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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."
It all depends on if they have some family in with a business somewhere that would let them get dumped into management or if they're going to be asking "do you want fries with that"? Life is unfair like that. The good thing about an engineering degree is that you're almost guaranteed to be able to find a job somewhere. Engineers have useful skills that companies are looking for. Someone who majors in Women's studies and gets all As is going to have a tough time finding work unless they have a network already in place.
One gets the impression that the author of the article doesn't particularly like math though. I've gotta say he should probably consider switching majors now, because it's not going to be any better after he graduates if he continues on with the engineering degree. There is a lot of math in his classes because there will be a lot of math in his job in the real world with that degree.
Also, he has a point about the textbooks sucking. A lot of them are written by engineers and really do suck. I recommend not missing any classes and try to correlate what the professor teaches with the book as much as possible. A lot of the time those seemingly incomprehensible sections will actually be fairly simple once the professor explains it, but be warned that some professors are not above pulling test material straight from the book, so you better understand how the author thinks too.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
I have to agree with that; what pisses me right off is the fact that engineering and medical degrees are the most expensive to get (mine cost 5x what the same arts degree would have cost over the same amount study units) yet a lot of arts students just bum around on the dole or low income jobs and never earn enough to have to pay back their debts.
Making education more affordable and making people pay up front is a good start. Making the coursework harder in the "arts" degrees might discourage those who just want to continue to get the extra education allowance in their unemployment packet each week.
If I may recall an anecdote from my days studying engineering some 12 years ago (wow I feel old). I recall sitting on a bus waiting for it to depart the uni when two pretty young arts students climbed on and sat directly behind me. They were talking about how hard their course was and how they had to study for all these hours in the week and it was just impossible to find the time. One asked the other what the worst thing was and she said "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. The good ones use the dead time between classes to keep up with the workload but even they probably do another 10 hours out of school to keep up. Most of us had to fit in part time jobs to pay the bills; those engineering books aren't cheap and the library doesn't carry hundreds of copies like they do with a lot of the artsy books. Add into that a partner and some recreation time to keep you sane and you can imagine the workload.
Engineers are supposed to be creative people. Engineering is the point where theoretical science crosses into practical reality. You're meant to be finding new and practical ways to do things. Your uni days lay the groundwork. The reason lecturers seem to be not very helpful is they are trying to teach you the Engineer-think; try now, get a feel for it, ask for help when I know what I need help with. I found surprising help with lecturers when I'd first tried a problem and got some way into it before asking for help. Others would walk in and say "but it's different from the examples in the book" and they would be met with a very agitated professor.
Engineering isn't an easy field to get into. As others have said it's damn boring when you get here unless you are really into it too. Grades are low because the work is hard. Want better grades? Work hard and understand the material! Rote learning doesn't cut it with engineers. We don't like parrots because parrots make a lot of noise without actually contributing anything useful.
It doesn't matter what grade a liberal arts student gets. If his/her book/movie/poem is shit, what do I care? If the Civil Engineer that designed some bridge barely passed uni (or had good grades because the work was easy) then all sorts of bad things could happen.
One more thing that bothers me about engineering in general is that there aren't as many (good) jobs as there are course places. Sure, there are places who are looking for an engineer but usually they want shit kickers rather than engineers. A lot of real engineering work is being outsourced to places like India where there are a lot of very talented people (I met a few Indian engineers one time and was surprisingly impressed with their skills) willing to work for practically peanuts.
I'm personally not working in my trained field. I'm an electronic engineer who now spends most of his days writing (mostly embedded) software. I've picked up what I need to through a combination of mentors, classes and generally just doing it and I could have done that without time and costs of a four year degree hanging over me. That bothers me a little because I'd love to be doing my preferred line of work; there's just no money in it because a lot of it is outsourced now except for the defence industry.
I drink to make other people interesting!