undergraduate photography class. The class was very good, but only 2 of the 8 students actually progressed at all during the quarter. The rest were complete and utter slackers, presenting (literally) the same photos from the first day as their final projects. The average grade in the class was an A, so I'm sure they weren't failed for this pathetic job.
During the quarter I took more photographs for my hobby than these people took for the course in which they were enrolled. So while the two students who did work hard did indeed progress, and did indeed put a lot of time into it, the majority of the photograph arts students at this top university are pathetic compared to a run-of-the mill engineering student. (I've TAed a lot of undergrad EE classes so I know how much they accomplish.)
I'm sure there are liberal arts students who really do work hard, but the majority of them do so much less than the average engineering student. Maybe they're just smarter, and that's why they're not choosing engineering?
(As a corollary, I ran into a sociology major who went on-and-on about how he was going to be working for Google next year. In human resources. That's not exactly the exciting part of google as far as I know...)
Hmmm, maybe this guy simply isn't cut out to be an engineer.
I remember my engineering program in college. It was loaded with a bunch of student that often complained about the instructors, the program, and the lack of leniency. In every case I can recall, the whiners were the lousy students.
The short of it is that not everyone who gets into a great engineering program is really cut out to be an engineer. [Also note that many who once failed to get into a great engineering program are great engineers now]
The fact is that engineering requires a lot of hard work. Complaining about how other majors have it "so easy" is just ignoring the fact that you're a lousy student that gets a deservedly poor grade. If you aren't getting excellent grades in your courses, my wager is that you either (1) don't have what it takes, or (2) aren't studying enough, or (3) have too many other obligations to study enough.
Yes, some instructors are lousy; some are fabulous. Most institutions let you pick your courses. Choose wisely. If there aren't enough good options, you picked the wrong institution - find a new one. And unless you're currently a top notch student, stop whining about your own failings.
By the way, I don't hire whiners.
Good luck.
can i get an amen from those reading this comment who think that groundbreaking films like terminator, aliens, terminator ii, titantic, abyss, etc., would be totally different and totally worse if not made by a man with a solid physics/ engineering background?
is terminator ii possible without someone with an awareness of shape memory alloys?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I paint and let me tell you that to get inspiration for a painting is hard. And please don't get me started on "how I could do that in five minutes." If you think like that then you actually don't understand art.
If you're talking about the "looks like 5 minute art" being the modern variety, then I must call shenanigans on you. Modern art is bollocks.
Disclaimer: I'm not an artist. What I know about art you could fit in a thimble. But, I'm an engineer and scientist, and I have tested this. Albeit accidentally.
Over a dozen years ago I went to the Met in NYC with a girlfriend. At the time I had long hair, was only slightly balding, and wore military clothing with lots of pins all over it. I looked eccentric. I looked...like what you'd think of when you think "artist".
So we're at the Met. And to make my SO laugh, I start doing my best "LA Story" impression on the modern art display. I was a little louder than I should have been (I blame the extra-fun Manhattan bars for this). Other people could hear me - I didn't know this. I began spouting nonsense.
"It says a lot by saying a little. It's artistic without being artsy."
"It's amazing how much of a conversation you can have with just green, isn't it?"
"You can see the effort but not the grace. Yellow can be so unforgiving."
And so on.
What I didn't realize was that other art people were looking over my shoulder and nodding at every single thing I was saying. I had the weird hair and the odd jacket. And nothing I was saying was making sense. Since it was all zooming over their heads, they erred on the side of caution and assumed I was a genius. And I had improved their day with my "insight", which was nothing more than half-drunken babbling. When I turned around and saw a half a dozen people following me around, I knew I had learned something important:
Art, modern art anyways - is a load of rubbish.
It's the emperor's new clothes.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Yeah. It sucks. And CS doesn't count as engineering. Don't kid yourselves.
Mike Moore ph33nd@gmail.com
I graduated from highschool and earned my GPA without cheating, and was admitted immediately to Engineering College along with 24 of my highschool dudes, of which only 3 remained in Engineering after only 2 semesters, mostly because they weren't up for the challenge (and because most of them cheated their way out of highschool).
:p)
Engineering was tough; 4 homeworks due 3 days along with quizzes & midterms, and to spice things up, an optional project here 'n there. Things were stressing like hell, but it was all fun. Each prof. treated us as if we had no subject bus his, dumping LOADS of work on us. Pleading doesn't help.
The books were great. Not good, but great. You want pictures, diagrams & colored fonts? Go to Arts school, as you're not fit for Engineering. Those books were so dense with information that almost every line has a great piece of info.
I see a lot of people trying so hard in Engineering, and their GPA only goes lower & lower by the semester. Wasting their time on a major that won't get them employed (because of their low GPA), is something beyond my understanding!
The grades may not have been fare always, but most were what I deserved. Some professors were generous enough to provide us with extra work to help us earn more grades (but didn't allow those of us who earned over 100% to give away to the less fortunate
I didn't like the subjects from other departments much, but they were useful to some extent.
Being at college most of the day (0800-2300) is stressing, but fun when you do something challenging & like. Solving problems and more importantly coming up with project ideas and working on making them a reality, is the most exciting thing ever; And the satisfaction of seeing your project working and displaying it in an exhibition brings great relief & satisfaction.
By the way, I studied in Kuwait University - College of Petroleum & Engineering, yet all the professors were from the top students who got scholarships to study in the US & UK in prestigious universities.
Mod points are a dangerous tool. Abuse them wisely.
My first joke when I walked into a new class was, "You're in luck. I speak English." Lots of people laughed but not because what I said was funny.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
yes, obtaining an engineering degree is hard (i have a chem. eng. degree). it's supposed to be, because getting everything you do in your career right the first time is hard. otherwise, people may die. yes, there's only one correct answer. because the incorrect one might kill people (putting aside obvious jobs for engineers that build bombs or ammunition).
unless you're a hunter-gatherer who wears animal skins and lives in a cave, almost every single thing you do in your life, from flushing the toilet after your morning piss to going to bed on a comfortable mattress with cotton sheets, depends on engineers. most of us probably expect everything we use in life to work. your car starts. the lights turn on. the toilet flushes. the door opens. you get the picture. it must work, it has to work, otherwise people may die.
a liberal arts major who paints a terrible picture isn't going to kill anyone.
When you recognize love in another and realize how precious it is, everything else seems so insignificant.
And while it doesn't apply ONLY to Engineering degrees, it's definitely one of the biggest problems:
A degree (or your GPA) doesn't REALLY mean much at all once you've gotten past HR.
What DOES matter is the REAL EXPERIENCE that you've gained both from in-class projects with outside companies and internships/summer employment. Hopefully, a side benefit of these experiences has been an increase in your network of contacts.
No engineering student worth his weight in salt would use a pen or a TI calculator.
you can, like, freeze them and blow them up and they remerge! ;-)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
As someone who actually studied engineering, then switched to "arts & sciences", (and now has a Master's in a creative field and works in engineering once again) I can say one thing both sides will agree on: Judgments should be based on evidence and sound reasoning, not on personal anecdotes, hearsay, and ignorance. Most of the comments in this thread, and the FA itself, are not based on evidence. (Cue welcome to Slashdot comment.)
The grade inflation thing rings true. But let's not jump and claim Philosophy, or English, or Music, or Biology or Chemistry, are easier than any engineering branch. Grade inflation is a problem between universities-- Harvard competing with Yale to make graduates look better-- far more than it is a problem within specific branches. A GPA from one school will eventually be compared to a GPA from another without regard to the relative merits and failures of each program, so pump up the grades and give your students the edge.
As far as Engineering vs. (say) Philosophy goes, I'll bet (and it's only a bet) that more philosophy students can get a passing grade in a Calculus course than Engineering students could get through Wittgenstein. The imprecision of philosophy and literary criticism is a selling point for some people and for others it is a hindrance. Is truth boolean?
I find it interesting that engineering and IT are very closely interwoven. Many people at my school chose these hardcore engineering degrees with the intention of joining one of the many IT leadership programs that seem to be rising in popularity amongst many respected companies (GE, UTC etc.) It's important to note that math and I do not have the best relationship. In fact you might call me mathematically handicapped. Oddly enough this really doesn't affect my ability to pickup programming languages, understand how a RDMS works, design a network infrastructure and, map out complex customer requirements. The most math I've had to use is high school statistics to analyze the impact my projects have on a processes cycle time. Some self motivated learning and an MIS degree is really all it takes to land a great job with excellent opportunities without having to be an unwilling engineer.
I am an engineering student. I already have my bachelors and am now working on my masters after working the the field for 4 years. My response to the question is yes and no. Engineers get the chance to work on some pretty cool stuff. As an engineering student I was always itching to get a chance to use what I learned. This is exciting and actually pretty fun. The assignments do tend to be rather similar from class to class, since one class tends to build on another and they are all math oriented. I don't think engineering students are really disappointed by that.
In my case, I didn't really mind that my grades weren't what they could be in another degree. Other professions typically don't pay as much and job security and availability is much lower. Engineers in a hiring position understand the situation as well. They aren't going to hire a 4.0 GPA liberal arts student or even a physics student for that matter. They are going to hire an engineer.
Where I find myself really disillusioned is in the completeness of skills taught at my university. The vast number of lazy and complaining engineering students and the desire of engineering departments to retain students has really decreased the quality of engineering education. I was not taught how to program beyond the most basic level, barely brushing past pointers, data structures and memory allocation. I was never taught how to implement large scale projects, programming or otherwise. Fortunately, I had a passion to learn programming(C, C++, C#, etc..) in detail. Even though I took a lot of circuits classes, I still have never soldered together anything except for the most basic amplifiers. None of the skills I learned in my undergrad were brought to or even encouraged to reach a usable level. So I was left knowing there were a lot of cool things I could do, some day.
What is even more discouraging is trying to hire a decent entry level engineer. What I'm discovering is that the vast majority of engineering students do not want to think, nor are the able to think rationally and clearly even if they must. I find this is true for graduate students as well as undergrad students.
Although I suppose my IP address would give it away somewhat. Currently I am in a Computer Science department in an Engineering College pursuing my PhD. And I would agree with most of these points.
5. Textbooks. Often textbooks assigned are written by professors in the department. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but most of the time the textbooks are useless and don't really provide clarity. If I need to understand in depth I use the book to look up the references so I can read the same things the writer read. Buying expensive books just to use them as references is kind of pointless.
4. Professors. I have slowly come to the conclusion that at the university level professors are not suppose to teach. Sure they give lectures and advise students, but really they are here to research and generate revenue to the department through the grants they receive. I decided to go to some of the lectures given by candidates for a recent position in the department, and was shocked to discover that not only did the candidates lack the ability to speak well, but their presentations often centered around the grants they had received. And I have been to several classes here in which the professor comes to class and reads the slides word for word. Every class. All semester. And the slides are online just in case you want to print them out and use them to kill yourself with paper cuts during the lectures.
3. Counseling. I don't want to comment on this one.
2. Grades. This is a big problem. I don't really care if other fields have inflated grades. But even the grades in our department are so important there is widespread cheating. When I first came here I didn't understand how people sitting in class asking questions about simple issues (like how to do binary math in a grad class) were getting better marks on exams. Later as I got to know people in my department, I realized that most students had access to old exams/homework. Since the professors didn't really want to teach, the exams and homework were often very similar to previous semesters, so it was a huge leg up. Last summer in a class requiring programming, a friend of mine was the TA and was telling me that a huge number of students either handed in the same programs or hardcoded the test cases into their programs so they would work. Theoretically none of those students should be able to graduate from our department, but instead they got a slap on the wrist.
1. Assignments. Well I don't know about this. By the time you get to grad school isn't everything math anyway.
After reading this article, I thank the heavens for my engineering student experience. I experienced none of the bad conditions stated in the article on anything but an occasional basis. Perhaps that's because I went to a well-endowed small private institution.
When I read the headline, I was expecting something about lack of interested (and interesting) women. I didn't experience that either, although my brief stint with a second major in poli sci helped with that quite a bit.
They also write shitty poetry.
http://www.coderoshi.com/
I went to a Colledge that was predominatly engineering. ( I was a Computer Science Major ) We had a saying
"The Engineering majors are the smartest, hardest working Students on campus.
And if you don't believe me, just ask one. They'll tell you the same thing"
(snicker)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
As both a Business and a Computer Science major I can partly agree on the grade inflation. But don't underestimate business majors. While business education may seem easier since it has much less math, it's still hard to acquire the business mindset they are training you to get. Math isn't everything...
They will, however, get better grades with less native ability
Why does that matter? They're getting better grades in film classes. Being mad that students in film classes have an easier time getting high marks than students in engineering classes makes about as much sense as being mad that students in 2nd grade have an easier time getting high marks than students in engineering classes.
This disparity is corrected for in the real world - try getting a job with a 4.0 film degree vs. a 3.0 engineering degree. You'll get any job the film degree candidate can get, with the possible exception of jobs where the film degree's GPA doesn't matter (actual film jobs, where they are evaluated primarily on their portfolio of work, an area where anyone who actually has any talent in film is going to kick your (or my) sorry engineering ass.)
More generally, if you really feel that someone else is getting a better deal than you, stop bitching about it and go do what they're doing! Enroll in the film program, get your easy A's, finish college with a 4.0 in your major, and enjoy your years of paying off your student loans while working as a car salesman/insurance agent/whatever else Liberal Arts majors do to actually feed themselves when you could have gotten that same job not going to school at all!
You have to understand what a Liberal Arts major is. For a very select few people, it's a stepping stone to being a professor, or research, or something else at the top of the field. For the vast majority however, a liberal arts degree is an opportunity to do some partying, find a mate, and prove that you're able to show up on time. So yeah, you can get a 4.0 liberal arts degree much easier than you can get an engineering degree, but you won't be able to be an engineer with one!
paintball
For the record my girlfriend is an advertising major. Her classes require her to do the insanely difficult tasks of glueing gummy bears onto paper and cutting up magazines to make ransom notes. Her classes grade on curves and she's usually allowed to redo assignments for higher grades. She does everything the night before it's due.
On the other hand I'm a CS major, my professors usually start the semester off with the statement "I don't believe in grading on a curve." That's often followed by "late work is not accepted." I usually have a non trivial project do every week. I have to start early or I wont have time to finish the projects. I have to try to balance my time between math, science and computer science classes. My girlfriend has told me an innumerable number of times that I work too much and my major is difficult, she's right. But I don't care because I love the work and I love my major.
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
Then you are obviously in the wrong field. From my understanding engineering is largely "apply formula x, y and z to this problem," or "determine which ad hoc method you acquired in a previous class to use here." The fields that make you sit down and think about things are theoretical fields - theoretical physics, mathematics, etc., where it does not take some rote memorization and skill in application but actual cleverness and ingenuity to sniff out a solution based on sound reasoning, not best guess. After all, most of the engineering courses I've taken (particularly electrical) is just a series of methods of how to "fake it" and doesn't really give a real answer, partly because there is no way to get a real right answer mathematically or physically . Personally, I'd like to be in the group of people that's looking for the right answer, not a good guess (uncertainty problems aside). I'll stick to my theoretical studies, the rest of you either stop complaining about how mechanic engineering is or pick a new field that requires some more intensive thinking. As far as GPA inflation goes, personally I think it's justified. Courses in fields like Physics absolutely have to be curved, because at the rate you learn material around 60% of the time you are not ready to use it until the end of the course (which makes sense, because it seems everyone performs better on their finals than on midterms here.) Courses like that are made to train you to think a certain way, not throw massive amounts of information at you and get you to memorize formulae and practice their applications.
so, being an engineering student is exactly what college SHOULD be like??? Lets fact it, the standards are much, much lower. I, for one, think the standards have drifted so low for some majors that just showing up will earn you a passing grade. That's inexcusable.
but it's infuriating that I'm competing for academic scholarships against people who are majoring in liberal arts and do next to nothing to earn an A. Engineering must be difficult, if an engineer screws up people die so there's no room for incompetence. I'm working through my Junior year now and looking around at pay scale, graduate school admissions and academic rewards based on GPA and beginning to feel like I made a mistake by not going directly after an MBA.
Fry: "What class are you teaching this semester, professor?"
Farnsworth: "The same class I always teach: the mathematics of quantum neutrino fields. I made the name up so no sane student would take it."
Fry: "'The mathematics of wonton burrito meals.' Thanks professor!"
Farnsworth: "Fry, please don't take my class! I'm a professor, I don't know how to teach!"
That's just silly. Solving logical problems and telling stories are very different pursuits, and while some people are good at both, it's not simply a matter of "brainpower." Why else would geeks need "artsy" people to help with their GUIs?
Some people have an intuitive feel for drawing a figure, singing a melody, or telling a joke, and some people don't. Some people easily grasp complex systems, and some don't. It isn't "just about brain power," it's about specific talents, and maybe more importantly, about what gets you excited. If making films is a burning desire for you, that's a good sign; if it's just an assignment that you get when you'd rather be designing jet engines, guess whose film is going to suck?
OK, it was 20 years ago for me but doing an engineering degree, especially computer science and electronics, we had 80 guys and 1 cute girl.
As you walk past other lecture rooms for biology, chemistry, etc it was all girls. Hot ones.
Thats the only reason and the real reason its sucks. Especially when you are at that age.
Seriously, an enforced balance of the sexes in classes should be encourage if not enforced.
In all academic disciplines.
Bachelor engineering degrees are actually worth their value because it is likely you will be able to get a good paying job after you graduate. For the social science and humanities degrees that is not necessarily true. For example one of my buddies graduated with a social science bachelors in criminology and for months could not find any jobs. When he finally got a job at a tax firm he told me his salary was around 40k and I was surprised that you could get paid that amount of money after spending what we did on tuition.
Later, I looked towards getting a higher degree because I wasn't satisfied with my current job so I figured getting some kind of masters whether it be in business or engineering would help me out. Turns out after a bachelors in any kind of engineering field, the returns for getting more education (masters or doctorates) diminish significantly even if it is an MBA. I found that I would make more money sitting at my current job with a bachelors than to quit my job for 2 years, get a masters degree in anything, and go back to work. There are some programs that allow you to get an MBA while working, but I didn't feel that that would be worth the effort either. I'd be worse off than I was as an undergrad with 40 hours at work and 3 night classes.
So my recommendation for kids going into college who have expectations to get paid well with their degree is to go in with either an engineering or biotech friendly degree and double major or minor into a social science or business field. Extend your undergrad time to 5 years so you won't feel as much pressure. And understand that if you plan on working after college, your GPA only impacts your first job and helps you negotiate a higher starting salary (but will not guarantee it). For example I graduated in the same class and same degree as another buddy and he graduated in the top 10% while I did not. In the end I still have a higher salary than he does.
Of course there are other degrees with good returns on investment like accounting. You simply have to do your research and figure out how much time your want to spend in education and what you think will actually be interesting to do after you're finish. If you are expecting to be really affluent, forget it. Any professional that has a high salary probably puts in a good amount of hours. For example investment banking has terrible hours but those guys get paid huge salaries. Doctors have pretty good salaries but ridiculous work weeks (30+ hour shifts, 80 hour work weeks).
The big secret to getting really wealthy really fast is to become a successful entrepreneur, and unfortunately, there are no degrees that will ensure that path. Things like MBAs can help, but they won't guarantee your success.
Physics textbooks tend to be "direct" and full of equations at the upper level. Sometimes the books notation was different than the professors notation. Nature of the beast. I found lower level science texts were more engaging than engineering texts. Your mileage may vary. Of course, there's always the library, where you can usually find other books on the same topic. Another book might explain it in a way that makes more sense to you...
4. Professors are Rarely EncouragingI found the professors in Physics were more engaging than those in Engineering. The departments had fewer students. Professors tended to be more "interesting." You got to spend more face time with the profs. As long as you were willing to do the work, they were happy to encourage you and would engage you in their work (as free labor, of course).
3. Dearth of Quality CounselingThe academic advisor's job is not to guarantee you find work after you graduate. Their job is to make sure you consistently work toward completion of a degree program that you chose. There's no guarantee that a job will be waiting for you when you get out. Again, I found the physics profs tended to be more interested in cultivating their students.
2. Other Disciplines Have Inflated GradesOK, your wining because you have to work in a competative environment where you actually have to study the equivalent to rocket science; and you want to compare your grades to the Art major? We Physics majors thought you Engineering major's had it too easy. Does that make you feel better? You either enjoy what you study or your are in the wrong field and need to change majors. That's exactly what I did.
Some professors view undergraduate education as a type of natural selection, It is. but their analogy is flawed. not it's not. If you can't hack it or don't like what your doing, you should be able to determine that as soon as possible; so, you can find something you are good at. Many of the brightest students may struggle while mediocre scholars can earn top scores because they have a larger group of supportive friends to or more time to dedicate to studying. Then the bright student should have sought help. I never had trouble getting explanations from profs. Of course, I was a Physics major, which meant I wasn't competing with 100's of students, only 10's. 1. Every Assignment Feels the SameScience and engineering use mathematics to describe the world. It only makes sense that math is a major component of the work required. Unfortunately, unlike literature where you can take the books home, you can't take the lab equipment home. But, that's why there are lab components to many undergrad science courses. It turns out, if you ask for time in a lab, and could provide some reasonable justification (I want to understand x better, is usually enough), you can get time in the lab... Again, I have to recommend science because the smaller class size means the resources aren't being stretched as far.
Look, undergraduate education in science or engineering is as much about teaching someone how to study or how to do research as it is about teaching fundamentals. Nothing is going to be handed to you; you have to be willing to do the work. You also have to be willing to make decisions (you are an adult now). If you don't like engineering, find something else.
as a lot of those high A people will be either writing or delivering your paper
Why should anything hard and intellectually rewarding be anything but challenging? The best thing is that it weeds out most people you would never a) want to work with b) trust your life too.
Kind of like the medical field... those who can put up with it usually are good people
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm not an English major, I'm a CS one so my english comprehension may be a bit off but this doesn't look like an article to me. More like a list.
:P
A Top Five list.
I mean, if you're gonna whine as to why other departments get inflated grades and what not why don't you first realize that they are other departments and can set their own rules and regulations regarding their material?
Do you really think telling someone you graduated with a degree in theater* will carry the same weight as a degree in a science?
*no offense to theater majors but y'all are at the bottom of the academic totem pole anyway
Dude, get over it. I'm a CS student (a giiirl CS student) with no Calculus background and I'm surviving just fine. Hell I've gotten 4.0s in several classes. Yeah sometimes I wanted to rip my hair out but I usually could find a math major to help me; though I do admit this may have been helped by the extra X chromosome I have :P. Anyways, getting an engineering/CS/or other hard science degree is totally doable. You just have to be really interested in what you're doing and be willing to spend the extra time. Yes I have friends who are passing by without doing much in the way of work in the humanities, but they will not be enjoying the kind of lifestyle I will be after I finish my degree. I am greatly looking forward to that lifestyle.
That's exactly my impression of the modd'ing here.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
I thought it was just ASU. :-) It was a depressing 5 years of my life. But really, I think you'd have to choose the university carefully to get a good experience. And it would help to be more socially adept than I was at that age. MIT should have been my choice, but then again they are known for a high rate of suicide aren't they...
I am an engineering student. Just wrapping up my second-year in civil engineering. And it's true, it does suck.
Firstly, the professors I have are geniuses. They know all there is to know about their particular field of study. But they know absolutely nothing about teaching. When the professors decide to order a certain text book, the publisher gives them a slide show to accompany the text. The profs now default to teaching straight from these slide show presentations, and do so with as much enthusiasm as us students do. If the prof can't be motivated about the material, it's nearly impossible for us to be motivated. Which turns into if we don't want to be there, neither does the prof. So most of my classes are a black hole of morale.
Secondly, the textbooks are crap. One of my prof has to keep giving out photocopies from a second text book that he has because the one he told us to buy doesn't have the right information in it. Another example, is when I missed a Soil Mechanics lecture. I went over his on-line notes, and noticed he was talking about aquifers. Not know what it was, I looked it up in the textbook using the index, only to find the book only alluded to an aquifer, saying "Aquifers are used to...". No actual mention of what an aquifer is.
Thirdly, assignments are all the same. Every week, for almost every class, we are assigned a half-dozen questions based on the equation we learnt in that lecture. Sadly, it's just learning to rearrange that equation, and not learning how to mix it with other equations learnt.
Lastly, I worked with professional engineers in the past, and would often hear their tales of woe from back when they were in school roughly 20-30 years ago. What they had back then was a challenge. The biggest challenge I have is simply trying to get out of bed for an 8AM lecture. Almost everything is spoon-fed to us these days, mostly because the profs don't want to have to put in an honest effort to teach us.
That's just my take on it. Maybe things will get better in third-year? But I have to run, I'm late for an open-book quiz.
If you don't love being in school and learning engineering, then get out and find something you do love. If you like engineering but hate school then here is my free advice.
1. Women. You will never be in a place that has more young, attractive, available women than a university. Go get some. It is true that forming relationships can't be reduced to simple algorithms, but the rules of the game can be deduced and learned. Yes Pointdexter, even you can get laid. You're smart, right? So figure it out.
2. Textbooks & Professors are a mixed bag in every field. Deal with it.
3. Grade inflation? Who cares? Do you think a 3.5 in Sociology is worth the same as a 3.5 in Electrical Engineering? Me neither.
Bonus - This is what got me through after just about failing second year. Find a small group of people you can study with and work together to solve your weekly problem assignments. Take turns, one guy on the blackboard, everybody else follows along. If you get stuck one of the group will be able to teach you what to do next. If you make a stupid math mistake (drop a sign, whatever) someone will catch it right away.
Have some fun.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
...if you study fluid dynamics!
higher education is *not* vocational training
For $100k it better teach me a trade! If I am going to take out a mortgage without a house to show for it. I better be damn employable by the end of it.
I agree historically this was not the case. But in the 70s higher education because REQUIRED and you needed a college degree to get what a high school diploma got you in the 40s. Now you need a graduate degree to equal what a college degree used to be. And graduate degrees almost always come with grants/stipends/etc.
For the excessively high prices of undergrad' degrees, you better have a trade when you are done.
It says a lot by saying a little. It's artistic without being artsy.
It's amazing how much of a conversation you can have with just green, isn't it?
You can see the effort but not the grace. Yellow can be so unforgiving. I think you're missing the fundamental point of modern art. Modern art is technically more accessible because there are no boundaries. Right - a modern painting can take considerably less time than a photo-realistic or impressionistic piece of art, but that's part of the beauty of it.
Modern art doesn't mean the artist had to spend days or months on a painting, and that it could've been done with ease and joy, and not frustration. In essence, it's the freest form of expression and just exploring very basic aspects of vision (color, shapes, etc.).
I think one just needs to open their mind a little, and with modern art, you tend to appreciate beauty of things you take for granted.
I did a year and a half of an engineering degree at the University of Western Australia in the mid 1980s before deciding it wasn't my thing. A few years later I went back to school and did a BA in sociology, and am now doing a PhD in medical sociology at the University of California, San Francisco.
I'll say this - engineering was indeed hard. It required a lot of discipline, had a *huge* number of contact hours per week and an equally huge load of homework. To do well required that you not merely do a lot of work, but that you were bright and had a high degree of comfort and fluency with mathematics.
Having said that, undergraduate sociology was also hard, but in a different way. The contact hours were less, and the workload tended to be compressed at the end of the semester (I remember cranking out four papers in one 36 hour bender one particularly poorly-planned semester..), however to do well also required a lot of hard work, as well as being bright and having a particular fluency with the manipulation and communication of complex ideas. The real kicker is that sociology (as with 90% of the social sciences) also requires that you do an advanced degree to actually work in the field, and to get into grad school you have to do very well at it as an undergraduate. And by the time you're finished you've had 8-10 years of training.
Finally, if you manage to limp through an engineering degree with barely passing grades, you're still employable as an engineer (ok, you might not get the most amazing job on offer straight out of school, but you will get a job). If you limp through a sociology degree with barely passing grades, you have a nice piece of toilet paper as a reward.
I don't think either route is a soft option. Doing well at either requires a lot of hard work and discipline, and both require brains and a high degree of fluency with a particular kind of thinking.
The kind of metrosexual weenie who thinks Wired has been relevant in the 21st century? Wake me when they publish something I couldn't have phoned in for $7 on Rent-a-Ranter.
Rule of Thumb: if you have to be convinced by group-think or educated into believing something is good art, it isn't.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
You can hang a Rothko upside down?
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
...
6) UNREAL quantities of homework (all math problems)
7) Textbooks that are often badly written/incomprehensible/irrelevant/error-laden
8) 3/4 of professors who speak English poorly
9) 3/4 of professors who drone on and show no enthusiasm for the subject
10) WAY too many equations written illegibly, rapidly, BY HAND on whiteboards
11) Lectures that, way too often, are not available as handouts
12) Handouts that, way too often, are not available before the lecture
13) Material that often feels irrelevant to the real world (esp. the way linear algebra is taught)
As a long time computer scientist who is taking a 400-level course in image processing (my first EE course), I much better appreciate how damned hard engineering is. By contrast, CS is a breeze, and the humanities are about as hard as watching TV. Now I remember why I traded in a BSEE program for a BS in biology.
Randy
6. Lack of attractive females in all or most of your classes.
7. Teaching assistants who can't speak English (and don't care about you..)
I hear a lot of the same crap that gets spewed at me by professors, that engineers are better than anyone else and that we have to work the hardest for our degrees. This is simply untrue: Engineering is extremely loose with the facts and unrigorous. I have a minor in math and took some physics courses and they were infinitely more challenging than any of my EE classes because they stressed the underlying theory MUCH more rather than using the approach of engineering classes in which you learn specific cases of a much broader topic but don't understand how they are related. Time and time again, especially in math, I was very impressed at the creativity and logic of math students and the ease in which they understood new topics. Fact: Engineering's difficulty doesn't make every other subject cake despite whatever you have been indoctrinated with. Engineering suffers from something that most other majors do not: People that are there strictly for the money. If you aren't interested in a subject, you're more likely to fail, which is partially why I believe that the GPA disparity exists. I saw so many people in my classes that wouldn't shut up about their 80k salaries they expected to score right out of undergrad, and those same people were always the ones that just barely got their prelabs done each week or surfed the web on their laptops in class (engineering building was the only one with wi-fi). I went to a top 25 engineering school and I can honestly say I know nowhere near what I had hoped to, and my peers know even less. I had a few friends in the same major, and I remember one semester we were all taking the same electromagnetic fields class with this old school guy who was really well-respected in his field. He was a pretty lousy teacher, but if you read the textbook and really made an effort to understand what was being taught, the class was cake. He threw the class a huge curveball on the final exam and instead of giving all problems regurgitated from homework, he asked us to define concepts such as "resistance" and "capacitance" in our own words. I was the only person I talked to that actually produced an answer to this question, and others bitched so much how the professor could possibly have "expected" them to know how to respond. How does one hope to be an electrical engineer but cannot understand something so fundamental? I'm going to graduate school at a more prestigious university but I have no misconceptions that I will somehow learn more from classes; I'll just have access to better resources with which to learn on my own. Engineering is best learnt by doing, and most people incorrectly assume they will become good engineers by going through the engineering curriculum and that somehow magically after 4 years they will be prepared to jump into projects, which is of course bullocks. These are the reasons why so many people find engineering difficult.
There are no [good looking] girls!
Fact: Engineering's difficulty doesn't make every other subject cake despite whatever you have been indoctrinated with. Engineering suffers from something that most other majors do not: People that are there strictly for the money. If you aren't interested in a subject, you're more likely to fail, which is partially why I believe that the GPA disparity exists. I saw so many people in my classes that wouldn't shut up about their 80k salaries they expected to score right out of undergrad, and those same people were always the ones that just barely got their prelabs done each week or surfed the web on their laptops in class (engineering building was the only one with wi-fi).
I went to a top 25 engineering school and I can honestly say I know nowhere near what I had hoped to, and my peers know even less. I had a few friends in the same major, and I remember one semester we were all taking the same electromagnetic fields class with this old school guy who was really well-respected in his field. He was a pretty lousy teacher, but if you read the textbook and really made an effort to understand what was being taught, the class was cake. He threw the class a huge curveball on the final exam and instead of giving all problems regurgitated from homework, he asked us to define concepts such as "resistance" and "capacitance" in our own words. I was the only person I talked to that actually produced an answer to this question, and others bitched so much how the professor could possibly have "expected" them to know how to respond. How does one hope to be an electrical engineer but cannot understand something so fundamental?
I'm going to graduate school at a more prestigious university but I have no misconceptions that I will somehow learn more from classes; I'll just have access to better resources with which to learn on my own. Engineering is best learnt by doing, and most people incorrectly assume they will become good engineers by going through the engineering curriculum and that somehow magically after 4 years they will be prepared to jump into projects, which is of course bullocks. These are the reasons why so many people find engineering difficult.
At MIT you get too much theory.
You don't have to read very far to see that the author of the article does not really want to be an engineer!
This is like someone who hates the French language majoring in French, and then wanting to change the major to make it easier.
HCG 50a = 2MASX J11170638+5455016
11h17m06.4s +54d55m02s
Engineering should be difficult, in fact, it should be the most difficult thing you do up to that point in your life. And then it gets more difficult. Engineers make decisions every day that influence (or end) the lives of a large number of human beings, and they have to be perfect each and every time. Little Bobby and his half-assed, drank-all-month-and-stayed-up-all-night-to-complete, book report on "Catcher in the Rye" doesn't qualify him to design a hydroelectric dam that holds back a million tons of water. You think Little Bobby could take part in designing an aircraft? Absolutely not, let little Bobby fill spreadsheets and do financial audits while the big kids, the Engineers, take on the big problems.
There's even a difference between computer programmers and engineers who program. Let the programmers worry about the programming language "flavor of the month", and AJAX, and Web 2.0, and Pair Programming, and Agile Development. Me, I'm going to worry about creating an algorithm that restricts fan speed, and does automatic braking in increments of .01 lbs/sqin to keep fan blades from spinning themselves apart. And then proving that it will not fail under ANY circumstances, usually with (god forbid) math. Already the programmers are shaking in their shoes, saying "You can't write bug-free code". You're right, YOU can't, but I can (though I will admit that the money available to bug-proof something that kills people if it goes haywire are significantly higher than your PHB's change tracking and document management system).
Network engineers, you aren't Engineers. Computer programmers, you aren't Engineers. Business people, nope you aren't Engineers either. Systems admins and other IT weenies, you are not Engineers. Get over it, or go back to school.
~Sticky, B.S. CompEng
/So getting flamed for this one.
"Maybe not in class ranking, but what about scholarships?"
I've already explaned why this is irrelevant. Please read through the thread.
"Or tuition reimbursement?"
I don't know many instance where engineers compete with philosophy majors for tuition reimbursement, I suspect it's mostly like vs like here.
"Or graduate school? "
Flat wrong. Graduate school is EXTREMELY subjective, this is just not accurate.
Here is my translation of these 'top 5' reasons:
5) I'm lazy, please draw me a picture. Make it pretty.
4) Please spoon-feed me everything I need to know. I am way too lazy to take the initiative otherwise.
3) I don't want to actually particiapate in the job market -- please dumb it down for me. I would like to be lead... like a sheep.
2) Those other majors where students are coddled (and go on to retail counters across America) -- please make Engineering like that. I want to be treated like an idiot whose self-esteem needs an artifical boost.
1) I majored in a math-intensive field and don't like math.
w8dm4n
Or maybe accounting? Looks like some sort of depreciation calculation run against a "lock box". C'mon Wired, you think you could have at least found a picture of engineering homework...
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
I'm nearing the end of my 1st year as an Engineering student, and I will turn 40 on the Friday before exams start. There are definite pros and cons to being a mature Engineering student:
Cons:
- Motivation. As already noted, a degree course contains a lot that is unnecessary. The first semester stretched my patience a tad, all the stuff that I know I will never use in my major, or afterwards. (It's getting better.)
- Solitude. There are three (3) mature Engineering students in the whole university, including yours truly. The others are all doing Arts-related degrees. Considering that my university is trying to encourage mature students, perhaps my entry wasn't all that competitive. 8-!
Pros:
- Attitude. I'm older than some of my lecturers, and fairly immune to bullying. I haven't even noticed any, so far.
- Experience. I've already seen a lot of Engineering in action, even if it wasn't my job. It's not all abstract theory to me.
- Reading Comprehension;
- Spelling & Grammar;
- Common Sense. (e.g. no killing of brain cells before exams.)
In a group assignment recently, the professor gave us a detailed requirements document, in addition to a basic description of the topics. Of my group, I was the only one who actually read the document, concluded that the assignment was - partly - a test of our ability to follow instructions, cite sources, design a presentation to meet the requirements, and present it. I ended up as a slave-master, pushing people to research and write material, and explaining to them that Presenting is not simply about reading a bunch of words dumped on to a PowerPoint slide. I fixed the presentation to make it readable - 10pt yellow text on white doesn't project well - and got complaints that I'd changed it...
(this is not a
I echo the "two year mark" sentiment. My GPA shot markedly upwards once I got to the two year mark and all the actual engineering kicked in. I loved it. This was my experience at Bradley University.
As for 6 figures being paltry, and staring at 7 figure slackers? I think that's a California thing.
Program Intellivision!
In response to the topic/question: Yes.
Through the years, I've worked with a few folks with engineering degrees. I asked them WTF are they doing programming? Most of them said they couldn't get a job - the aeronautical were the saddest. They hated being programmers but there's only so many spots at the aviation firms and it's mostly defense. God forbid if you had to work with a PhD! They had no interest in their work. They were board and wanted to do research.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
I started off as Engineering and couldn't hang with the program because of math requirements. 1/3 of students failed the entry level CSE (computer sci/engineering) course, and I passed with a 3.5, but where I couldn't hang was the ridiculous amount of math required by the engineering department. My programming skills were 5x better than some honors level mathematics students, yet I had to switch to a telecommunications degree (which led me to a very nice job in project management). Regardless, I could have gotten good grades had they not demanded I take math courses by someone from Russia who can't speak a word of English.
The article does make good points about fair grades & good textbooks. I have a Mathematics degree, and took the "other" course sections. My physics, compilers, & differential equations courses were the pure science versions.
I think I earned fair grades. I got only a C in ODE my sophmore year and an A in PDE my final semester. The C meant I was average among my peers. Then, I finally learned enough by PDE to do execellent (A) work.
I had very good physics & calculus textbooks. They had full-color diagrams, how-to-solve examples, & explained how to derive the equations. Both books were department-wide choices, & neither one was written by the lecturing professor. I still have & read both books 15 years later.
Physics Book: "Fundamentals of Physics", Halliday & Resnick (1988)
It's quite an old edition.
It's supposed to suck to be an engineering student. Engineering has a reputation for being a brutal major, and a lot of otherwise intelligent people wash out of engineering programs. That's what gives the degree its value in the job marketplace, though. Just managing to complete an engineering degree, regardless of GPA, is impressive to employers. It's also worth pointing out that many jobs that engineering graduates would be applying to would not accept candidates without engineering degrees, so grade inflation in other majors is pretty much moot.
Incidentally, I know when I've been thumbing through resumes, I've never paid a lick of attention to GPAs. To me, someone who plays up their academic achievements on a resume is probably just saying "I have no relevant experience."
hot foreign sheep.
All I learned from 3 years of Architecture education was a set of skills more apt to allow me to work in the field 30-1500 years ago, including how to use dangerous glues, how to carve basswood and how to act pretentous (the most valuable skill). CAD programs couldn't be officially "taught" because "not every student can affoard it" and "there's no true standard" (bullshit--its called autoCAD). 3D printers were too expensive for the school so we were using the antiquated technique of building our models with expensive basswood and expensive scaled pieces of plastic, etc...causing our models to reach the upwards of $500+ dollars each semester despite the fact we didn't actually do it the way we would in the field (i.e. plug it into CAD, print it). *sigh*
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
It does, but we like it. Intellectual masochism rocks!
The author really needs to change majors, if you ask me. Meanwhile, you think engineering sucks as a student? Come back to me after you've changed the diaper of an 80 year old man who can't speak. Or did post mortem care on a child. No, nursing is EASY. It's just fluffing pillows, right?
You can't blame the philosophers. If they didn't have high opinions of themselves, what would be the point of all that thinking? Let me go think about it for 3 years. . . .
5. "Awful Textbooks"
I'm not certain I quite understand this complaint. To me a textbook is a source of knowledge, not a novel. I don't mind if it's in black and white, but I do mind if the author can't write. I don't own many of those: I generally browse books in the library or in the bookshop before deciding to buy them, so I weed out ones I don't like.
In Mathematics, textbooks tend to be written in a "Definition, Definition, (Theorem - proof)^n, exercise" format. A bit dry, unless you're really interested in the subject already. That's why you need professors: to make the subject matter come alive in their lectures, point out connections, and explain what the thinking behind the theorems is. A case in point would be "Rudin, W., Principles of Mathematical Analysis, 3rd edn. (Wiley). Hard work, but a deserved classic in its field. Unfortunately grossly overpriced nowadays.
Looking at e.g. textbooks in Physics, Civil Engineering and Transport Planning I find the ones I have seen quite good. If I might mention one example of a physics textbook I find really beautiful, it would be "E. Hecht, A. Zajac, Optics, 2nd edn. (Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1990)".
What I really hate are books with "Calculus" in the title. Invariably bloated and overpriced, set in an irritatingly large font, trying to teach the mechanics of entry-level mathematics at a snail's pace with distracting colours and usually impossible to use as a decent reference when you need to know something. Perhaps it's a matter of taste.
4. "Professors are Rarely Encouraging"
Well ... I'm afraid that what you are describing in a professor who is an inept disinterested teacher. Unfortunately they exist, especially when it comes to teaching large classes the very basics. But that varies by University (and by department of course ... and per individual). I don't think I've met any of those at MIT though, but that's an extreme. I know it's hard to assess the quality of a University before you've been to one. The only suggestion I can give is work hard, make sure your grades transfer to a "good" University, and switch if yours is disappointing.
3. Dearth of Quality Counseling
Well ... where I work we have regular lectures where real-world companies present themselves and their career opportunities. I tend to advise students to be good at what they do and to gain some degree of (documented) mastery of all related tools: from writing to programming to project management to organising to photography to wielding a wrench, and to take *at least* one student placement with a real engineering firm before they graduate. I'm sorry to say I'm not up to speed on resume padding and that my plans don't include acquiring expertise in that field.
2. Other Disciplines Have Inflated Grades
Well ... true to a large extent. In Engineering, Mathematics, and the Sciences the success criterion is fairly objective: mastery of a well-defined subject so that you can recognise problems and solve them by applying the theory you've studied, and a way of examining problems so that your notes have value to those who read them.
All depending on subject and University of course. Have you ever seen the amount of homework and study that medical students go home with? Terrible! All those bones and organs and muscles and feedback mechanisms and diseases they have to learn ... and learn to perfection before they even *see* a patient. And Law students? Ouch ... I'd really think twice before enrolling in a (good) Law course.
But as regards the Arts, I'm not sure. I've seen really erudite writings (by students !) on Art History, Contemporary Literature, Old English, and some absolute trash Arts subjects I won't be specific about here. It all depends on the quality of the instructor and the school: if the school is perepared to let students fail sub-par work, and the teachers are good
i got slapped with the troll mod
it was meant to be a harmless joke, you seem to take it as such
but apparently amongst the mild mannered slashdotters resides a militant fundamentalist hitchcock fan with modpoints to burn
who would have known?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I thought it would be interesting to see what diffrent textbooks engineering students are using. If you feel inclined, post your major, school, and any texts you use, and if you think they are any good.
Me:
3rd Year Mechanical Engineering
Queen's University (Canada)
Machine Design, Shingley - Great book, I actually enjoy reading this one
Stats, De Veaux - Never even opened it
Fundamentals of Heat and Mass Transfer, Incropera et al. - Another great book, Also enjoyed.
Mechanics of Materials, Hibbeler - I've used in a few courses, wasn't bad, but wasn't anything special
Engineering mechanics Dynamics, Meriam - Horrible book, my prof did an amazing job of explaining the course, and this book just confused things
Fundementals of Thermodynamics, Moran - Another great book, can't say enough good thigns about it
Only other book worth mentioning was my fluids text. Also very good, but i can't remember the author (and i dont' have it on hand). But it had a green cover with odd swirly lines on the front. Another good book was a materials science text. I also can't remember the name off hand.
Some books that REALLY sucked: Elec text, it was red, yellow and white on the front. Horrible book. All my math texts sucked, but its really hard to present math in an interesting way
About 2 years ago, I was in London and everybody told me that I simply *must* visit the Tate Modern (http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/) to see the Kandinsky exhibit (http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/kandinsky/). Being an American in London, the dollar wasn't worth anything, and so when I went to see this exhibit it was 10 pounds. A fair chunk of money for what was about 4 rooms of paintings. But hey, it was London, and of course everybody said you had to go to see the Kandinsky exhibit.
Well, from a historic standpoint, Kandinsky is interesting. He "invented" abstract art. But he was nuts. Crazy. Bonkers. No two ways around it. He has what I'd charitably describe as a handful of interesting and challenging pieces. The rest is just a painting by a crazy person. And after you look at a wall of it, you're tired of it. You're tired of the guy. And you're mostly sorry that you paid all that money to look at the splatterings of a madman.
Well, I finally looked around and said very loudly "This stuff is crap. And everybody pretending to like this stuff is only doing it because you're *supposed* to say everything this guy did was genius. It's just the ravings of a madman". Everyone turned around and gave me an evil eye.
Except the guards. They all started clapping.
I quickly high-tailed it out of there before I got pelted with wine and brie, but it's true.
And yes, I'm a computer guy, but I'm also an artist (musical). But you don't have to be an artist to call B.S. on this sort of nonsense. And most art... modern or not, really *is* crap.
And this is why liberal arts majors aren't so impressed by engineering students: because some of them are so dense that they can't write an English sentence about a cup of coffee without using mathematical variables.
Some geeks so absorbed in their symbolic descriptions of things that they can no longer talk about the things themselves. A cooling cup of coffee is reality; a formula is a way of describing it precisely, but it's useless unless you can always come back to the real-world thing you're describing and make that clear.
Many science majors look down on liberal arts majors for not understanding math and systems. But many liberal arts majors look down on science majors for not being able to understand why their words mean nothing to non-specialists. It makes it sound like all they've done is memorize and not internalize.
If you can't describe your field of work engagingly at a party, please, do us all a favor and don't write textbooks or become a professor.
You're right, we programmers aren't engineers. We have to write programs far more complex than a fan controller, with far more inputs and outputs. And we have to do it with ever-changing and never well-defined requirements. With extremely constrained deadlines. You're building a small Lego shack in a week, plus testing time. We're building a magnificent house of cards in a day, changing the basic architecture three times during the building process, balancing it on a turntable and then setting it out in a gale with the only testing being us blowing on it during construction. We're not engineers, we're frigging miracle workers. Sure, a few cards may blow off -- but the miracle is that the thing stands at all.
MTR, B.S.C.S
(only partly tongue-in-cheek)
I'm not sure what your point is. I loved Primer.
Cow Cube
There was no flamebait there, I can't believe two pizza guys got mod points on the same day. Holy crap, you morons, not only was it not flamebait, it was written in support of engineering majors. As in "engineering majors become engineers, they don't worry too much about getting jobs outside their field".
Stop getting pissed at me because you're liberal arts majors, you picked it. Maybe if you'd chosen a better major your reading comprehension wouldn't suck ass.
I had the same issues, and my daughter does as well studying social work. Lame everything. Don't get me started on the textbook racket the colleges have set up with textbook publishers. And constantly rising costs while the schools build 9-figure health clubs and sit on 9-figure surpluses. College is a scam - but we have to do it or risk flipping burgers for the rest of our lives.
I can't believe this topic was post today! I graduated 1.5 years ago in Electrical Engineering and woke up today 5 AM still having nightmares with my old teachers. I have fighted so much for better quality in my course and got trouble with many teachers. My history in the course is unbelievable. I'll summarize because they are too many:
- Got bad grade in the Microprocessors course because I "invented" a instruction. Even with the Intel (8051) Manual in hands showing the instruction I used to the jerk, he could not admit the instruction existed!
- My mentor asked me to transfer money from my account to his master student. I said "no! this is extortion". This is why you don't see my name on Microelectronic events anymore.
- I got so stressed that I developed psoriasis (dry skin and joints). Girls notice every time.
- Other students had low self-esteem and were so afraid that they usually supported retarded teachers.
- Till today students have class notes handwritten (anyone heard about computers?). No typewriter for you, just handwritten!
- I tryed to have some help with my homework, and the teacher said I knew programming as good as a piece of shit. Hahah! He said the only way I could make a RS232-USB converter was reading the whole kernel source code.
- My brother is lawyer. How can someone explain to his mother that one could get Laurea (Law), and the other was reproved 10 times (Engineering)? Oh yes, there were 10% of the class that could end the course untouched, but they are like zombies and can't sustain any sort of social life.
- Many others that I would go crazy remembering.
This is a subject that I try not to discuss anymore, afraid of causing me a nervous breakdown, or making others scared of my insanity. Having 5 papers published in well known international events since early years in University, I am currently away of any academic research, afraid of being pursued in the academia. I have plans to leave my job this year and try again, but I got more or less depressed event thinking of it. Only pure interest in science keep my hopes alive.
Thank you for the audience!
Donkey Kong Cluster
As someone who will graduate with a degree in engineering this May, I feel that I can comment. As far as textbooks go, I have had some good textbooks and some bad ones. For undergraduate courses, professors will often post lecture notes online, such that these notes and the textbook can be cross-referenced with each other. If I ever had problems understanding a textbook, I would turn to the lecture notes. On few occasions have I had to consult other textbooks (I never really talked to my profs). I agree 100% that better students can end up getting lower grades due to supportive friends. I never had many friends in my discipline, and as such, did all my assignments alone. Meanwhile, at least 90% of the students worked together on assignments. This was not so much as constructive collaboration as it was 'You do question 1, I'll do question 2 and Bob will do question 3. Then we'll copy each other'. The result is that these students also have more free time, as they are doing only a portion of the work. This allows them more time to study more for midterms and finals. This final semester I had 7 courses, one being a project (which did and still is consuming between 6 and 10 hours per week) and another being a thesis (which required much more work than the coursework of an average course). The result was that I usually only had the night before to study for my midterms.
Great new book on Evolution: The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins
"No one who has an opinion worth a damn"
Did you not read that qualifier?
And no, pretending that human resources robots don't know the difference between what a liberal arts degree requires and an engineering degree requires in nonsense.
As a current Mech Engr student; I find it is quite horrible. Here's why: The current accepted curriculum is geared to churn out calculator fodder for the large corporations. At my non-disclosed school, it is readily apparent by the the massive funding they give the school and the corporate tie ins and large camaraderie that they try and foster. Not to mention the fact that they do not actively advocate/heavily promote outside entrepreneur business leadership; instead relegating that to EMIS, where that program itself is geared towards milling around in cube management land.
I've realized that engineers are problem solvers, but they can not come up with the problem. They are the computers of financial engineers and the people that we engineers loathe because of their social time they have. If your in a business school for undergrad, chances are you have friday off. Your workload is comparatively magnitudes of order "lighter," so you are able to do this thing called "networking." I happened upon this non-computer "networking" phenomenon when I was seeking guidance on a few patents and businesses I was developing. Because of this experience, I've gone back and relegated engineering as the domain of where it's overwhelmingly minutia oriented and anti-social.
This is why I fully intend to take my BSME that I will receive, and shelve it. It's off to a graduate school with a good law and business program and get both a law and mba degree.
Don't get me started on petroleum engr's either... I pity them. If they lack any financial planning tenacity and are under the age of 35, they won't have much of a retirement when it enters another bust cycle. It's feast or famine in the oil industry.
What's most comical is that after talking at length with several chairmen of F500 companies, they say the same thing "Where are the engineers that think?" They don't like hiring technical only people, they like ones that can interact with people, understand business, and come up with solutions. Those are the types that shoot to the top in a multinational. Until there is a drastic change in engineering thought process taught at schools, theres little incentive for society to accept engineers beyond a human calculator.
I'd love to see one day a core engineering program like CSE,EE,ME teamed with a business and philosophy program and get a three degree. That'd be a hellaciously killer combo.
The author of TFA is either:
Nearly all the engineering profs and engineers I have met in life have been friendly, fun, and interesting people, and I say that having given up on engineering for a liberal arts degree because I couldn't pass second-semester calculus.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
Nor are the majority of Engineering students destined to make Great Engineers.
Nor are the majority of Computer Science students destined to make Great Computer Scientist.
The Greats are very few.
I'm not one of them, neither are you.
Spending endless hours studying was not fun, nor were spending hours upon hours deriving equations.
Lab classes on the other hand were fun, spending time building/testing/diagnosing was very enjoyable.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
Q: Does it suck to be an Engineering student?
A: Yes. All-nighters. Profs with horrible accents. Five years of coursework crammed into four years.
Q: Does it suck to be an Engineering professional?
A: No. Knowledge of how the physical world operates. Good pay. Work that is rewarding to do.
:(){
"The clerks handling academic scholarships do." No, they don't. Their opinion is irrelevant, you either meet the requirements or you don't. Unless you have some evidence that suggests that these "clerks" are somehow using their subjective judgment in an objective process. So, no actually, the clerks do not, and you are wrong.
it does suck to be an engineering student. Even more so when our entire department (EE) is going through re-accreditation and all the academic planning goes to shit because of unavailable courses. Here's my response to the Top (Bottom) 5.
1. Books.
My quarterly book costs are in the $300-400 range for 3-4 books total. In comparison to soft majors: $50 for 10+ paperbacks. Expensive? CHECK. Useful? CHECK. I personally don't know any LA/Biz students who keep their books after the term is done. That has something to do with the fact that most of the courses taken by non-engineering/sciences don't build on top of previous courses. In one such series, Microelectronics, we not only build on the circuit analysis and semiconductor device courses, but also on programming (simulation tools), physics, and easily calculus. These books we purchase build our reference library for when it really matters to have them.
2. Professors / Padded grades
Can't do much here, there's some good professors who are prepared and know how to teach. There are also awful professors (and sometimes even good lecturers) who grade tough as nails, even with a curve. This is not a symptom of the professor, but of the college. When over 40% of the grade is depending on a single exam, there's lots of room for error. The grading curve alludes to this, and interestingly enough at my university the curve dips lower the higher up you go.
A professor once told me...
Engineers that earn partial credit build bridges that fall down.
Engineering is a hard discipline. For scholarship students (where GPA matters and is compared against everyone), you can only do engineering with a 3.0/3.5 or whatever GPA, you only get to be an engineer if you can be a top engineer, not a mediocre one, while you can get a scholarship and be a mediocre film student. It's an odd set of priorities, but oh well. We don't need more engineers that build bridges that fall down, we need engineers that can design good ones.
Otherwise, yeah, your GPA is relative to those in your field. Take liberal arts courses, they'll lift your GPA if you are in trouble, not take a HUGE amount of work, and make you a more well rounded person.
Is it just me or does that look more like a discounted cash flow problem than a typical engineering problem?
Awful textbooks - oooh, they don't have any pictures! and they have all this tough math shit! they don't inspire me!
Professors are rarely encouraging - oooh, they don't tell me how great I am! they expect me to pay attention in class and actually understand things!
Dearth of Quality Counseling - oooh, they don't help me write a resume! they don't tell me how to make money at this engineering shit after I graduate! they should be taking more of an interest in me and not expect me to learn anything about the career I've chosen!
Other Disciplines have Inflated Grades - oooh, I gotta stay home and study hard things like math while my Liberal Arts buddies go out and get high every night! I gotta work hard at understanding things while they go and have a good time! and, and, I don't have any friends to do my homework for me!
Every assigment feels the same - oooh, I don't wanna do math problems repetitively until it becomes second nature! I don't wanna practice on solving problems until I am good at it! and the whole process is not creative (whatever the hell that means)! and no hands-on (what? did they stop electronics labs? every course I took in engineering - even at the undergraduate level - included labs!)
This is exactly what is wrong with US education today. Students (and the educational system made them feel that this is their right) want to be pampered and spoiled and made to feel good. To hell with any learning!
Take it like a man, shorty!
Instead of wasting your mod points modding me down for telling the truth about you?
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
Why would someone who is presumably a finance major be writing a report on Catcher in the Rye? That question aside, do you think any of these miraculous hydroelectric dams would be around if not for people who were able to do financial audits and keep the numbers straight?
I've got news for you: engineering isn't the only worthwhile pursuit, nor is it the only difficult one. Writing coherently about literature isn't something you can do after getting drunk and staying up all night: good professors can tell if your essay is shit and will call you out on it. Nobody writes book reports in college, anyway, assignments for lit classes are usually more specific and require a degree of creativity to complete successfully that many people can't muster.
If you want a top tier, non-in-state school. Of course, if you're really smart, you should go to your in-state school and do a lot of extra-curricular stuff in-major. Then, presuming you don't start your own company right out of school, you can get your deep-pocketed employer to spring for an expensive second degree. Then go start that company.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I remember plenty of poorly written textbooks, but I also remember that for each of those cases, the professor apologized for the book, said that it was the best that there was and proceeded to make up for the quality of the book with excellent instruction. I don't mean that the books were poorly formatted or needed pictures - I mean that they were poorly written and badly organized.
A lot of posters have made references to professors who were too engaged with their research to give any time to their students. I'll admit that maybe my school was an exception; Every single one of my engineering (as well as the physics) professors were more than willing to spend as much time out of class to make sure that everyone understood what they were teaching. Sure, they all had research projects, but they were professors first and researchers second. Or maybe professors and researchers in equal measure. All that I know is that if I needed help, it was pretty easy to see the professor.
Are all the problems just exercises in math? Probably - because engineering problems are defined by math. We model reality with math, make changes to those equations and then study the results to determine the effect of those changes. Math tells us why things work - you must understand why something works (or doesn't) before you get creative. Hand-on experience isn't like adding a little salt to the pot and see if it tastes good. Hands-on experience, creative experience comes with a mastery of the "why" something works. And, for good or bad, math is the "why".
As for grade inflation, it happens in engineering classes, too. Perhaps not as much as in other field; I can't say, though, because I'm an engineer, not a historian or economist, right? Just deal with it, be happy that you earned the grade that you earned and move on. Ten years on, your grades won't mean anything.
And regarding counseling, there were a few professors who were pretty bad at both educational and professional counseling, but the majority of the faculty did a great job. In fact, I started an internship after my sophomore year and now, 8 years later, I still work for the company. My adviser was very interested in the work that I was doing and gave me a lot of suggestions that were very helpful. Academically, she helped me craft a schedule that, although it added an extra semester to my four years, worked in a minor in math and physics.
I think that the biggest difference between other engineering schools and the school that I went to is that my school was relatively new (I think that mine was only the fifth graduating class) and the EE student body was small enough that undergrads could actually assist professors in research that would normally be done by grad students. I doubt that anyone has ever done a study on it, but I suspect that there aren't many schools that have more published papers with undergrad coauthors than mine.
But ultimately, I'd say this: if any EE or EE student thinks that what they're doing is boring, then find another career. Sure, the money as an engineer is good, but if you're not happy doing what you're doing, then get out while you're still young.
Aaron Rowe is right on the money. I'm currently an EE bachelors student at City College... graduating in 2 months. I'm 37. This is my second degree - I graduated from the University of Buffalo in '88 with a dual degree in history and polisci. Now I started at UB for aerospace engineering, and had a teacher in physics 107 (mechanics - i.e., our first course) say "look to the left and right of you. Two of the three of you won't be here in 2 years." He might have been right, but UB didn't even make an attempt to encourage us to stay. Nor did it try to show us what we'd get out of it. Meanwhile my friends were skiing, drinking and getting laid. So I dropped out. Actually, right before I dropped out of engineering, I was reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which convinced me to also get a job in a garage, which helped my building skills more than anything I was going to get in engineering in the first 2-3 years. The thing I got from Zen and the Art was, don't bother going to school for something until you know why you're there to learn it. I went back to school after being a tech consultant for 10 years and making plenty of money, because I wanted to work in renewable energy, and I didn't really care how much of a financial penalty I would pay in doing this. This motivation was enough to survive 3.5 years of bullshit, and I will go so far as to say as almost sabotage, by my school in getting a second degree. This degree is, as far as I'm concerned, just a credential, but a very important one. Some of my clients were probably less than thrilled having their time and attendance oracle db installed by a history major, but I'd been in the industry so long that experience mattered more... certainly no one would have let me do the solar power system on top of a hospital with a history degree. Some observations based on City College and University of Buffalo: - I like building things. I am not much better at building things than I was 3 and a half years ago. In fact, to the extent that I am, it's because of my peers. Some of the smartest May '08 EE grads in my school know how to solder, how to program a PIC, how to mill aluminum, how to use a plastic printer, how A/D conversion is done, or how to build a power distribution system for electronics near electric motors, because me and some other older IT guys who are returning engineering undergrads taught them. - At both schools you were fairly well prevented from doing anything concrete unless someone really liked you. That meant that you'd need to get excellent grades in something where the teacher actually gave a shit about his undergrads, which was not all that often. For people with a true engineering mindset, that means that they could actually disappear from the profession without ever getting the chance to show what they could do, and no one would notice. This was the case with me the first time around. Also, the people getting A's and the real engineers are quite often not the same people. - The ability to build things is disappearing, and the reasons for this are many. Machinists are hard to come by, and the introductory level courses in high schools are disappearing. My high school had computer labs and no machine shop (granted it was in Manhattan). Getting dirty is considered to be the sign of some McJob peasant, not an engineer, even if you're milling parts out of aluminum for a robot. The practical skills of diagnosing are problem are very related to the ability to design a new system, and these skills are being lost - not just in engineering applications, they're being lost everywhere - cars, healthcare, the IT world - because those skills are expensive and difficult to acquire. - To add to that, the ability to build new things depends in part in your ability to understand similar things that have already been built... there is no interest in the engineering world in taking any kind of historical or investigative look at what already exists. - Some of the most interesting and useful knowledge that we get - programming microprocessors, for example
But it pays well after all the schooling is over... How many degrees besides medical fields can you feel 95% confident that you will have a job after school?
For a bunch of engineers, it is odd that so many of you think engineering school needs so little improvement. Or, heck--that the world needs little improvement, since the idea here would seem to be that if more people were interested in engineering, more engineers would be out there improving things.
Curiosity may have killed any number of things, but never itself.
The math part was the part I liked the best. Deriving equations, all that. I loved seeing where it all came from. It was like watching thought become action, something akin to magic.
The whole time I felt like I was climbing a mountain. I loved it all. The challenge of it, the feeling of treading new waters, late nights, too much coffee...all of it. I know that makes me deeply odd, but it's true.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Well this feeling of "easier disciplines" getting a better deal only get worse in grad school! Take CS for example. Try talking to a fresh Algorithms PhD and a fresh HCI/Semantic-Web PhD!! The former will probably be looking a tiny list of low paying postdocs at some unknown university while the latter will probably have offers from the top research labs and univs.... Seriously life is unfair get used to it!
I am going to school for computer engineering and I work with to Computer Science students from different schools and a computer engineering student from a different school. We all work in a shop that mixes hardware manufacturing and engineering with software engineering. The biggest grip that seems to cross university lines is that what they teach isn't always relevant to todays tech. I mean I just got down with a Computer Interfacing class that was done completely with a serial port and an ISA board. USB was mentioned as too complex to teach in one quarter(maybe, but two?), but I am pretty sure it had to do with the teacher being out of industry for 10+ years. I also was teaching a tenured professor how to solder board mount components using magical things like flux and non rosin core solder. The guys at work say the same thing. Software engineering class that don't even mention versioning (svn, cvs, whatever) software or unit test. Electrical engineering classes that are two bogged down in theory to say oh and you can buy this whole system off the shelf. I kept rereading waiting to see this complaint and it was no where, WTF?
I think what you said applies to all engineering majors, but you can add a bit to each specific engineering major. For example, in mine (aerospace) we had to do a ton of applied math courses, just 3 credit hours shy of an applied math minor with the standard curriculum. I think the reason we took so much applied math was to prove that yes, we can do a large amount of math that may be involved in the discipline. On the downside, we had far fewer elective credits than other majors (including engineering ones) so many of my classmates had very little exposure to the humanities while in college.
Many of the points in the article ring true for me. We had several awful text books (one was the equivalent of an alpha 1 release of Vista--a book covering differential equations and linear algebra--if you can imagine how horrible that is) and some professors that had no business being teachers. One physics professor insisted on not allowing even 8-function calculators on any tests but would give you more partial credit if you used a log system of math rather than standard arithmetic when solving the problems. He also would spend time in class on such subjects as the history of the unit of horse power.
One funny memory of college is from a 8am recitation I had for the aforementioned physics class. The teacher assistant was an Indian (the Hindu type) with a very thick accent who had a very monotonous tone of voice. One day a student right in front of me that had dozed off suddenly stood up, turned right, and ran right into the wall 10 feet away, crumpling to the floor in a daze. Needless to say that was the end of that recitation that day, but it sure woke the rest of us up. I think he sleep-ran into the wall, since he seemed to be OK afterward and didn't know what had happened.
Most of the complaints seem to be about the drudgery of work and the unfairness of grading. I thought that, too, for a while. Then I realized that there were 4.0 GPA aerospace engineers in my class, and most of them really liked what they were doing. I did too, mostly, but barely made top 1/4 of my class. It wasn't that the grading was harder than high school - the people were smarter. As a result, I was lower on the population bell curve than I'd been, and I had to do a lot more work just to keep up.
If engineering is too hard, go play in one of the other majors. You'll probably find a couple where you're higher on the IQ chart than most. Big fish in a little pond - then you can slack a bit and get marks like you did in High School. Just hope you've got an "in" in the business world, because after you get you first job, nobody will care what your GPA was in college. Then you'll be back to fighting with the smart ones who took the hard classes in college - or worst yet, the so-so students who have family in your chosen business. Then you're truly screwed. Unless, of course, you're a genius and you start your own company and make a fortune...but if you were, you'd probably be doing better in your engineering classes. Bummer.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
"So, yes actually, the clerks do, and you are wrong :)."
No they don't. I mean, some may, but there's no way to know which ones without asking.
"What he is saying the clerks handling academic scholarships do is consider a 3.8 GPA in X equivalent to a 3.8 GPA in Y"
I know that, he's wrong and you are too. The reality is, they don't "consider" the GPA at all, they read it, and file it. They make no judgment about the numbers contained on the apps, and even if they did, THEIR JUDGMENT IS IRRELEVANT. They have NO decision making power, they FILE APPS.
If the criteria is 3.8, it's 3.8. What the clerk thinks about that HAS NO BEARING on the number.
So, no, you and he are both wrong.
It really depends where you go. Personally I had a miserable experience many of the reasons were due to the university I attended. Instead of hiring qualified professors, they hired qualified engineers. The university made a substantial amount of money off of any research the professors produced into a product. So they offered free research and got a large percent of the profits. Unfortunately one equation I did learn was a great engineer does not always equal a great teacher. They were often condescending held little or no office hours. Handed all their work to their T.A's(who often didn't speak English well enough), and did seem to choose awfully written books that (most often) they or their colleagues wrote. The books were terrible because they were laid out poorly and did not have complete information. The book would skip steps in the process of simplifying equations, and (only in one case) did the book actually have no information that the questions, in the same book, required. That I remember clearly. As for inflated average, I would have settled for a "typical" average. My class averages were often in the low double digits and sometimes single digits. This includes honor students. It seemed more for separating the weak from the strong, than actually transferring the information. I made it because I was just to stubborn to quit. Plus the grades all had to be put on a curve so despite my grade average of a 24 i ended up with an 86, but never thinking you can actually pass a test on your own is a mind f*ck. We were told by a T.A. once that they were trying to fail out students for the first year of engineering. Turns out they were actually trying to fail us out for the first four years.
My post: As a software development major, I'm starting to get really sick of constantly having three or four projects on my plate at any given moment. I love writing software, but if I have three projects in different languages, all due the same week (and I'll be getting three more when I hand in the current ones), I can't really put that much time in to any of the projects. However, this isn't so bad when you consider I've been writing the same crap for about three years now.
TFA: 1. Every Assignment Feels the Same
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
If you can do both, so much the better. Like in the circuits example you mentioned; as an aerospace engineering student I never learned it. The professor was terrible at teaching a bunch of non-EE majors how a circuit works because he was trying to teach us circuits math, not circuits. He never taught us what a circuit was for. Giving someone a circuit diagram and saying "solve for this" isn't very productive, especially when your students are more than capable of applying the concepts to their own discipline.
I think the general attitude of "well you're probably not going to use this so we'll just teach you how to solve problems with it instead" is pointless and destructive to the engineering education. I'd love to be able to really get circuits, to get what I thought I paid for but I'm having to teach it to myself now, my job demands it.
Yes, studying engineering sucks, espcially the early classes before you get to do independent study; but at least employeers recognize the value of having survived a reasonably rigorous cours eof study and developed an analytic bent for problem solving.
Personally, I probably worked only 10% of my career so far as an engineer - and never designing things; rather applying my skills to plant operation, testing, and repair. I've also used the problem solving skills a lot as a consultant; even if teh client has noting to do with engineering.
The challenge for engineering students is to broaden their education beyond quant skills - take as much art and science classes as you can (even if pass / fail or non-credit) so that you can combine analytics with a broader undersatnding of teh world. The more you can communicate with others the more valuable you are - I'll take an average engineer with great communication skills over a great engineer who can't communicate effectively every time when I hire someone.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
ALL of the heads of state in the world today are, or can be considered Liberal Arts majors. MOST of the governments of the world are filled to the brim with liberal arts students (mostly specializing in language. Many CEO's have liberal arts degrees and NOT business degrees. So your statement that the Liberal Arts Major is a four-year stamp for dead-end jobs is not even remotely accurate. People who major in Liberal Arts run the world you live in, because most people who major in Engineering or other hard sciences would do an absolutely horrible job doing so. That's not where your skillsets or strengths lie. In order to run the world, you have to be able to account for other people's opinions, personalities, agendas, and desires. Most engineers/programmers/scientists I've met are very intolerant of opinions and beliefs other than their own (as often evidenced on Slashdot). They cannot deal with the political complexities required, nor would they be successful in a job that required them to do so. Furthermore, I'd be more inclined to believe that if put into power, engineers and other hard scientists would probably institute forms of fascism into the government, because they would be more interested in fixing the problem than in actually running the system. And there's a vast difference between the two goals when you're considering political systems.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
10. Lack of professors with RECENT real world experience. Many of the professors I have had have only had real world experience with procedural languages. I found the highest quality professors were those that had real jobs as software engineers outside the classroom. One professor at my university routinely posts news articles about the impending CoBOL comeback. I am still waiting.
9. cookie cutter lessons. None of the lessons taught in class are fresh. In fact, at my university, the lessons have to be "approved" by some department head so once a professor gets one approved, he just reprints the syllabus and assignments from the previous years with new due dates on them.
8. Classes are too long. I spend enormous amounts of time IN CLASS and between 2 jobs and school I have little time for homework, studies and family. Also a semester should be shorter (maybe a month shorter), It seems like each project is only marginally different than the previous. I mean how many different ways do I need to to be able to perform relevance analysis? Once you learn the theory and 1 implementation, move on. It's not that interesting anyways. yes I know this was similar to #1 but my complaint is not that the assignments are repetitive but more that a 4 month semester is too long to spend on a single topic and professors are packing the time with stupid assignments.
7. Hostility to all things open source. My university still refuses to accept that students might not be running Windows (or even OSx). I am routinely assigned projects that require MS SqlServer or Excel or some equally annoying platform dependent technology. When I ask my professors "Does it run on Linux?" they always give me a blank stare for 30 seconds before telling me that there is a Lab on campus will all the software I need.... It's too bad I work 60 hours a week and am lucky just to get to class. I mean Why are they chained to visual studio? How much is MS paying them to use only MS products?
6. lack of interest in new technologies. I know this kinda goes with the above but Jesus people if I hear one more professor rattle on about punch cards or CoBOL I am gonna lose my mind. We get it. You guys programmed by chiseling instructions on stone tablets and the ramming the tablets up a dinosaur's ass and then you waited for the dinosaur to perform your instructions. I don't CARE!!! let's try something new shall we? Quit livin' in the Past.
Wall Street Journal: March 20, 2008;
"Want More Engineers? Provide Jobs for Them"
. . .
"However, the declining number of students enrolled in technical programs has nothing to do with the quality of our schools or the natural talents and interests of our students. It has everything to do with the massive loss of domestic technology jobs to outsourcing, offshoring and the importation of foreign technology workers through the H1-B visa program. It has everything to do with vanishing opportunities, declining compensation and decreasing job security."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120598693755151313.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
It depends on what your interests are. If you like taking humanity classes but want to graduate in 4 years, then yes being an engineering student sucks. Also, you should probably factor in how much you like doing applied math with which specific engineering major you want, in this order (most math to least):
aerospace
electrical
chemical
mechanical/civil
computer science (if you count this as engineering)
Several students I knew that were hating aerospace switched to mechanical or electrical and enjoyed those majors much more than aero mainly for this reason (not spending all your time picking up new applied math courses).
As for the humanities, I had an interest in playing in the symponic band at my college but could only fit it into my schedule one semester due to completely incompatible scheduling between the school of music and of the engineering department. I also wanted to take foreign languages every semester but could only fit it in a few times for similar reasons (unless I wanted to permanently take 8am classes).
GREAT sig! That's such a cool episode.
Darmok, his arms wide!
With the first link, the chain is forged.
If you think it sucks to be an engineering student, don't you think you'll hate being an engineer? If you don't like what you're doing in college, you're only going to hate it more in real life. Change your major.
And one more thing, textbooks suck all around these days. That's true for any major anymore, the business of textbook publishing is supported by a combination of corporate grants and wildly inflated prices at non-competitive on-campus bookstores. I challenge you to find any major that has consistently good textbooks.
Has anyone else noticed that some people seem to take an engineering major just so they can tell other people "My major is so much harder than yours! I'm both a) smarter and b) more deserving of your sympathy!
As an engineering manager, I've hired a lot (and fired a few) engineers and tech writers.
I don't give a rat's behind what your grades are. I care if you can think. Yes, I've rejected 4.0 "homework machines" and hired lesser GPA candidates who showed me that they could problem-solve, not just answer homework. And major doesn't matter much either, if you can show you can do the work. One of the best programmers I know has degrees in linguistics, not engineering.
So, here's some advice to all you still in school: 1) Don't confuse getting good grades with getting a good education. 2) Hiring managers are looking for people that solve problems, not cause problems.
Congratulations Slashdot on becoming Digg. Seriously.
I'm not talking about "measurable truth vs. perception." I'm talking about being able to communicate what you know.
Scientists are often good at taking real-world things and describing them with formulas and theories. They are often bad at taking their findings and describing them in real-world terms.
To be unable to break your field's concepts down into simpler terms is a mental shortcoming, just like not being able to understand the concepts in the first place. Maybe it's no big deal if you only talk to other scientists. But the "film majors are morons" poster seemed to think smart=articulate, and that's just not the case.
If engineers have it so tough, why is it that whenever we (the science physics students) had classes with the engineering students in undergrad, we thoroughly whomped them? Hell, I had to pay extra tuition one year because a required course was cross listed with engineering so it was a four credit course instead of a three credit course (even though it was much less work than my other physics courses, apparently engineering students need extra credit hours to account for having to take a lab).
Also, if this guy wants to complain about being an engineering student and having terrible textbooks, try having to use graduate level textbooks for the last two years of your undergrad because they don't make undergrad textbooks.
Granted, based on my limited experience with engineering professors, they do seem generally terrible, but this is probably something that depends on where you go. However, if you don't expect to learn largely on your own with a crappy textbook, you probably shouldn't be in either engineering or the physical sciences.
what's that now?
The grading system as we know it today comes almost unchanged from its invention sometime during the Middle-Ages. A grade is not indicative of anything other than an individual's ability to earn a grade. If you got an 'A' and you think that means you're smart, then you'd be wrong. Grades do not reflect aptitude, but only how well you can earn a grade. Generally speaking, if you do everything a teacher tells you to do, give them just what they want, you should get an 'A.' If you are truly brilliant and creative, its likely the work needed to get the 'A' will not challenge you, you will learn all you need with as little work as possible (work smarter, not harder), and you will receive a mediocre, if not a failing, grade. It is very probable and likely that many who fail know as much or more of the course material than those who ace the course.
Its grades that suck, not the material of any given course. That students must pay, with their parents' monies, their self-esteem, and sometimes their sanity, to make it easier for prospective employers with an illusory and truly baseless method to sift the competition is anathema. College is stressful enough without the damaging effects grades have on all students. Grades should be abolished and replaced with true evaluations.
The Admin and the Engineer
"No one hires a director, artist, or writer based on their GPA (I challenge you to find one director's undergrad GPA on IMDB or wikipedia). The quality of their portfolio of work determines their success or failure - not their GPA."
It's either who you know and/or who you blow --- talent is secondary. Look at popular art, film, music or writing and tell me I'm mistaken.
Basically, if you can't handle the unfairness while you're a student then you probably won't handle the unfairness when you're an engineer.
If you're just going to complain and have a terrible life, well then it was better to find out while you are a student.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Brilliant engineering students may earn surprisingly low grades while slackers in other departments score straight As for writing book reports and throwing together papers about their favorite zombie films
Oh!!! You think *that's* annoying? Wait until you get in the real world, and those people are the ones that are appointed to make decisions about your career because they are "creative" and see the "big picture".
A professor once told me "There are two ways to make a living; Take something easy and make it look hard...or take something hard and make it look easy." If you're really an engineer at heart, you take a lot of comfort in knowing that you fall into the latter category...but it doesn't make it any less annoying.
30% drop out in the first year
...
30% drop out by the end of the course
Of what is left most pursue another disciplines.
Team projects are meant to suck because in the real word these things are tricky.
The reason all this sucks to some people is to selectively get rid of them.
Consider it intentional.
Now if you enjoy Engineering even though you went through this
Congratulations you were meant to be an engineer. Many were sacrificed so that you can become one.
Go forth and engineer things
G
Once you graduate, the engineering degree has a good chance of getting you a well paying job where you get to use your brain to create "stuff".
With an easy to get liberal arts degree, you have the opportunity to join the exciting world of the fast food service industry.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Yes, your professors are boring and disinterested. The assignments are tough and tedious. Your eventual job will be much the same. But..... You get to work on stuff that interests you. If you do not get your jollies creating Free Body Diagrams, whetstone bridges, or Karnaugh maps, perhaps you should go review zombie films.
I've never thought of it like that; looking at it from that angle really does change my entire attitude. I feel a little foolish now for ranting up and down and not taking the time to even consider that. That's, seriously, one of the most insightful things anyone has told me in a long time.
Out of curiosity, how did you see that? I almost get a hint that this is a lesson you've had to learn in the past (and perhaps were too stubborn and young to understand, like myself), and has an anecdote attached? There's just no way that you saw straight through the situation without having "been there, done that"!
I'm seriously hoping you could follow up that thought a bit; I could use a bit of wisdom as of late. My advisor wants me to apply for our grad. program, but he's beside himself at my QPA ("You're entirely too smart to have a 2.35, come on!") since he does the Computer Science grad school admissions. I've been at war with myself over selling out by "playing the game" to boost my QPA, or continue to learn as much as possible, grades notwithstanding. My sister has a 4.0, but only plays the game... she doesn't even know what classes she's taken and forgets everything after the exam... drives me nuts.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
As part of my engineering curriculum, we were required to take a few business-related classes including Finance and Productions & Operations Mgmt (aka POM). The reason behind this was to make us "well-rounded engineers" and more adept at taking on a wider range of tasks, such as those one might find in smaller companies. I knew several bus. ed students who dreaded taking the Finance and POM classes since they were by their perspective their "two hardest classes by a long-shot". Turned out that these were among the easiest of all the classes the engineers ever took.
The scariest thing about this whole experience was seeing our future bankers struggling to do a single simple compounded interest problem with a calculator in under an hour w/o assistance from the teacher. Meanwhile, the engineering students in the class usually had it done correctly in about 10 seconds or less. I saw similar differences in the POM class where the bus.ed students were baffled by a simple just-in-time inventory scenario, while the engineers had the answer figured out within seconds.
There is such a difference in effort required to earn an "A" grade between engineering and non-engineering disciplines, that it probably merits using a different measuring system entirely.
Engineering degree? It sucked but I loved it.
:)
If going to college isn't WAAAY more than attending classes then, in my eyes, you're missing out. Don't spend time bitching about the textbooks. Spend time trying to get into the homework group of the single semi-attractive female in your engineering math class of 200. Spend time trying to get on the robotics competition team, or figure out how to build a concrete canoe.
Spend time finding obscure research texts in the library. Wander through the physics lab. Join a club, find a gang you can get together regularly with and play a game or urban explore, or practice some crazy martial art.
Even if you can't do all these things while maintaining an unnecessary A+ average - who cares? What is life? Why are you in school? Every day gets you closer to death so why, as long as you can stay in school, do you care enough about shitty textbooks or grading practices to even spend the time bitching about it?
Get into research as an undergraduate. Take trips out of town to the nearby lake on a beautiful Thursday afternoon instead of going to lecture. Take a classmate and discuss your impending fluid dynamics exam there while on a boat. How fast does a wave propagate? Can you go faster? What happens?
The phrase "Live and Learn" has the words ordered the way they are for a reason. You'll feel much better about your four years when you graduate than if you never let loose "back when you were in school." They're you're college days - use them as such.
And yes I paid for it and no I don't regret it. Do whatever you want but I guarantee you you'll regret more keeping you nose buried in horrible engineering texts than spending that time with people and exploring your surroundings.
Engineering degree? I did it all for the nookie.
According to your definition, the world is run by the "Peoples Skills" set, which, in fact, it is. This is evidenced (expecially in politics) by the tepid, vacillating, "bend with the breeze" politicians. Maybe we need leaders who have a set of balls and believe in their convictions rather than "Playing to the poll numbers". I think engineers would make great politicians. So they're a tad stubborn in their convictions, but that is what's lacking with crowd pleaser sycophants in office today.
In case anybody missed it, the kid in the picture is doing an annuity calculation, most likely for microeconomics. He decided engineering wasn't worth it...
That's the most unconvincing, biased list of anything I've seen in ages!
First of all, I'm a fourth-year student at a big engineering university.
When everyone asks me what I think of my school & major... my answer is always the following:
I love my major, but the workload is constant, so that gets difficult. It's just that--difficult to keep up! The assignments are (80%) fair... *rarely* plug-and-chug "math" problems, most professors do seem to care (only one I had really did not care), and the subject is interesting to me, so I think it's all worth it in the end. Counseling here is horrible (my Co-op advisor told me to switch to ME back in freshman year just because of the job market in my field), but that hasn't stopped me from landing several high-paying/interesting internships and jobs!
Plus, everyone I know who's in school for engineering has the distinct goal of a certain $$ starting salary. We all know we'll have jobs when we graduate if we do -decently- (talking a whopping 3.0 minimum for most companies), so I think the GPA difference is taken into consideration.
Sure, none of us have lives here. Sure, there are "no" girls here. But in the end, I have an offer months in advance of my graduation (like many of my friends) with a starting salary above the average household income of the area I'm moving to! That, to me, is enough to validate all this craziness. From what I hear, the job itself will be similar to this lifestyle anyways, so like someone else mentioned... it's good to get used to it!
And by the way, I've had lots of great books in my curriculum... a few bad, usually those that were written by the professor here though. I hate the flashier Econ/Business book style... as engineering texts they'd be wasted paper with pictures and things unnecessary for real mathematical approaches. How silly would it be to have a controls book with big colorful pictures of masses, springs, and dampers? Anyways, I suppose it takes an engineering type of person to appreciate the engineering courses!
Modern Art: A gold plated toilet, hung upside down on the wall.
See for yourself: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN.
The coolest part about being an engineering student is that when you graduate you get to design things that everyone else uses... You get to say 'I designed that' about all sorts of things... Bits of cars, vans, aircraft...
Doesn't get you the girls though... Unfortunately...
Given the ease with which you made up and propagated that bullshit, there's a good chance you have or are on your way to having a BA.
But lets try getting you to provide some real information.
List for us World Leaders and CEOs who only have a Bachelor of Arts degree. I'm sure there are a couple. Now figure out (if you ever learned how to do this) the percentage of CEOs and World Leaders (or even members of congress) who just have Bachelor of Arts degrees. To keep the problem manageable, you might consider only looking at Fortune-50, -100, or -500 companies.
Here, let me help you:
Fortune Top 10:
- Wal Mart: Lee Scott, Business degree
- Exxon: Rex Tillerson, B.S. in Civil Engineering
- General Motors: B.A. in Economics, MBA Harvard
- Chevron: David O'Reilly, B.S. Chemical Engineering
- Conoco Phillips: JAmes Mulva, BA in Business and MBA
- General Electric: BA Applied Mathematics, MBA
- Ford: Alan Mulally, BS and MS Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering
- Citigroup: Vikram Pandit, BS and MS in Engineering, PhD in finance
- Bank of America: Ba Finance
- American Intl. Group: MArtin J Sullivan, degree unknown (he's british)
So out of the top 10, you have four engineers, four business/finance, and one applied math guy.
*ZERO* Liberal Arts majors. Maybe we can give you one out of 10 with credit for the math guy, even though it was APPLIED math.
So for CEOs, looks like engineers kick liberal arts major ass. For Heads of State, I think you'll find that the vast majority of Heads of State have MBAs or JDs (or BLs) in developed nations, or are the children of political families in lesser-developed nations, or are former warlords in even less developed nations.
But, with a statement as stupid as "ALL of the heads of state in the world today are, or can be considered Liberal Arts majors", (ALL? Really? Don't make it hard to be proven wrong or anything...) I doubt you're going to have much to say here, even if you did use your Liberal Arts training to insert your 'cover my don't know anything ass' statement of "or can be considered". Can be considered? Either they have liberal arts degrees or they don't!
It must really gall you how you just got trounced by an engineer though.
paintball
I was(still am for another few weeks) part of the inaugural year of the 'Freshman Engineering Program' at the university of arkansas.
:]
The program was initiated to combat the poor retention rate (it was like 63% I think?) of engineering students after the freshman year. So far we're at just below 70% retention, so they seem to have found a little success so far! (we just had our Declaration Day so most people who don't want to be engineers should have been culled out by now).
We've had seminars this semester and last about all kinds of things; how to get involved with engineering organizations, how to build resumes, what each engineering discipline involves, how to get money for studying abroad or just to pay your tuition, how to behave at interviews and when career fairs were being held, etc.
We also have a 1 hour class (sadly all those seminars and lectures made it take up about 5 hours a week), which is filled with easy points and assignments relevant to our future experiences of writing reports and inventing things.
We chose mentors at our orientation in summer to meet up with weekly; they clue us in to which professors to avoid or shoot for, what classes will be like in the upcoming semesters, they keep us accountable for our grades and assignments.
Then aside from that, there are several 'adults' in charge to go to for informal advising or office hours, aside from the usual army of TAs one would expect.
Of course most of the seminars were completely dull if you didn't want to be a CivE or a ChemE, and by learning a little bit about each discipline, we've delayed the more indepth treatment of our chosen discipline, but on the whole I think it was a very precocious treatment of the very things this little list details.
If anything else, it was a good way to meet other engineers, if only because we were forced to
Later in my life, when I directed the work of several engineers, I found I was glad I did not become one. And the same goes when I meet that kid-cousin who just became one. Other professions have inflated grades. Like marketers, salesemen or finance guys. This is real life, boys. Every day on the job feels the same, too.
Switch over to the business school They'll take anybody.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
You're probably getting knocked to -1 by fellas with unlimited mod points because you've made the jump from figuratively to literally asking for it. So, your first statement at least is likely off base.
There's a second reason, by the way.One of the courses I was in was forced to give only one 'A' out of around 90 students and 4 'B' grades to fix the department's bell curve because of scores in other classes often used by athletes, et. al as filler for their general education requirements. So the level for the 'A' grade was at around 98%, 'B' at 95%, and 'C' cut off at around 88%. Where the equivalent course would require something like a 90%, 80%, 70% levels for the same grade. What's fair about nuking someone's scholarship when in fact they are in the top 5 students in a class of 75? With a score modifier in place, the college university would have not so easily messed with the numbers if a "B" grade in a more advanced engineering course carried more weight than a "B" grade in the general ed math course offered by the same department.
My point isn't that 200% is the right "GPA enhancement" or an "A+ grade" in a doubly difficult course, by the way -- it's that other things need to be taken into account besides straight GPA.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
The person who lives it up in their 18's and 20's.
Attends lots of parties with other party animal types and booze.
Get's good grades and a degree.
Goes straight into a decent job making decent pay with a relatively small college bill and the potential to advance within a corporation.
or engineers
who bust their butts.
work long hours on assignments.
graduate to jobs with low status and slightly better pay but little chance for advancement.
---
We need to get OVER the perceived status of these positions and stop entering them enough so that their actual prestige (and pay) rises again. There is currently still a gross over-supply since engineers, computer scientists, and so on seem to be stuck in a low status ghetto after (well... and during) college. Back in the 50's it was great to be an engineer or scientists. They were rare, got high pay, and business people were compensated at 1/400th to 1/10th what they are relative to engineers today.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Astronomy : Astrology :: Science : ?
Break up with that loser and find a GF worth keeping!
Some of them are undoubtedly just lazy, but I think another big part of it is that a kid in high school usually doesn't have a particularly accurate idea of what engineering school is really going to be like (or what an engineering career is going to be like), and it turns out to be something that just doesn't click for them. The laziness might then develop, but the laziness is more of a symptom than the actual disease. People in that position would probably be best served by looking for a new major, but if you're already a couple of years in, it might seem like a waste to not stick it out. Maybe switching majors would require you to spend an extra year in college, which would result in that much more student loans. Maybe you're just scared that whatever you choose next will be just as disappointing as engineering school was.
I'm not an engineer, I went to architecture school, but school for me was nothing like what I expected, and my job is very little like I expected either. There were plenty of things about school that I complained about (even though I worked hard (at least as hard as the engineering students) and did well), and there are plenty of things at my job that I complain about. But for both of them, despite the problems there were some very compelling things, things that I've enjoyed, things that I've loved being a part of, things that I'm proud of.
Not to make excuses for lazy people, but I think it's less of a problem that engineering is hard work, and more of an issue that it's just not for everyone, but a lot of times you don't really learn that until you try it. Just about any job/industry/field is hard work if you really want to be good at it, engineering isn't particularly special in that regard.
My other point is that it's important to differentiate between whining and criticizing. There's worlds of difference between whining because you want things to be easier because you don't care enough to work hard, and complaining because you want real change because you care about what you're involved in and you want it to be better.
Although in the case of the article that started this discussion, this guy is probably a whiner. Four out of his five points can be pretty easily applied to many fields of study. And the one about other disciplines having inflated grades could almost certainly be reversed if he spent some time at different schools.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
I believe Admiral Rickover actually had an English degree from Annapolis. At one time a liberal arts degree prepared one for a wide variety of careers.
Ridiculous. An engineering student with a TI calculator. HAH! Probably some math major.
>> textbooks are awful because they are thick and black and white and contain long equations (i don't know if i should laugh or what)..
No that is not the reason.
I am autodidactic also know as self-taught, I have never had the luxury to attend college.
I spend much of my time collecting, reading and struggling to understand master and Ph.D Level texts with out the benefit of a professor around to answer questions. Often I must get 5 or more book on a subject and read them all before I can get a complete picture because so much is left out.
Black and White, thick and full of long equations is great. My problem is the simplest of math and concepts becomes an unsolvable riddle when your missing a few simple things like the context or what A, B, and C mean in an equation when a book failed to explain this. By using several books each leaving out different things the combination allow me to find in one book things left out in another.
Unless you happen to be there when the professor explains it, it's not only non-obvious but it is unsolvable using just the text alone.
So when I finally find someone who understands it, one or two simple questions can allow me to move past it.
I almost feel the authors are deliberately leaving out key pieces of information so that without the oral tradition of a professors lectures the text is a dead end. Those students that fail to pay attention they are SOL if with just there text books alone.
I am not sure if this is deliberate or they are just so used to being in circles that understand this, that take it for granted that things like Lambda are obviously the conductance of an electrolyte or represents a wavelength. Gee that one must have taken me about a month to chase down.
One blurb on something like this can really save a lot of time and effort.
Assuming that the reader is versed in things like Galois fields when talking about elliptical curves is a bad assumption, especially when one page could cover the basics and allow the reader to proceed without a large tangent into yet more text books.
This is why Richard Feynman is so loved, because he was able to break things down and explain seemingly complex concepts in a complete yet understandable manner while not being dumbed down.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
So glad I made the change. Way, way, way, easier. I spent about 15 hours a week on homework as a CS major, less than 5 hours a week for History.
And guess what, now I'm a test engineer. I may have not have passed calculus II, but I can quote churchill (which always impresses the dip shit VPs) and I can write a useful script faster than most of the "Mr. I went to the UCSD Super computing Center to get my CS degree" that are a dime a dozen in this industry.
For me, so far, the compute/storage industry has been a matter of skills and politics, engineering degrees only help get your foot in the door if you don't know someone. As long as you have a bachelors they think you are educated. Funny thing is that engineering programs don't teach politics (like most liberal arts degrees) so a lot of the people I know with engineering degrees don't understand the personal and political dynamics involved in the modern workplace and they constantly fuck themselves over.
Alternatively, you could develop Yellow Fever in college like I did.. There are some Asian hotties in engineering :D
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
that it sucks to be an engineering student is the lack of a good future. With people like the Beltway Boys on Fox News advocating completely lifting H1B visa restrictions, so that those that would have otherwise been your employers can hire Indians, Russians, and the like for 2/3rds what you'd have otherwise been able to demand, you're out on a limb for a decent life later on, unless you want to live 5 single guys to a house, like the H1B's do, and share expenses in order to have a fun amount of discretionary income.
Hu Jintao has a hydraulic engineering degree. His first job was at a hydro-power station. So, is hydraulic engineering a liberal art or are you completely full of it?
Don't make me use my other sig!!
Nobody does, but the guy who's great at acting like he knows makes the bucks. (exception, sort of: See Kramer "Mad Money" guy - he explains that he kind of knows what's going on but he breaths, eats, sleeps, shits, fucks, the stock market.)
Neither do I.
I don't understand, but I think leaving then just to copyright is the right thing. Please don't ask me to reason it out other than I "think" it like the written word.
Like the college drop-outs who make it really big: Gates, Jobs, Cuban, etc...and there's the guy who went to 2 year college and has a $3 million tile store argggg! I'm with you.
With you there.
Not just engineers, sorry.
I'm sure you've figured this out: you don't need to; just listen to her.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
Hate to link to myself, but this one really deserves its own counterlist. Top Five Reasons it Rocks To Be An Engineering Student
Yes, it did suck to be an engineering student - but it's not for any of the reasons the author stated. It was hard, demoralizing, and robbed me of any semblance of a "normal" college experience. But once you have an engineering degree you can pretty much go into anything you damn well please. Sure I could have had a 4.0 as an English major, but what would that have gotten me? It's not for everyone and it's not a typical college track - if you go into it knowing that, you're not going to get blindsided. I'd call it a love/hate relationship - I loved learning about it and working hard at it, and I also hated every agonizing minute of it. Would I do it all over again - hell yes.
I've studied both engineering and liberal arts on the graduate and undergraduate level and I've found the liberal arts to be just as hard as engineering. Sure it's a pain in the ass to memorize equations, but it also means that sometimes, when you're lucky, tests can boil down to the old plug and chug. Also, no matter how hard the concept, proof, whatever, at the end of the day if you put enough effort in, you will understand it.
Have any of you ever tried to read Hegel? It's incomprehensible. Or if you think philosophy is cheating (when I took courses in logic, they were cross-listed between the philosophy and mathematics departments), try reading Finnegans Wake. Better yet stop whining and choose a different major if you feel so hardly done by. Maybe your non-engineering roommate is just smarter than you.
If you have engineer genes, it's going to be hard. If you don't, well, its even harder.
There hasn't been a new nerd joke since maybe 1960. Only the technology nouns have changed.
-dB
"It if was easy to do, we'd find someone cheaper than you to do it."
Obviously this guy has never taken a 300-level physics course, like theromdynamics or PDE. Much more teeth pulling than anything he's mentioned.
>I have worked at/with both sides of that fence. Medicine is a heck of a lot harder than engineering.
>The complexity of biological systems is typically orders higher than most engineering projects,
That's a fallacious argument because no one designs, or even understands to a very high degree, how biological systems work. The discussion wasn't about whether it is harder to understand computers or biology, which is a moot point because *no one* understands how any biological system works to the degree that I understand how my computer works, it was whether it is harder to succeed in a biology, medical, or an engineering program.
This is a much more difficult question to answer. I suspect it isn't that hard to get a bachelors in biology compared to a BS in CS, but becoming an MD requires more years and may require more effort. However, I think it also changes depending on where you go to school, and what kind of job you are aiming for when you come out. Also, if you are going to be a physician, I doubt it requires the kind of analytical capacity that many engineering tasks require, but on the other hand the same thing can be said of being a low level code monkey, since those guys often don't know the theory behind computer science anyway.
So, the question is really too vague to answer. Computer science and much of engineering has theoretical and analytical aspects that don't really exist in biology, whereas biology has complexity and a need to memorize vast amounts of facts. Also, since I'm not actually an MD, it's hard for me to say if I'm missing an important part of the field.
I'd say that simply as a matter of years, although this is not a great measure, it is harder to get the degree necessary to be a physician than it is to be a code monkey. Technically you don't even need to go to school to get some kinds of programming jobs.
Bah, teacher can stop grading on a curve when they figure out what is worth teaching and how to test it. I was lucky and got to go to co-ops all through my chemical engineer degree. I realized pretty quickly that we were being taught a load of worthless garbage that we would never use.
The vast majority of engineering examines are really tests of rote memory, your differential equations skills, and how quickly you can rush through some silly problem. On the other hand, most professional engineers will never ever do differential equations by hand, will be smart enough to look something up if they don't know the answer off the top of their head, and never toss an arbitrary hour long time limit onto doing critical calculations. College engineering, especially BS degrees, teach you about an hour's worth of useful knowledge for every 100 hours you of your life you burn away trying to stuff seven differential equations into each other.
I can't tell you about other engineering degrees, but I can tell you that the chemical engineering curriculum has not change in the slightest since 1950, yet most chemical engineers these days shoot for jobs in biotechnology, nanotechnology, and solid state devices... fields that didn't even exist in 1950. This should give you an idea of the worthlessness of chemical engineering degrees these days.
I can't speak for the other engineering degrees, but I can say that a chemical engineer offers only two things. First, it shows that you have some basic understanding of chemistry and physics. Second, that you have the perseverance of a saint, are smart, or both. The "I must not be an complete idiot degree" is nice, but I personally look back on those years with disappointment at how little real education I got in a field that interests me. If it had not been for co-ops, I would have chalked up the academic aspects of getting an engineer as a complete loss.
What makes it worse is that having spent time in industry I realize how much I could have learned if we didn't blow all of our time trying to kludge a dozen different equations into a solvable form or memorizing worthless equations.
For a good number of girls in university, they'd probably maximise their income by forgetting about education and be prostitutes and pornographic actors (what was that Eliot Spitzer prostitute making, $5000/hour?
Upside: $5,000/hr.
Downside: Have to screw Eliot Spitzer
Challenge: Have to convince Eliot Spitzer that you enjoyed it.
paintball
why ask why? just deal. too hard? change your major and stop whining.
FWIW since probably no one will read this.
In physics 2 I was told by an engineering student in my class that I'd never pass because my undergraduate degree was English lit.
"This is where they weed out the engineers."
On the final I had an 89, the highest score. Class average was 45!
As an undergraduate, I enrolled as engineering student briefly, but got bored and went back to liberal arts. Later I became a research geophysicist.
There are good engineers, but there are also plenty of twerps that didn't learn anything, but have lots of attitude.
rhb
this is a bunch of hooey. allow me to apply the same points to being a music major:
5. Awful Textbooks
Music theory textbooks teach you prototypical constructions that don't actually apply in the real world. Therefore, doing the exercises in the book exposes you to plain vanilla, uninteresting, contrived musical examples that have no bearing on reality.
4. Professors are Rarely Encouraging
At the end of every semester, music majors have to perform a "jury" for a group of faculty members. These people frequently forget that students can't be expected to perform at the same level as they do -- most of them are accomplished musicians with doctoral degrees in performance or musicology. They love to tell you how terrible you are and point out your deficiencies.
3. Dearth of Quality Counseling
Most music programs don't offer career counseling either. Academic musicians hate popular music, so viable careers in the music industry are never discussed. Anyone who has become a successful musicians has no time to go back into the baby university programs and tell us how to get out of being a piano teacher for 3-year olds for the rest of our lives.
2. Other Disciplines Have Inflated Grades
Engineering students who can't speak english get amazing grades but can't write a paper to save their lives. We have to write 15-page papers on the influence of Beethoven on the ensuing generations, and all they have to do is play around with their multimeters all day. The guys on the basketball team get to take Music Appreciation and get A's in Criminal Justice, and we have to do 12-tone serialism assignments.
1. Every Assignment Feels the Same
Nearly every homework assignment and test question is a music problem. Only a few courses require creativity or offer hands-on experience.
Anyway, most of that is tongue-in-cheek, at least from me. For one single reason: i liked being a music major. Yeah, there are things that suck about being a STUDENT, but if you enter into a college program and you're not prepared to "live the life", you shouldn't go into that program. If you think life as an engineering major sucks, try being a medical sciences major, or psych, or journalism, or anything.
What a bunch of whiners. Are these the people I want designing the laptop i'm gonna buy in 15 years? Do your fsckin' job and stop trying to turn your education into a 4-year post-adolescent playgroup.
Doctors also have an annoying sense of entitlement and we pay them a lot. Similar concept.
:)
Further, unless you go to a private university, even though you pay a lot, it is nowhere near the real cost of educating you. Most importantly though, most engineering professor actually generate in excess of $400,000 per year in external research funds (at least at Tier I universities such as Illinois, Berkeley, Texas, Purdue, etc etc). On average, the university collects about $140,000 of this as overhead which they can then spend on anything they like. Meaning, none of your tuition is really going to cover the professor's salary. This is particularly true since professors pay for their own summers out of their research funds (the $400K bit, NOT the universities $140K overhead bit; your university collects money when the faculty is paying himself out of his research!). So that leaves more than $140K to cover 9 months of employment, which means at the university level most engineering faculty are actually SUBSIDIZING your education since 9 month salaries typically come in below the $140K (even with fringe etc).
Humanities faculty are an entirely different story. They typically have virtually no real external research funds. It definitely creates a different mindset (being human we all tend to focus on those who pay us).
Most of us entitled professors tend to be more than aware of these facts
...isn't really that big of a deal. With the exception of those on GPA-based scholarships (most of the engineering students I know with state scholarships requiring a 3.5 GPA lose them, while I'm sure many liberal arts majors manage to keep them), it just doesn't matter. As everybody else here has said, when you go for your first job you're competing against other engineering majors, not film majors.
/whining
No, what gets me is the fact that we're required to take the same number of core classes as arts majors, or in the case of my university _more_. Our engineering program requires an additional 3 or 4 credit core class above and beyond what the university requires, even though we're already taking ten more credits than any other major that I know of to get our degrees. I can deal with the fact that many/most other majors honestly do have an easier time in their programs than we do. But for some reason it's the insult added to injury of knowing that the only reason I'm at 18 credits this semester is because somebody somewhere decided that as an engineer I absolutely _need_ to take a music class.
You know what I say? Make music majors take a statics and dynamics course. Or hell, just require them to take calculus to fill their math core requirement, instead of MATH 101: Addition for Artists.
I accept your point regarding the bazillion Liberal Arts degree majors. Most of them take it because they just need a four year stamp. To top it all off, most are pretty mediocre too. So you have zinged me there, sir. To answer your question, yes, you can get a good job with Liberal Arts. Most of them are in sales, but you can. Furthermore, I'd argue that the definition of a 'good' job is highly subjective. For me, it's making enough to keep the roof over my head, food to eat, bills paid, a night out on the town, and a decent retirement program. (although I leave myself wide open to the charge that for many, this may not be enough).
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
90% of everything is crap.
Can't blame the arts when the same standard applies to code. Produced by engineers.
We are the 198 proof..
I went into "software engineering" at a top Canadian university. Two years later, I realized I hated it...the math courses all sucked, because they weren't math. Profs de-emphasized proofs, and emphasized application...cool, that's nice, except I found myself memorizing patterns in problem solving rather than understanding the underlying theory. This hurt my performance, as memorization was a weakness of mine, my strength is REAL math, logical reasoning. I was getting grades in the A- to A range in my first two years of undergrad and working quite hard. I decided to switch to mathematics (combinatorics in particular) and computer science and now I'm getting A+s because we discuss proofs and derivations in math courses rather than jumping straight to application without a strong foundation. That makes things easier to remember and it makes it easier to solve problems. I don't know if this is an issue in the U.S., but I can with some degree of confidence say, if you aren't doing that great, but you think you're good at math, maybe you should've been a math major rather than an engineering major. Engineering does NOT test whether you're good at math or science, it tests how good you are at blindly following patterns.
Here's the problem with engineering education (especially at a top research institution).
:)
The prof's job is to get grants--that's it.
If they get grants they are rewarded with less teaching.
Profs feel that teaching is beneath them or they feel that their teaching style actually teaches.
Most professors feel that since some of their class does well, they must be doing a good job.
They are being very naive. Most profs give take-home tests (because they feel they can't give an extensive in-class test).
If you think students aren't collaborating, think again.
Also if you're a prof and you don't post old tests you are cheating your students.
Some will have those old tests which blows the curve for those who don't have the old tests.
Of course the prof could come up with completely original questions for every exam ever--but few would take the time and that's not always possible with some classes.
TAs and profs generally could care less about giving you help--it takes up their time.
They look at you like you're an idiot when they don't know how to explain a concept.
I can't imagine why more people don't do engineering--who wouldn't want to add working all the time with not being helped by people who are supposed to be teaching.
Don't get me wrong--I love engineering and math. I have a PhD from a top 5 US research institute in ECE with a math minor. I know what it takes to learn engineering--just you.
Profs don't teach you--you have to. And bug one of your friends when you get stuck--usually it's something you would normally see in a minute if you didn't spend the last 3 days not sleeping but studying.
If you have no friends go to the prof or the TA but you're going to have to be pushy for their time and MAKE them help you out.
Sometimes you get a good prof, but it's quite rare anymore.
I'd go be a prof but I don't feel like underpaying and exploiting grad students for 3-7 years to give them a PhD (and postdocs too...haha!).
If you can, go to a second tier school (preferably private school...state schools weed like crazy) for undergrad engineering (the profs have slightly less grants pressure and have a bit more time for teaching) and then a top tier for a masters. If you don't need teachers or help EVER, go to a top tier undergrad engineering school.
Congratulations, you got me on that one. Of course, in the Chinese culture, most successful politicans and businessmen are expected to get engineering degrees or some other hard science degree. Note that Hu Jintao hasn't been a practicing engineer for a while. But, you are right: he is an engineer. I think I'll have to write a margin of error into my future statements for Slashdot.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
I'm the complete opposite. I hated any arts (and many social science) courses I was forced to do because there was no clearly defined right answer, and no clearly defined ways to arrive at the right answer. It was much more subjective, and I hated that. Even an answer that one person (me) feels is completely right could actually be wrong and get a bad grade.
I don't think engineering/science courses restrict creativity one bit, but that's just me. If you're so creative that you feel the laws of physics are cramping your creativity...you definitely belong in arts.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I had to snicker when the first five comments (including parts of the first thread) all contained typos, spelling errors, or incorrect capitalization and/or punctuation. I'm no English major and don't mean to be a pedant (there are likely errors in this post), but maybe writing quality book reports yields high marks because the submitter avoids presenting himself as an uneducated buffoon with only simple mastery of the English language? My apologies if English isn't your mother-tongue, you are exempt from the following:
In my short professional career (I am 27), I have oddly met and had close professional relationships with several Engineers. One that worked for 3M, one for IBM, and a contract integrated-circuits whiz. They are all in their mid-to-late 50's. They are well respected and accomplished in their work -- and at first blush they all seem to be dullards and/or social misfits. Upon further inspection they have all turned out to be quite brilliant and well-spoken. Unfortunately, perception is reality. It sounds like TFA author is jealous because others picked a field in which it is easier for them to excel. If it is so easy, I challenge the author to switch to an English major instead. He will either succeed in that field or eat crow. It is a moral victory in any case.
Or, to put in simpler terms TFA author may better understand: STFU and GTFO. RTFM FTW. Less QQ more PEW PEW!
Love,
-DP
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its
I've spent my entire easter long weekend working on 5 projects. I have a design project report worth 30% of my final mark. This "report" is about what I designed verse the actual product, and 90% of the course mark is based on documents and presentations. I've been awaken since SUNDAY, and I think I'll have to stay up for the rest of tonight to finish my report for tomorrow 3pm. Being an engineering student is the hardest discipline in all of University. PERIOD. www.toblender.com for a weekly comic about how it sucks to be an engineering student.
As a graduating engineer I can say the 57k+ guaranteed starting salary for anyone with over a 3.0 is worth it. Despite what you may read, engineers are in HIGH demand in the US, in engineering and in nearly every other field.
The demoralizing factor to engineering schools is inherently built into the human psyche of greed (among those in the rein of power). You need to look into society's behavior and direction to get a grip of where this had all gone awry. The lack of quality of thoughts in not only the engineering schools but society itself - to be more exact lacking in mass (quality of thoughts) to have any impact in society, is the one impeding factor for not just engineering students, but human beings as well. Those with the desired quality will want to drive that to his advantage eventually - thus perpetuating the damaging greed psyche. Who said GREED is GOOD?
We all need to know that the need to sacrifice, is paramount to uphold the very basic fundamental quality that is sorely lacking in the advancement of human society since I don't know when.
Consciousness to Goodness and Sacrifice and Wisdom is what we need to have in our first step prior to acquiring knowledge. You cannot miss any of the essential steps while climbing up the ladder - even if you can.
There is a need to comprehend the terms - GENIUS, PRODIGY - or any other mind-bending terms, that, those words are perpetuated by the misguided minds of organized society. No one is exempted to climb each of the steps.
Engineering students don't get sucked. High school students do ;-)
Some people talk about a recession, of course that is not quite true. What will come is a stagflation which is a recession combined with an inflation.
Of course engeneers might be laid off first because of the idiocy of the managers, but that will not make the situation any 'better'. With no developers or service-persons, and no money to afford foreign workforce they will not be able to sustain their business.
But unlike them you are able to go on living. You can use an old car and convert it into a power plant for generating electricity. You can use LEDs from old devices to give off a bit of light. You can turn junk into something usable. Those will be sought after then. You will be able to earn your food while ecconomists will have to starve, or try to continue to live their highly parasitic lifestyle.
Someone eventually mods you down where you belong for this.
I am a graduate student in computer engineering and can testify to the fact that hardly anyone in engineering actually knows how to bloody communicate. There are entire treatises written by some of the few literate professors in my department about how literacy among engineers has suffered horribly in favor of the ability to do complicated math, where in fact both are required in equal measure -- the ability to solve the problem, and the ability to explain how you solved the problem with some kind of clarity. Why? Because it is necessary that the solution be a) repeatable and b) able to be used to build other solutions.
Are you understanding yet why our textbooks might be lacking a bit?
+++ATH0
My favorite moment from engineering classes at a large ohio public university:
Being told by student advocacy that a professor who routinely resorted to calling his students stupid and mocking their questions was "untouchable" because he pulled in $3 million per year in reasearch grants.
Or possibly the prof who taught fluid mechanics who gave every assignment to us on sunday night, due monday, all without managing to give us any idea how to do any of the assignmnet while we were in class.
Caveat: I'm not an artist nor am I an engineer...I'm a math geek.
...obviously this is professor/school dependent, but it does ring as an interesting take on this topic.
That said I think anyone who wants to compare engineering to the arts needs to do some fact checking. At the three institutions, and I'd be willing to say at almost every institution in the US, I briefly checked if you want a B.F.A. you need to submit a portfolio. So already the high school art student(who probably needs the same types of grades in their field as engineering students) needs to have a portfolio put together before they can even apply to their school. Even better music and dance majors need to give an audition. Unfair as it may be the idea of majoring in Dance is kind of ridiculous to me, however I'm willing to punt on this one and blindly state that dance programs probably run the same distribution of difficulty that engineering/science programs due, and the idea of your average engineering student attempting dance classes definitely evokes hilarious mental images. Other than grades and academic awards do engineers need to have design portfolios or pass auditions? I've never heard of it.
Also just check your favorite college's policy on non-art majors/minors taking an art class? Usually a non-major/minor can't even take a "real" art course, I use "real" here in the same context as we talk about real calculus vs "real" calc(i.e. for business/life science majors).
So I feel pretty confident in saying this is simply a case of "the grass is greener".
Another interesting thought was just motivated by the fact that in engineering, there often is a much more definite answer than in other less "practical" degree programs. Philosophy for instance at once could be considered a pretty willy-nilly degree...however in a philosophy degree program instead of being able to manipulate formulas to get The "answer", you need to convince you professor that your answer is "right". Which is harder?
This whole topic exemplifies my favorite flavor of engineering arrogance when an engineer believes that they can "reason out" how to do someone else's job better than them by the fact that they are clever engineers, some engineers do this regardless of the credentials of the someone else, and thus are justified in telling someone else how to do their job. Whereas if someone else were to criticize the engineer doing his job without considering the engineer's credentials, the engineer takes great offense to this, with very little regard for the someone else's credentials. And all of this is just appealing to the simple of "do unto others...", which is doubly amusing as engineers often tout logic as one of their strengths.
Well that's enough whining from a math geek.
mE
Oh well. I'll just repeat it: "If you think engineering textbooks are boring (black and white and contain long equations) then you should take heart, because the Engineering Job is going to be just as boring."
;-) Oh well; that's life. The reason I stay on the job is because they pay me $55 an hour, else I'd go do something more fun. I theorize that the more boring the job, the more they pay, because that's the only way for them to fill the seat.
That was a genuine comment from a genuine engineer... not offensive enough to deserve deleting? If anything, my time at Penn State was MORE exciting than my actual 10-year career as an electrical engineer. Every day I come to the same tiny cubicle and stare at the same flickering CRT moving around the same circuits I've seen a thousand times. At least at Penn State I got to flirt with biology coeds (points to wife), but that's not the case on the job. I'm not even sure we have any women here.
Anyway, back on topic:
If you think college is boring, maybe you ought to go on an Internship and discover the boredom of an actual engineering job.
You may find yourself changing careers.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
As a Third Year Computer Engineering Student, I can agree entirely. I have found that my class has been told on numerous occasions to buy the required text book by a professor, so that we would understand the material. The real agenda?, Sell! (Their publications of course). With Courses from Linear Algebra, Vector Calculus, to Differential Equations I have found a number of useless books that teach the theory in one convoluted example and never mention the Theorem or Lemma again. I have also had amazing text books (Supplemented with Wikipedia) which have taught me all about Transistors, CMOS, Diodes, etc (Also it came with PSpice, thats pretty awesome for a 200$ textbook). I get excited when useful software is bundled with my textbooks. On the Issue of Professors, I have found that every last engineering professor is encouraging of their students and want us to do well and understand the material (for their jobs sake?), regardless I feel a sense of constant support from my professors. In first year physics, chemistry, and Philosophy(writing credit), and 2nd year Technical Communications i have found that the professors only favor certain individuals and could care less how the rest of the class did. This was only a brief dive into the rant/article but being at work I need to get some work done. But I would like to say that all Engineering Students should realize that's what they should expect when entering such a Faculty. It is not a breeze to fly through, and it can be achievable as long as you do not take on the mannerisms of a first-year arts student that party's all day and night regardless of the classes they have the next day. Just My Thoughts! XD
...the accompanying photo shows, what I assume to be, an engineering student working a problem using a TI-83 CALCULATOR!!! WTF? In my school, all self-respecting engineers sported HP iron using the vastly more efficient RPN (Reverse Polish Notation, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Polish_notation) entry method. Given the length of some of my exams, you needed every speed advantage you could get and RPN was the way to go. I still use the HP-48S I bought in 1990.
Just what our society needs- a new class of victims. I think I wil start crying if I get sad enough. This is one of the stock of a media looking for readers- find a new victim class to catch attention.
I speak here from the benefit of having first hand experience:
I have a Combined Honours batchelor degree in Computer Science and Music - that is the British version of a double major degree, with half my classes spent with the Comp Sci students, and the other half spent with the Classical Music students. Consequently, I had half my marks coming from the Computing department and the other half coming from the Music department, and I can say that Music papers and courses were marked MUCH lower than in the Comp Sci department. Specifically, there were courses in Comp Sci (and Maths, Chemical Engineering, etc) where it was possible, and not uncommon, to get 100%.
There has never - in any year, in any course - been a 100% mark in any of the Music courses. They just don't mark that high. If you had written an essay on, say, 19th Century French Piano Concertos, that was so good it was published by the University, it might just get a 90% mark. A low pass mark was 40%, 70% was a 1st, and a very good to excellent mark would be in the 80s.
That's not to say that one course was any harder than the other, but I'd like to know where this idea of high marking for arts degrees come from... it was anything but at my uni.
(IAAAG - I Am An Arts Graduate)
I've the unusual experience of being required to retake basic engineering classes after 28 years of being an embedded firmware engineer. (That's another story) My experience is at Arizona State University but, judging by the other engineers I've worked with and supervised, I believe it applies to other schools. I would note, that ALL the professors I had were trying to do their best (a pleasant surprise to me) but that does not equate to being a good or even adequate teacher. The counselors were very good and responsive but were too few to really provide the level of mentoring I would consider minimally required. Awful Textbooks -- One should read the manuals that come with many products, especially those written by engineers. Professors are rarely encouraging -- Try dealing with sales and marketing. Unreasonable expectations are often part of sales/marketing deals with the brunt of meeting them falling on engineers; being setup can be a way of life. Darth of quality counseling -- With the exception of Intel, you are pretty much on your own when it comes to planning your professional future. As to having a mentor, time alloted to projects does not allow for helping engineers come up to speed; too often it's simply sink or swim in a alligator filled swamp. Inflated grades -- Ask any engineer at Intel about ranking and ratings. Ask any engineers about their experiences with evaluations come review time. Funny how often the more well known a project the higher the ranking of an engineer will be regardless of challenge or difficulty. There's my favorite: the engineer that a "hero" because s/he has been working 24/7 to fix a bug due to sloppy work. And the corollary of the engineer that works smart so his/her work goes smoothly and therefore is ignored. Every assignment feels the same -- Only companies big enough to do research will give you the ability to bypass this one without job hopping.
I have to say that the English spoken by my math instructor was near flawless. Which only made it more painful to hear the phrase, "You should have learned this in high school!"
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
ERTW!!!!!!! YEAH BABY!!!!!!
I am better than you because I find it easier to lie to people, and this skill is necessary to be a good politician. Also, your father smells of elderberries.
Fixed that for you. Enjoy your karma loss.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
There is some truth in that, but I don't really know if I believe that some people are born with more artistic talent than others. There is some level of experience and training that goes into becoming a world class neoclassical artist who could reproduce a carvagio, rapheal, or da vinci painting, that you can not obtain with out years of study. However more modern art of found object sculptures or pollock style paintings requires more original though than professional training. And I don't believe that original thought or creativity is the exclusive domain of artists.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
You are right, I deserved that.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
Clearly, this is why I was unsuccessful as an engineering student. Couldn't have anything to do with all those classes I skipped, or drinking nights when I should have been studying.
Really, being an engineering student was awesome. Except for the learning part.
I double majored in Chemical Engineering and Computer Science, at the same school (Rutgers), and I have to agree that any Engineering is incredibly more challenging than other disciplines, including Computer Science. I was friends with some who dropped out of rigorous Engineering programs to 'take it easy' in Computer Science. (I majored in CS because I enjoyed programming and logic, and doing both wasn't easy by any means.) While I agree that grades in Engineering programs generally do not curve, and I experienced my Chemical Engineering class drop from 160 to about 40 by Senior year, which was common. I suspect this doesn't happen in Computer Science, as there is a large industry that demands CS graduates, whereas probably not so much for Engineering, where they can afford to be more brutally honest. I don't agree that Engineering should inflate grades and have prettier text books, but I do agree that their texts are often challenging, and the Engineering professors tend to talk to students at a level as if they already known the content, rather than someone learning it, which usually wasn't the case for CS, although I suspect many disciplines have this problem, not just Engineering, at least on some level. When I went to graduate school, and people asked about my relatively poorer grades in Engineering (3.2 GPA instead of 3.8 in CS), I would tell my CS professors that it was due to the rigorous grading regimen of Engineering, rather than anything else, and that Chemical Engineering was much tougher than CS, which would likewise fall on deaf ears. I'm sure this attitude that Engineering is just as hard as any other discipline is common among many professors, and I even believe there may be some schools that may not be as unbalanced between CS and Engineering, but I believe they are few, or in smaller schools. In short, I think what will help is a better understanding by the public at large that Engineering programs are much more difficult than other programs (this is even reflected by the Magna Cum Laude limits being lower for Engineering programs than other programs (including CS), so even that should be an indicator most shouldn't be able to argue with), and I also agree that many text books are written assuming either different prerequisites (i.e., I'm guessing Physical Chemistry texts require a deeper understanding of Physics/Math than most students have that that point), or vastly differ from the topics that the classes go through (meaning it's probably the wrong text book for the class).
Oh please! It's a joke, lighten up!
When I read it I thought, oh my god, is it really still like that? I started at NC State in EE back in 1985. At the time it was considered #3 of EE departments in the US. Every single one of those items was true then. At freshman orientation they said, "look to your left and your right. If you're still here after 4 years the people on either side of you will be gone," referring to the 67% losses from the department. My professors - what dicks. Textbooks - not only stultifying but ridiculously expensive. Huge, 75+ student classes that were nothing but weed-out classes (worked on me!) No tutoring available except your friends, if you had any (ha ha), but you kinda couldn't get your homework done without a study group. Creativity exercises? Are you kidding me? Shutup and finish that SPICE simulation. Grading in EE was so tough that a 2.5 GPA was considered decent, and you had not one but THREE chances to pass a core class with a C, replacing your crappy grade with the (hopefully) better one you got the next time.
Item # 6 could have been, "First and second year classes are all taught by barely intelligible foreign first year grad students."
If I'd written this article, it would have been subtitled, "or, Why I Changed To Physics." My boss at my co-op job made fun of me for it, telling me I was defecting to liberal arts, hahah! Physics was hard too, but at least I enjoyed it.
Of course, I ended up an engineer anyway (software engineer). Go figure.
Love, Squeedle
I think it would be better to ahve free education with high standards.
An educated society is much healthier then an ignorant one. It helps improve industry, create new industries, innovation, and free thinkers. Crime rate is lower, a LOT lower in educated societies. It would be well worth the additional taxes.
Hell, I would go so far as make it a requirement to get a degree before you can drive a car, drink alcohol, or travel outside the US.
""I have four hours of lectures in a week and need to do about 4 hours of work at home. One day I even have to get here by 11AM.". She was actually baffled how anyone could seriously do 8 hours of work in a week and still fit in the other things like having a life.
Conversely most engineering students do around 30-40 hours at the school."
Oh come on, your smart enough to know that caparison isn't even close enough to be valid. Two Anecdotes ? really?
I know artists that put in just as much time as engineering students.
Guess what? all of them have been very successful in their field. Now that work may mean talking to people in an art gallery, but it is still time put in.
For the wanker:
yes I KNOW free == taxpayer funded.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You fail politics 101.
The trick is not exaggerate, distort, or otherwise spin facts.
The trick is to exaggerate, distort, or otherwise spin facts in a PLAUSIBLE, not-easily-disprovable manner.
You don't, for example, want to exaggerate the danger of a plane landing and photo op when, for example, there is video available showing just how not-dangerous the situation was.
paintball
It just takes motivation. Clearly someone with the motivation to do the engineering course work is higher then someone who went for the easy grade. OTOH, I would rather people went for the easy grade then didn't go to college at all.
OTOH, you study engineering to become an engineer, you become a Liberal Arts major to do liberal arting..hmm.
I was philosophy student until I learned the number one question asked by philosophy grads:
"You want fries with that?"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
As much as I hate to say this (and mind you I'm typing this through gritted teeth) my flamebait post at you was out of line, and blew any credibility I had in my initial post. And I have paid for it. Let me make this clear: I didn't like your initial response. I thought it was boorish, boastful, and a fine example of why most normal people don't like scientists and engineers. Thus the flame response. That being said, you are right. Not all heads of state or CEO's are liberal arts majors. And, you are right in that a politician must employ the spin factor. However, MOST heads of state are graduates of liberal arts fields, or liberal-arts related fields. And, most people with MBA's start out with Bachelors of Arts in Business. Which, may I point out, are Liberal Arts majors. So while I indeed exaggerated in my original post, I think you'd find if you did some more research that I'm mostly right in my claims. However, I am mindful of the Hillary example, and will be far more critical of my own posts in the future, if nothing else than to be more intellectually honest. So I will concede the factual, moral, and ethical victory to you on this one. But I will be damned if I ever back down from the likes of you out of cowardice. Count on seeing a lot more of me on /.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
Politics 102 is Know Your Audience.
Where you ran into trouble is you saw my initial response, and reacted to the fact that it was boorish, boastful, and a fine example of why most normal people don't like scientists and engineers. But what you did not factor in, apparently, is this is Slashdot, where the VAST MAJORITY of readers are scientists and engineers.
My first reply would have been a poor one in most circumstances. But for this audience, it was very good. The audience is scientists and engineers. Absolute logical elitist arguments work best.
You can't expect success using a liberal arts argumentative style on an engineering website.
paintball