Slashdot Mirror
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
that's more than i can say for my CS degree. All I learned was in spite of my education, not because of it.
The trick to staying happy is to mingle with the women on the other side of campus
chillax137
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.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I suspect the point is: Are you happy with where you are, are you pleased with what you've accomplished and would you do it over again?
People spend far too much time comparing themselves to other people rather than looking after their own happiness. Keeping up with the Joneses isn't worth it.
I had a similar problem with several of my CS professors (I was a CS major.)
I complained to my adviser I couldn't understand them, but he said that I should basically be more sympathetic since they probably
had a tough time understanding me as well. I was shocked by this; I'm the student... if I don't
understand what the prof is saying, I fail. Plus, I'm PAYING FOR THIS CLASS. A LOT!!
One of the things that always pissed me off about academia is the sense of entitlement the professors have.
$7.95/mo, 200 GB disk, 2TBxfer, MySQL, PHP, RoR.
Also, one writes "book reports" in fifth grade, not in any semi-respectable university. One gets the impression Aaron Rowe never actually took a humanities class beyond perhaps the most ludicrous one he could find to satisfy a requirement. Does he think English majors make dioramas, also?
There is a general impression on Slashdot among the more ignorant that humanities classes are a joke. I think a lot of it is based on the fact that, yes, introductory humanities classes, aimed at people just out of high school, tend to not be especially difficult. It's more likely that a science or engineering major will take these classes than the upper level ones. Taking an upper level philosophy or linguistics or history course (or even a low-level classics course) would probably disabuse them of the notion.
Also, a lot of the science/engineering types base their opinion of humanities classes not on any firsthand knowledge but rather on third-hand accounts of what humanities classes may be, filtered through jokes, anecdotes, and misinterpretations of what some humanities professor might have said. A lot of it is alien to the engineering major; a humanities class structure is not about being told what is true and retaining it, it's about being given a lot of (oftentimes conflicting) information and synthesizing it.
But I look forward to a day when engineering, science, and humanities majors can put aside their differences, come together in a spirit of unity, and make fun of business majors.
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.