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."

Comments

How many times am I going to have to do this?

[Gazzonyx]

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. Granted, in a multitude of different languages - but a linked list is a linked list, and a queue is a queue... I get it, will samples in five languages really prove it?

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?

Here is why it DOES suck

[tron420]

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.

Re:it's been done

[Moofie]

I'd say somebody who knows about shape memory alloys knows that Terminator II has nothing to do with our current understanding of shape memory alloys.

So, that'd be a "yes". : )

Re:Bologna.

[Moofie]

"Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" was pretentious rubbish.

There...happy?

Re:You are Freaken Arrogant!

[Moofie]

So art is necessarily about an enlightened being shining his light of True Seeing on us poor, benighted normals?

No thank you.