I am just wrapping up my chemical engineering degree at a top-tier US university. While we certainly have specialized tools to solve engineering problems, Excel was highly stressed.
The rationale was this: no matter what company I may be employed at, I will ALWAYS have access to Excel. Therefore, we were encouraged to leverage the built-in VBA to write algorithms for problem solving. Sure, we learned FORTRAN and some other languages, but Excel is arguably the most important in terms of real-world engineering work.
From my perspective as an engineer, I don't fault the school systems at all for pushing Excel. It's much more powerful than you may realize. I would hope that high schools *really* teach Excel and its VBA scripting capabilities. These experiences could seed further work in the more traditional languages used by computer science students, while also giving non-CS high schoolers a good grounding in basic computer programming.
"...so that poor people will pay more of the tax burden."
Mod parent troll.
This is completely false and misrepresents the FairTax system. If you read:
http://www.fairtaxvolunteer.org/smart/faq-main.htm l
you will find that people of low incomes are exempted from the FairTax altogether.
I'm a current Rice student, and one of the running jokes about all this nanotech stuff here on campus came from our student newspaper writers.
Take two bucky balls, and one long nanotube, and fuse them together with a few bonds and you get:
PHUCTANE
All the students in orgo were completely phuc'ed after that.
Slashdot Mirror
I am just wrapping up my chemical engineering degree at a top-tier US university. While we certainly have specialized tools to solve engineering problems, Excel was highly stressed.
The rationale was this: no matter what company I may be employed at, I will ALWAYS have access to Excel. Therefore, we were encouraged to leverage the built-in VBA to write algorithms for problem solving. Sure, we learned FORTRAN and some other languages, but Excel is arguably the most important in terms of real-world engineering work.
From my perspective as an engineer, I don't fault the school systems at all for pushing Excel. It's much more powerful than you may realize. I would hope that high schools *really* teach Excel and its VBA scripting capabilities. These experiences could seed further work in the more traditional languages used by computer science students, while also giving non-CS high schoolers a good grounding in basic computer programming.
"...so that poor people will pay more of the tax burden."
m l
Mod parent troll.
This is completely false and misrepresents the FairTax system. If you read:
http://www.fairtaxvolunteer.org/smart/faq-main.ht
you will find that people of low incomes are exempted from the FairTax altogether.
I'm a current Rice student, and one of the running jokes about all this nanotech stuff here on campus came from our student newspaper writers. Take two bucky balls, and one long nanotube, and fuse them together with a few bonds and you get: PHUCTANE All the students in orgo were completely phuc'ed after that.