Does It Suck To Be An Engineering Student? 971
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."
Re:NO IT DOES NOT (Score:2, Interesting)
I got a punch on the nose recently from a media studies lecturer in his fifties (he'd got drunk at a party, I was a bit teasy) for discussing exactly this.
The point where he snapped was where I suggested that the Maths/Science/Engineering students could make films (i.e. write papers about their favourite zombie flicks) many times better than his average student, if they were not busily, y'know, learning how to do hard stuff.
It's just about brain power.
Whatever (Score:3, Interesting)
Lack of theory (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Spent a few years in Engineering.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Meh (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm on the fence, but there are good points (Score:4, Interesting)
Bad textbooks often follow from bad professors. Beware especially the profs who insist upon using their self-written textbook. That goes double for the ones which can't get the book published, and in turn force you to buy a crappy GBC-bound xerox from the campus duplication center.
I never had a good counselor. Good counselors can give you career advice. My counselors were already-overworked professors clamoring for tenure; not only did they lack the insight a good counselor could provide, but they also lacked much time.
I would not have the non-inflated grades any other way. I also don't trust grades to be a very good diagnostic figure for a student's effort, aptitude, or potential.
And as for homework... engineering is ingenuity (same root word), rooted in math and reality (which we usually call "physics"). The math bears repetition. It's not that I liked doing math exercises all the time, but now that I am on the other side, I fully appreciate its necessity. There were math concepts which I did not totally grasp until I had hammered on them for years.
Math (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Lack of theory (Score:2, Interesting)
I know someone who teaches math at the university level, and she does not have a very high opinion of engineering students; she finds them arrogant, underprepared, and either unable or unwilling to apply themselves to actually learning the mathematical theory.
It has ALWAYS sucked... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:NO IT DOES NOT (Score:5, Interesting)
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:at least you're learning (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:hate to break it to ya (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:NO IT DOES NOT (Score:5, Interesting)
Engineering salaries and disposable employees (Score:3, Interesting)
This is why companies seem to like mediocre scholars, because they can buy them cheaper, throw a bunch of them at a problem and solve it more cheaply than having superstars. They like disposable employees because they never get slowed down when someone quits, leaves, goes into rehab or dies.
Colleges know this, and so they're relaxing standards and caring less about who makes it through, because they're more interested in churning out the inventors of the next FaceBook(tm).
Re:It was (Score:3, Interesting)
Going along with your calculus example, I did well enough in the calculus courses I took, but I still didn't get the big picture. Until I got to more advanced physics courses (I was a physics major), where I had to actually apply calculus as a tool to do the physics. Then calculus suddenly made sense.
Same with linear algebra, the whole concept of an eigenvalue, or why diagonalization is useful, didn't make any sense to me, and just seemed to be arbitrary manipulation. Until I took quantum mechanics and learned about eigenstates. (And yes, for those physicists reading this,I should have realized this a year earlier when studying coupled oscillations of classical mechanics, but I didn't fully 'get it' back then).
It used to pay better (Score:3, Interesting)
The trouble with studying engineering today is that it used to pay better. In 1970, the IEEE reported that electrical engineers and lawyers were making about the same salaries.
I had a quite good undergraduate engineering education. What sucked was going through Stanford CS for a Master's in the mid-1980s. I went through just as it was becoming clear that expert systems weren't going to lead to strong AI, but many on the faculty didn't want to admit it. Yet the expert systems people were still in charge. This was just as the "AI Winter" was starting, and the first-round AI startups were going bust. The whole experience was disappointing. I was fed way too much bullshit, and I knew it at the time. I have the Stanford diploma, but as an educational experience, it sucked.
Stanford finally had to transfer computer science from Arts and Sciences to Engineering and put in adult supervision. It's much improved now.
Re:You are Freaken Arrogant! (Score:5, Interesting)
It depends on the definition of "better." Some of Hollywood's most influential directors, from Stanley Kubrick to Jim Cameron, were/are hardcore engineering geeks. But most movies made by geeks end up being made for geeks... more like Primer, in other words, than The Terminator.
It would suck if nerdhood was the only point of view represented in the film industry.
Re:NO IT DOES NOT (Score:3, Interesting)
There was only one guy teaching intro to engineering materials, he was Indian, educated in England and had been teaching in Puerto Rico for over 20 years. The result? Handouts were written in british english (we were taught American English as a second language) yet he taught all of his classes in very broken Spanish with an Indian accent.
The computer labs were more or less modern, but we only had dot matrix printers (this is 1987-1992) so the only way to be sure we would have a clean printout was to carry our own ribbon. Plotters were in short supply unless you knew the right people, I got lucky because my work-study job was to run one of the two CAD labs.
Scheduling was a mess. On top of the very precious few hours of sleep, there was always one critical engineering course that only started very early in the morning, usually before 8 AM. Tests were always in the evening, usually without a time limit.
Those were some of the best years of my life, but I am glad that is over.
Bologna. (Score:5, Interesting)
I paint and let me tell you that to get inspiration for a painting is hard. And please don't get me started on "how I could do that in five minutes." If you think like that then you actually don't understand art.
If you're talking about the "looks like 5 minute art" being the modern variety, then I must call shenanigans on you. Modern art is bollocks.
Disclaimer: I'm not an artist. What I know about art you could fit in a thimble. But, I'm an engineer and scientist, and I have tested this. Albeit accidentally.
Over a dozen years ago I went to the Met in NYC with a girlfriend. At the time I had long hair, was only slightly balding, and wore military clothing with lots of pins all over it. I looked eccentric. I looked...like what you'd think of when you think "artist".
So we're at the Met. And to make my SO laugh, I start doing my best "LA Story" impression on the modern art display. I was a little louder than I should have been (I blame the extra-fun Manhattan bars for this). Other people could hear me - I didn't know this. I began spouting nonsense.
"It says a lot by saying a little. It's artistic without being artsy."
"It's amazing how much of a conversation you can have with just green, isn't it?"
"You can see the effort but not the grace. Yellow can be so unforgiving."
And so on.
What I didn't realize was that other art people were looking over my shoulder and nodding at every single thing I was saying. I had the weird hair and the odd jacket. And nothing I was saying was making sense. Since it was all zooming over their heads, they erred on the side of caution and assumed I was a genius. And I had improved their day with my "insight", which was nothing more than half-drunken babbling. When I turned around and saw a half a dozen people following me around, I knew I had learned something important:
Art, modern art anyways - is a load of rubbish.
It's the emperor's new clothes.
Re:NO IT DOES NOT (Score:5, Interesting)
There's surprising variability in text book quality. Some are written for scientific rigor, precision and conciseness at the expense of readability and accessibility. Others give a little on using the precise scientific terms at every turn, focusing instead on being approachable and accurate. For example, consider the following paragraph from my Thermodynamics book, introducing the 2nd law:
That was from Fundamentals of Engineering Thermodynamics by Moran and Shapiro, 2nd Ed., p 160. I took this as an electrical engineering student many years ago (1995, I believe).
Some years later, my girlfriend at the time was studying toward her mechanical engineering degree. Her textbook (which I don't have handy), introduced the topic in what I thought was a much more approachable manner. Paraphrasing, it went something like this:
Both are engineering texts covering the same material, but with completely different treatments. Both cover the same range of topics, the same steam tables, the same cycles... everything. But, which text book is more accessible? Which text book is more effective? All I know is I had a really hard time in Thermo, whereas she picked it up very quickly. (I did manage to eke out a B, but she aced it as I recall.) Some of it's aptitude—we each picked our disciplines for a reason—but a big factor is accessibility. I found myself understanding Thermo much better than I had, just reading portions of her book.
And that's kinda how it goes. Some classes have impenetrable texts, others don't. These days, the wealth of online materials is astonishing compared to what I had when I was in school—1992 - 1996—and so that helps a lot.
The main thing is to have fun. If you're not having fun doing engineering, then maybe another line of work is better for you. Sure, the projects are challenging, the homework is difficult and often draining, but it's all worth it when you get to the other end and see things come to life. If that doesn't make it worth it to you, then perhaps it's not your field.
--JoeSo what? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why does that matter? They're getting better grades in film classes. Being mad that students in film classes have an easier time getting high marks than students in engineering classes makes about as much sense as being mad that students in 2nd grade have an easier time getting high marks than students in engineering classes.
This disparity is corrected for in the real world - try getting a job with a 4.0 film degree vs. a 3.0 engineering degree. You'll get any job the film degree candidate can get, with the possible exception of jobs where the film degree's GPA doesn't matter (actual film jobs, where they are evaluated primarily on their portfolio of work, an area where anyone who actually has any talent in film is going to kick your (or my) sorry engineering ass.)
More generally, if you really feel that someone else is getting a better deal than you, stop bitching about it and go do what they're doing! Enroll in the film program, get your easy A's, finish college with a 4.0 in your major, and enjoy your years of paying off your student loans while working as a car salesman/insurance agent/whatever else Liberal Arts majors do to actually feed themselves when you could have gotten that same job not going to school at all!
You have to understand what a Liberal Arts major is. For a very select few people, it's a stepping stone to being a professor, or research, or something else at the top of the field. For the vast majority however, a liberal arts degree is an opportunity to do some partying, find a mate, and prove that you're able to show up on time. So yeah, you can get a 4.0 liberal arts degree much easier than you can get an engineering degree, but you won't be able to be an engineer with one!
Re:You are Freaken Arrogant! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm an EE. (EIT)
The students I went to school with were, for the most part, arrogant, stuck-up, and useless. One guy said, "It's nice that there are stupid people - otherwise we'd have to scrub toilets."
I pointed out that the janitor worked part-time, was a union employee, and probably got paid about 50k a year. (For part-time, remember?) The janitor was a nice guy, actually, and he was aware that most people thought of him as a "non-entity."
I've always felt that the other subjects are just as hard as Engineering to complete - they just require a different mindset. Yes, some people can game the system to get a bunch of slacktastic courses. That's true for 1st year, for certain. It's not true for later years. Sure, second year math has a 70% failure rate. I'm sure that there's some musical course or art appreciation course that's just as tricky. What about Ethical matrices for solving very difficult situations? Or something else that I'm not aware of because I didn't take 4th year A&S electives? University and College are hard, no matter what degree you try to attain. Engineering isn't some elite cadre of the Brainiacs.
Other students despised me because I invented things and didn't bother going for the 9.0 average. (I realized that I could do half the work and get a nice B average.) One of my friends said "they hate you because you don't give a FUCK. Not at all. It's all they care about, and you're still here, and you don't give a FUCK. It's hilarious."
I also realized that what we learn at school has NOTHING TO DO WITH ENGINEERING. IEEE taught me that with a phrase akin to, "It's hard for people who have entered the workforce to pursue a Master's Degree, because they haven't used the theories or mathematics since graduation."
I don't paint. I can't think of what I'd make. (Although I can put a fresh coat of latex on a wall with the best of them.
Re:This isn't high school (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
The clerks handling academic scholarships do.
There are states that offer scholarships that require one maintains their GPA above a certain level. While the types of students who would earn an academic scholarship aren't the types that would switch to a relatively easy Liberal Arts major to maintain the scholarship, it is commonplace to see students taking LA classes to pad their grades and maintain scholarships. This incentive to take irrelevant (but easy!) classes should not exist.
Re:You are Freaken Arrogant! (Score:3, Interesting)
The music major was far more time-intensive. Music majors regularly took 21-24 credits while the "libbies" would complain at 16. And, those credits were not "dense" time-wise, I'd frequently have 3 or 4 different performance groups for 3 hours a week each, yet only get one credit for each. You'd have to practice 2 or 3 hours a day to acheive your instrumental proficiency, and I wasn't even a performance major.
When I finished the music and was working F/T on CS, I had a whole lot more drinking time, yet my average was a lot higher in CS.
In art, you have to make a metric ton of garbage before you're capable making anything good. And everything that comes out good looks easy and obvious, until you try to actually do it.
Re:You are Freaken Arrogant! (Score:3, Interesting)
My comparison was between the capacity for making (or even appreciating) art between yer average Maths/Science/Engineering student and the average media studies one.
Re:You are Freaken Arrogant! (Score:3, Interesting)
Surely you have witnessed the phenomenon of some people being 'more capable' than others, before any learning (of whatever) has begun? We are not only a product of the lessons we've sat through, surely?
Re:This isn't high school (Score:3, Interesting)
So ALL of the scholarships went to the English school (and other departments, presumably) after the second year - not a single engineer got a GPA based scholarship...
Re:You are Freaken Arrogant! (Score:2, Interesting)
What you mean (correct me if I am wrong), is for example the phenomenon of one child in grade 1 being better (and quicker at picking up) math than another child in grade 1 - the very first time they attempt it, neither of which has ever received any formal mathematical training. However, if you were to examine these respective children's histories, you would most likely discover that the one had early childhood experiences and environments which had stimulated their visual-spatial abilities, whereas the other had not (or at least to a lesser degree).
I assure you, I am not saying we are solely the product of the lessons we have sat through, but, other than some gross biological and anatomical features, in terms of the skills and abilities we learn, we are the product of our experiences.
Engineering and Grades (Score:3, Interesting)
Engineers that earn partial credit build bridges that fall down.
Engineering is a hard discipline. For scholarship students (where GPA matters and is compared against everyone), you can only do engineering with a 3.0/3.5 or whatever GPA, you only get to be an engineer if you can be a top engineer, not a mediocre one, while you can get a scholarship and be a mediocre film student. It's an odd set of priorities, but oh well. We don't need more engineers that build bridges that fall down, we need engineers that can design good ones.
Otherwise, yeah, your GPA is relative to those in your field. Take liberal arts courses, they'll lift your GPA if you are in trouble, not take a HUGE amount of work, and make you a more well rounded person.
Re:You are Freaken Arrogant! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:So what? (Score:5, Interesting)
As an aside, I hope making money isn't the only reason people choose to go into an engineering program. If that's the case, you would probably be much better off getting a business degree, or furthering your education to medical or law school, and I'm sure anyone who can get an engineering degree is sharp enough to pass medical school. You must expect to derive pleasure from doing engineering itself. [For a good number of girls in university, they'd probably maximise their income by forgetting about education and be prostitutes and pornographic actors (what was that Eliot Spitzer prostitute making, $5000/hour? There's some number of girls just as good-looking as her in every university), but I don't think maximising their income is their only interest -- that's an argument against people who say that money is everything, or nearly everything -- would they suggest the same to their daughters?]
Re:Employement, post graduation? (Score:1, Interesting)
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).
You must be a liberal arts major... (Score:5, Interesting)
But lets try getting you to provide some real information.
List for us World Leaders and CEOs who only have a Bachelor of Arts degree. I'm sure there are a couple. Now figure out (if you ever learned how to do this) the percentage of CEOs and World Leaders (or even members of congress) who just have Bachelor of Arts degrees. To keep the problem manageable, you might consider only looking at Fortune-50, -100, or -500 companies.
Here, let me help you:
Fortune Top 10:
- Wal Mart: Lee Scott, Business degree
- Exxon: Rex Tillerson, B.S. in Civil Engineering
- General Motors: B.A. in Economics, MBA Harvard
- Chevron: David O'Reilly, B.S. Chemical Engineering
- Conoco Phillips: JAmes Mulva, BA in Business and MBA
- General Electric: BA Applied Mathematics, MBA
- Ford: Alan Mulally, BS and MS Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering
- Citigroup: Vikram Pandit, BS and MS in Engineering, PhD in finance
- Bank of America: Ba Finance
- American Intl. Group: MArtin J Sullivan, degree unknown (he's british)
So out of the top 10, you have four engineers, four business/finance, and one applied math guy.
*ZERO* Liberal Arts majors. Maybe we can give you one out of 10 with credit for the math guy, even though it was APPLIED math.
So for CEOs, looks like engineers kick liberal arts major ass. For Heads of State, I think you'll find that the vast majority of Heads of State have MBAs or JDs (or BLs) in developed nations, or are the children of political families in lesser-developed nations, or are former warlords in even less developed nations.
But, with a statement as stupid as "ALL of the heads of state in the world today are, or can be considered Liberal Arts majors", (ALL? Really? Don't make it hard to be proven wrong or anything...) I doubt you're going to have much to say here, even if you did use your Liberal Arts training to insert your 'cover my don't know anything ass' statement of "or can be considered". Can be considered? Either they have liberal arts degrees or they don't!
It must really gall you how you just got trounced by an engineer though.
Re:So what? (Score:3, Interesting)
I have worked at/with both sides of that fence. Medicine is a heck of a lot harder than engineering. The complexity of biological systems is typically orders higher than most engineering projects, and those are the simple biological components. In engineering, you typically (not always) pick your tools, materials, etc to design your solution. In medicine, you have to discover your materials and then find the tools that match the materials you know about (and hope there is no problem with the materials you do not know about).
There is a reason that the FDA has such rigorous standards for food additives and medicine (thought less so than before Bush Jr). People (or pets) are very complicated bio-chemical sets. And, they are not identical. Each one tends to be rather unique. What works for group X does not work for groups A, D or G and vice versa. There are so many things in engineering we get to simply not focus on, but in biological sciences, they bite us if we ignore them.
I fully encourage every engineer to start learning biochemical engineering. It is the engineering of the future, as it holds the promise of so many cure, preventions and solutions to most of what troubles us (world citizens). But, get ready for some very complicated sets of rules and get ready to spend a much larger chunk of time memorizing the basics.
For me, it is great fun. It is cutting edge and I am going after a Masters and Doctorates in the fields starting this summer.
Just imagine learning how to write a program using genes and bio-chemicals to manipulate bio-processes. Now, talk about side effects, heck Perl is child's play compared to that! If you have not spent much time in it, try taking 40 hours per week for the next year to learn the basics. You might cram it all in, ut most won't, and you will have scratched the surface.
InnerWeb
textbooks are awful (Score:3, Interesting)
No that is not the reason.
I am autodidactic also know as self-taught, I have never had the luxury to attend college.
I spend much of my time collecting, reading and struggling to understand master and Ph.D Level texts with out the benefit of a professor around to answer questions. Often I must get 5 or more book on a subject and read them all before I can get a complete picture because so much is left out.
Black and White, thick and full of long equations is great. My problem is the simplest of math and concepts becomes an unsolvable riddle when your missing a few simple things like the context or what A, B, and C mean in an equation when a book failed to explain this. By using several books each leaving out different things the combination allow me to find in one book things left out in another.
Unless you happen to be there when the professor explains it, it's not only non-obvious but it is unsolvable using just the text alone.
So when I finally find someone who understands it, one or two simple questions can allow me to move past it.
I almost feel the authors are deliberately leaving out key pieces of information so that without the oral tradition of a professors lectures the text is a dead end. Those students that fail to pay attention they are SOL if with just there text books alone.
I am not sure if this is deliberate or they are just so used to being in circles that understand this, that take it for granted that things like Lambda are obviously the conductance of an electrolyte or represents a wavelength. Gee that one must have taken me about a month to chase down.
One blurb on something like this can really save a lot of time and effort.
Assuming that the reader is versed in things like Galois fields when talking about elliptical curves is a bad assumption, especially when one page could cover the basics and allow the reader to proceed without a large tangent into yet more text books.
This is why Richard Feynman is so loved, because he was able to break things down and explain seemingly complex concepts in a complete yet understandable manner while not being dumbed down.