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."

NO IT DOES NOT

here is my summary and my thoughts

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 ... 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.

Re:NO IT DOES NOT

If you think the books are boring (black and white and contain long equations),

wait until you get on your JOB. Engineering education works perfectly; it prepares you for the boredom ahead of you.

How about hiring them?

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.

Re:NO IT DOES NOT

The books do tend to suck a lot more than non-engineering subjects. I suspect it's because engineers who are well-versed in their respective fields have trouble breaking down concepts for relative newcomers. It's not surprising for me to find an advanced concept wedged into the introductory chapters, and helpful beginners' explanations stuck curiously near the end of the book.

I cannot even begin to count the number of times where I've been doing my course readings, and completely not understanding a concept... and then running across a neat little paragraph explaining it all in a very concise way... in an unrelated chapter, half a book later.

I've been in school four years now, and I've had maybe 3 textbooks that I felt were truly helpful. The rest were just shameless wastes of my dollars and many trees. In their defense, all the information is in there somewhere, but rarely where you'd expect it to be.

Re:NO IT DOES NOT

Typical science snobbery. Truth be told, some liberal arts people are quite accomplished in their fields, and do quality work that would be extremely to duplicate without a similar level of raw talent and time commitment.

The problem is not those people. The problem is that those people are able to coast to an amazing degree because the grading system favors the slackers who take those classes because they don't want to work.

So the real problem is twofold:

One, the truly excellent students aren't getting the sort of challenge that would allow them to hone their abilities to their limits.

Two, the quality of the whole discipline is being diluted by a bunch of crappy students doing mediocre work for a grade.

I witnessed this in liberal arts classes, I also witnessed it in some CS classes, where incompetent coders could pass the class based solely on the curve and their ability to parrot theory on the exams. Literally. I was in a class where a programming assignment's average grade was 7 out of 100.

This isn't high school

"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.

Re:NO IT DOES NOT

As an engineering student that took a film class as an elective I can attest to that! I would write papers that had A's while the students to the left and right of me earned C's. My paper comparing Hidden Fortress to Star Wars scored especially well. Alfred Hitchcock was an Engineering student BTW.

Re:You are Freaken Arrogant!

How's that hangover?

hate to break it to ya

"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."

That's true in school and real life kid. I'd like to tell you life is fair... But then I'd be lying and in a management position.

at least you're learning

that's more than i can say for my CS degree. All I learned was in spite of my education, not because of it.

Re:at least you're learning

I'm in a mechanical engineering degree. In the past 10 years, fewer than 10 people have recieved 4.0 gpas. It is ridiculously difficult. The classes are ridiculously difficult. However, by the time I graduate RIT I'll know this stuff so well.. I spent all weekend on 3 problems. what the heck! lol It takes me two hours to write a decent 10 page paper, it takes me 10 hours to answer 1 math problem. I definitely agree, other fields have inflated gpas, but you know what, I know a hell of a lot more than someone with an inflated grade, and that makes me proud.

I thought it was due to the lack of women?

I mean the "Sex Kills! Go To Tech and Live Forever!" bumper stickers weren't created just because they were catchy.

hmm

"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.

Re:hmm

And the point is?

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.

Language barrier

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

Re:Language barrier

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.

in my experience...

The trick to staying happy is to mingle with the women on the other side of campus

It was

the best of times, and it was the worst of times.

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.

Lack of theory

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.

Meh

1. Every Assignment Feels the Same

   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.

2. Other Disciplines Have Inflated Grades

   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.

3. Dearth of Quality Counseling

   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.

4. Professors are Rarely Encouraging

   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.

5. Awful Textbooks

   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.

It sucks to be an engineering student

Because...

• ... every teacher thinks that his students may be able to improve the Navier-Stokes equations.
• ... the dude that didn't start to study engineering now is the dude that has five years of work experience and is hiring you when you have finished.
• ... all the beautiful girls (boys) are studying something else that doesn't require that you run your head full of formulas.
• ... all the math involved makes you an introvert nerd.
• ... you have a perfect understanding of what Isambard Kingdom Brunel did but can't fill in your tax form.
• ... that you fail to understand why energy-efficient technology is taxed harder than technology that wastes energy.
• ... you can calculate the distance to a star but fails to understand the astrological terms that the girl of your life is talking about.
• ... you see the flawed thinking of intelligent design and find out how many jerks you are surrounded with.
• ... people don't know what the Coanda effect and the Trench effect are.
• ... you know why a matter changes state from warm and fluid to solid and icy but not why your girlfriend does.
• ... you still haven't understood why not the whole world has gone metric yet.
• ... you understand the futility of software patents.
• ... you know how a Katana is made and why it's so good and still with all that understanding your car breaks down too often for no apparent reason.
• ... things that you encounter that breaks down due to bad design and you see that "I could have made that better"
• ... the guy that looked doped-up in the grammar school that got low grades in everything now is a famous artist earning millions.
• ... you don't have a clue regarding the behavior of the stock market but you have full control over your wallet.
• ... for a party you calculate the "bang for the bucks" party when buying the alcohol and forget about the taste.

It has ALWAYS sucked...

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...

Re:So lets see...

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.

Re:Employement, post graduation?

Until you realize that, historically anyways, higher education is *not* vocational training. Higher education is meant to do exactly that - educate, in any subject that might tickle the learner's interests. Vocational training belongs in trade school - and I bet most engineers have too big of an ego to go to the same school as the mechanics and the plumbers.

Disclaimer: I am an engineer, but I'm routinely frustrated with how our kind tend to think we're better than everyone else, simply because we have a starting salary higher than most other degrees (note that I said starting, this relationship doesn't hold as time goes on).

Re:The worst of all... I never learned to READ!

5 years ago called. Apparently you left your jacket at their house.