Why Students Are Leaving Engineering 1218
Ted writes "A former engineering major has written an interesting article explaining why he thinks many smart students are not studying engineering anymore." Many business leaders have commented on the lack of engineers and several companies have even started initiatives to help bolster our diminishing ranks. Will these measures be enough, or does the system require much more drastic measures?
Article summary (Score:5, Insightful)
We should make our engineering programs easier and more glamorous so that more people can hack it. This will help our colleges turn out better scientists and innovators.
Re:Article summary (Score:5, Insightful)
I spent a lot of money (in loans and scholarships) to go to a GREAT school. Many of my friends took the free ride to the local state school, and found that their professors didn't teach, the TAs didn't care, and they walked away knowing very little. The cause of this problem is complex, but the state of public secondary teaching is slacking, and that's bound to impact the graduates at some level, too.
Re:Article summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Like you, I went to a really great school, and then found myself in a working world that didn't care. Unless you have extraordinary social contracts the salary will be based 90% on the degree. Had I known then what I know now, I would've saved my money, slacked my way through state school, and slacked my way into a cushy PhD position.
Re:Article summary (Score:5, Insightful)
People whining about TA's language skills is a pet-peeve of mine. Im in the middle of Indiana. Outside of Purdue, the population is pretty homogenous. It doesn't matter. Now that I'm in grad school, and I go to conferences, I have to be able to talk intelligently with these same people. To work in any modern corporation, one must interact with many differant langauge backgrounds.
Engineering is hard. It just is. No amount of sugar coating will make it easier. Studying hard, going to office hours, going to class and actually doing the homework, instead of copying, makes one better. I partied my fair share, managed to play an intercollegiate sport, got exceptional grades, co-opped 6 terms, and am involved in many extra-curricular activities. I'm not an exceptionally smart person, I just work hard, and I budget my time.
What more can the government due to encourage higher education? Money is all over the place for qualified candidates. I got a full ride scholarship for a PhD from the National Science Foundation. I didn't get the scholarship because of a physics test score my freshman year, I got it because I was a problem solver, and I got to know many, many professors. Being on a first name basis with a professor is always a good thing. The fact that I can go to a state school, and from the day I step in the door as an undergrad, to having a PhD, only spend $30k in tuition is pretty amazing. And Indiana isn't the only state where deals like this exist. Residents of Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, California, Washington, Iowa, Florida, and a whole bunch I'm forgetting have wonderful schools that are really cheap.
This guy washed out because he was looking to make a buck, not because he really wanted it. I'm glad he isn't designing my bridges.
Still hard, less reward -- was: Re:Article summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Engineering is hard. It just is. No amount of sugar coating will make it easier. Studying hard, going to office hours, going to class and actually doing the homework, instead of copying, makes one better. I partied my fair share, managed to play an intercollegiate sport, got exceptional grades, co-opped 6 terms, and am involved in many extra-curricular activities. I'm not an exceptionally smart person, I just work hard, and I budget my time.
Well said. There's no way to take the work out of the work. All the rigors this guy described are familiar to those of us who stuck it out and got engineering degrees.
Hell yes it's hard. But in the past, there were usually high paying job opportunities awaiting engineering graduates. That is no longer the case. Many of the businesses which hired these US engineers in the past no longer do because they can hire an engineer in China at a fraction of the pay. That's where the work went. For example, twenty years ago, there used to be a couple dozen good places in the RTP NC area where a skillful analog circuit design engineer could find a good paying job. Today theres one or two. There's still plenty of circuit design work in the world. It's just not being done here.
Today, engineering is still just as hard as it ever was. There are still good and bad educators at each engineering school. But what is different is the reward is vastly less than in decades past. When companies cease to manufacture and design products in the US, fewer engineers are needed here. There's too much stick and not enough carrot.
Re:Still hard, less reward -- was: Re:Article summ (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Still hard, less reward -- was: Re:Article summ (Score:3, Insightful)
Once again, this is a generalization but
Story from an elder (Score:5, Insightful)
I spent 3 years doing development and validation of computational fluid dynamics software at a major jet engine manufacturer. While I was there one of the guys who had beein in aerospace for 40+ years befriended me.
The real reason is that there aren't more people becoming engineers is that we just aren't treated like he was when he was my age. His salary when he was 30 was comparable to a medical doctors. It used to be that people who had the brains and passion to suceed in any field would often choose engineering, now, if they want money, they avoid engineering. Engineering is left to folks like me who really love solving problems, and would probably do engineering even if it paid less.
Companies that scream bloody murder everytime a government regulation interfiers with the free market in any way that hurts their bottom line (complaining that capatalism is te american way) want permission to hire engineers differently from all other professions because engineers are scarce. Well you're the ones demanding a free market.
Pay us more, there will be more of us!
My older friend I mentioned before forbid his children from studying engineering... I will advise my kids that a career in engineering is a bad finacial decision, but if they think it will make them happy...
This is the problem.
How many of you would tell your kids to become engineers?
Re:Article summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Fine, learn how to understand Indian English or Chinese English on the job. The point of college classes is to learn the material and be graded on your understanding of the material, not your understanding of the TA who can barely speak English.
Language skills... (Score:5, Insightful)
1) I taught the lab of a second year digital logic class whose prof. might have been good at research but sucked as a teacher. I didn't believe the comments the students made about the class so I sat in (second row, left side of class room that had seats for 50 people) and I couldn't understand a word the man said. He basically faced the board and muttered while making scratchings that sort of looked like K-maps. So, I got my hands on the class syllabus and started taking the first 45 minutes of my 2 hour long lab to teach digital logic. At the end of the semester, I had a lot of people thank me for doing that.
2) Communication is key. If students turned in homework, a lab report or a test that was incomprehensible, I gave it a zero. Engineering is all about communication and I quickly taught my students that being engineering students was not an excuse. If they didn't write legibly and clearly, I didn't care how brilliant their work was because neither I or anyone else could understand it. Oddly enough, the foreign students usually demonstrated better written language skills. (I did have to occasionally to convince them that a thesaurus is a dangerous tool.)
I've been working now for 10 years and communication is still key. I'm in the process of learning Mandarin.
Re:Article summary (Score:4, Funny)
My favorite was the T.A. teaching my Circuits II class. Very nice Tiawanese gentleman, who at somepoint had a practical joker for an English teacher. Every time he wrote a circuit on the board, or worked a sample problem he reversed "off" and "on", and "open" and "closed". Took all of us much longer than it probably should have to realize what the problem was. then we spent the rest of the semester trying to convince him he had it backwards, and he complained to the department head that we were trying to trick him.
Betrayed by your spelling (Score:5, Funny)
Im in the middle of Indiana.
one must interact with many differant langauge backgrounds
What more can the government due to encourage higher education?
Let me guess... you were the TA that was trying to communicate with Kern. No wonder he had a hard time.
I agree (Score:3, Insightful)
Just imagine it from the other side - not only does your TA have to be engineers/scientist, but much of the relevant research is written only in English, and they must be able to speak English to do their jobs. Despite the complaints, it is a lot easier to struggle to communicate in yo
Re:Article summary (Score:4, Insightful)
Get out of the honors or accelerated or whatever classes, they are geared to students who have a native instinct for the course, not student that actualy require teaching
Feel free to substitute any field for $thingy, the problem is pretty universal.
Re:Article summary (Score:5, Interesting)
My undergraduate degree was from Cornell University - Most of my professors were top-notch, and my worst were nowhere near as bad as what the author of the linked article describes. I loved what I was doing, and didn't find things to be that difficult.
I am now finishing up my masters' degree at Rutgers University - While there are also some stellar professors there, the average and minimum quality of the professors is utterly horrendous, as is the quality of the academic facilities on the engineering campus. The roofs leak, half the desks in classrooms are broken, the bathrooms flood on a daily basis, and in one of the bathrooms a stall door has been broken without repair for over a year. These facts are especially sad given the $60 million state-of-the-art football stadium a half mile away which is in utterly perfect condition.
I have also had to change my definition of a bad professor since coming here - Before they were the boring ones that droned on in a monotone, but I've had professors here who would spend 20 minutes trying to work out a mistake they'd made in one equation, IF they even bothered to show up to class. My first semester here, one of my professors failed to show up to a quarter of the lectures, and did not even notify us.
too funny (Score:4, Insightful)
sounds like some people are studying being "elite" more than learning to become practical engineers.
No, I don't want to hear "it's not your job" either or you pay blah blah blah. Sometimes you just chip in and get something done, don't wait for an invite in the real world.
Down the street from me is sort of a weird intersection, the weeds grow real high quickly, blocking the view so you can't tell if a car is coming around the corner or not making it hazardous. Ya, the county mows it once a month, sometimes that isn't enough. solution! Take weed whacker in trunk of car, stop, get out, and HORRORS OF DE HORRORS do something practical that benefits the neighbors and me just for the hell of it! And not get paid! And it's not my job! And it costs time, and uber leet mad weed whacking skillz! The horrors!
MUAHAHAHAHAHA!
not trying to flame, but really............organize a dang fix up party with your buds and some brewskis some weekend, fix the desks and the doors and the leaks. Maybe after the school newspaper covers the action (don't leave out the contrast with the stadium, nice set of before and after pics, etc), it will embarass the school and alumni enough so they will fund the maintenance department better.
As to bad professors, no idea other than I hold that all bossess need to work the loading docks and the assembly line once in awhile, just to keep them straight, so all professors need to go out and get non academic jobs once in awhile. Pass a law or something.
Mods on crack? Insightful? WTF? (Score:4, Insightful)
Never heard of a UNION, have you? You're NOT ALLOWED to do things like this in most universities. Physical plant services are unionized in every university I have ever been in.
Nevermind most fundraising goes into a collective pool.
I repeat HAHAHAHAHAHA! (Score:5, Funny)
HAHAHAHAHA! Can sneak over to someone elses college and steal a mascot, figure out how to beat vegas, dissasemble and reassemble the profs car inside his bedroom, stuff like that, but a DOOR floors them!
teehheee hee, take yer razzin! No engineers street cred until you can brainstorm your way to fixed desks and doors! In the real world you have to deal with marketing weasels and deadlines based on when their car payments are due, clueles bosses who order you to do three different things simultaneouylsy that conflict with each other, government regulations that only make sense to people who are required to eat with spoons only, and all sorts of other impossible crap, yet the work still needs to be done, and it gets done. Figure it out, it ain't rocket surgery!
p.s. I was in a union long time ago, wouldn't have bothered me *one bit* if my work mysteriously got done when I wan't looking, because the CHECK would still show up!
hehehehehehe, engineers, whooo hawww1one
Re:I repeat HAHAHAHAHAHA! (Score:4, Funny)
If you muck around the network wiring in a Vegas casino and you aren't one of the union electricians they will commit grave acts of sabotage to the network: like sever the whole thing with a chainsaw.
A colleague of mine once got impatient with the pace of work in a Vegas casino.
Underestimating the potential responses of trashling laborers is a bad idea.
Re:too funny (Score:5, Insightful)
Good engineers, in my experience, have a background in what they come to do and love. I've met engineers who just plain can't understand that its beneficial to know what the non-engineers (the lesser-folk to these kind) think when they're working with their products, and I've met engineers who have had experience in their trades.. 100% of the engineers with real trade experience were the better engineers, probably because they can better relate to the poor slob doing the work, at least that's the way I see it.
This is exactly why I think every engineer should work with the guy that has to maintain/install his product--because at that moment when the engineer is turning the wrench, if his design sucks, he aught to realize it... The end result is a better product. These are the "If it's not broken, make it better" guys, and in many facilities they've been completely abstracted from the Real World, and they therefore can't get a grasp on why their stuff isn't working well.
Re:too funny (Score:3, Insightful)
Consider for a second that there is a position which matches the missing pieces of your (zogger's) ideal engineer. It's the technician. The god of fiddly bits of equipment, master of the shop. He isn't paid as much as, is much better in the shop, but not as good at calculus.
Now in Europe, they call us Canadian (and American) engineers "Reader's Digest engineers" because their engineers and technicians are the same person. An engineer is expecte
Re:Article summary (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Article summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't go to a school for undergrad if it's got a good name. That's what grad school is for. Do undergrad at a place where you learn the trade and get involved in practical elements. THAT is what will make you successful in life -- no matter what your major is.
Engineers (Score:5, Insightful)
Engineering is too important to be easy. The right way to get more engineers into circulation would be better pay -- it's basic supply and demand. When demand exceeds supply, prices must go up.
It's funny how corporations love economics right up until the point where it involves paying intelligent people higher wages.
Re:Engineers (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as an investment banker, stock trader or lawyer makes several times what an engineer or engineering teacher gets, there is a big disincentive to study engineering. Supply/demand appears not to be working or there is too much supply or too little demand for engineers. Liberal arts graduated company execs want to hire engineers for cheap and have convinced the govt. to let them get that cheap labor overseas.
Re:Engineers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Engineers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Engineers (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Engineers (Score:4, Interesting)
Most (good) engineering schools take a bit longer than 4 years. Ga Tech (where I happened to go for Mech. E) generally takes 5 years, and thats only for undergrad. The engineers in charge of engineering stuff that has potential to kill people/destroy stuff are usually required by law to get a PE (Professional Engineer) certification. To get that, you have to first get an EIT (Engineer In Training) certification by passing the FE (Fundamentals of Engineering) test, and getting some work experience under another PE, just as medical students are required to do their residency under supervision of other doctors before becoming doctors. Going through this process can easily take as long or longer than finishing med school.
The difference being alot of jobs are available for engineers that do not go through all (or any) of the above steps. Simply obtaining a BS is good enough for alot of jobs, they just do not have as high a pay rate, nor the serious consequences for screwing something up. Its generally suggested to get EIT and at least a masters degree to get a successfull job of the type most people go to engineering school to get. It takes 6-7 years of engineering school (not taking summers or overloading your schedule...and passing everything the first time around), which most people (like myself) are burned out from after the first round. For now Im stuck in a lower paying job, doing mostly non-engineering type work (of the mechanical type, at least), waiting and telling myself Ill continue on and get a real engineering job soon...
tm
Re:Engineers (Score:5, Interesting)
It's funny how corporations love economics right up until the point where it involves paying intelligent people higher wages.
I have noticed this. They especially do not want to pay intelligent honest people! They will bribe congressmen to bring in more people from overseas. They will "outsource".
Where I work they are trying to create bureaucratic process as substitute for Engineering knowledge and experience. This is not working but the main players do not have the experience or knowledge to know it is not working.
Re:Engineers (Score:4, Informative)
Oops. Sorry. That was Shakespeare. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Engineers (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Engineers (Score:3, Insightful)
As a structural engineer i have been to too many countries where the education of their engineers leaves a lot to be desired. This shows in the quality of the end product.
Engineering is not meant to be a glamorous job. The money is good, but the reason its good is because lives depend on it. If you fail to engineer something correctly and leave design flaws, then there can be disastrous consequences. If you need to make it difficult at the college or university level, then so be it. If you c
Alternative summary (Score:5, Insightful)
I had some phenomenal instructors at my own Smartypants U, but there were some bad ones, too. And even the best of them sometimes failed to communicate the concepts well. Ideally there would be plenty of instructors who can really capture the students' imagination and communicate the joy and beauty of the ideas underlying mathematics, computer science, and engineering. Lord knows that these fields have no shortage of beautiful and powerful ideas.
However, it seems to be true that teaching is undervalued in the typical faculty job. There aren't many reliable metrics taken, and of those that are, there seems to be little accountability for poor performance. For research output, on the other hand, judgement is precise and swift. Under such a regime, how can one blame a professor for focusing on his research? Certainly there are many cases of faculty who are brilliant researchers and teachers, but in the more marginal cases, it's typically the teaching that gets the short end of the stick.
For the long-term health of mathematics and science, I think more focus must be on inspiring students within those fields, and that requires uniformly good teaching and advising. How we get there, I have no idea.
Re:Alternative summary (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Pay teachers very well so they are in say the top 5% of all wage earners. This will attract the highly skilled and educated back into teaching.
2. Send teachers to school during school holidays to further their own knowledge. Pay them for this. This ensures teachers are constantly updating their knowledge instead of driving taxi's during the school breaks.
3. Don't let your local community decide what should be taught in schools. Curriculum should be decided by a national panel made up of leaders in each field of study. Education should be a national issue, not one decided based on local beliefs no matter how "intelligent" those beliefs are.
4. Provide options for traineeships in traditional trades (e.g. electrical, plumbing etc) for the non-academic students. This will help remove disruptive elements from classes allowing those who want to study or have the aptitude to study to do so in peace. (not that you don't need to study to become a plumber and such, but I'm sure you all know what I mean)
5. Properly fund the schools and get rid of the Coke/Chip machines. I know the sugary drinks and food taste great, but they don't help you sit still and concentrate. (A new slogan perhaps?
6. Ban the teaching of religion on any and all school grounds. AND ENFORCE IT!!! Religion has it's place in society, but not in schools!
Just a few thoughts anyway. I know it won't solve all the problems, but I'm sure it would make things a damn sight better than they are right now.
Shitdrummer.
Re:Alternative summary (Score:3, Insightful)
If you try to change the system you get compl
Re:Alternative summary (Score:3, Interesting)
It runs both ways, too (Score:5, Interesting)
Yet I will not teach. Why?
Because I do not love research enough to enslave myself to the professor's life, which frankly put, is 80% grubbing for money so one's graduate student/post-doc army can spew out more papers. Teaching is completely an afterthought. Of course, I could teach at a community college or even a high school, but I would be paid only half what I would make working in the corporate world. As much as I love teaching, the difference between $40k and $80k is too much too pass up.
Hence, though I want to teach, and it would be to the obvious benefit of my students that I teach, the system forces in another direction.
Teaching and research are different skills. We should quit pretending otherwise.
I had no passion for it and still made it. (Score:3, Insightful)
The author is spot on in quite a few respects - engineering is more a test of endurance than intelligence. Professors are assigned courses that have nothing to do with their areas of research, and it shows. Most TAs hate their jobs and constantly attempt to unionize because of poor working conditions.
Shortly before I started engineering, a crazed physics TA went on a shooting rampage through my campus, killing seven people before he turned the gun on himself. Yes, being a TA at a major university can be a
Re:I had no passion for it and still made it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, you apparently missed the most important part of your engineering education. I have long since forgotten how to do vector calculus and my 68k assembly is beyond rusty, but I'll never forget what one professor said on the very first day of class - "We aren't here to teach you things - we are here to teach you how to think".
That is the whole engineering education boiled down into one sentence. All of those "test[s] of endurance" are the best way that you can learn how to think like an engineer; how to analyze a problem and methodically develop a solution. It doesn't matter if you are designing bridges or writing software. And that line on your resume will open more doors than anything else on your resume. Getting a quality degree means tells a potential employer that you have the ability to stick with a difficult task and succeed.
In my own experience, while I have always been asked about my Electrical Engineering degree and education in job interviews, I have never been asked my GPA. It is like the joke:
Re:I had no passion for it and still made it. (Score:3, Insightful)
So is the profession of engineering. The patience to test every bit of your work for flaws is infinitely more important than being able to do long division in your head or recite the U.S. Presidents in backwards alphabetical order by middle name.
It;'s about the attitude. (Score:5, Insightful)
However, despite the school tradition of complaining, it's almost always self-deprecating humor rather than genuine unhappiness. Around here, we take pride in our 40%s, when the average is 20% -- numbers don't mean anything without context, after all. Also, most of us were warned before even applying to the school that we should expect our grades to average a letter grade below what we got in high school.
You're absolutely right: this guy has completely the wrong attitude, so it's no wonder he gave up. It's just as well, too: everyone I've met with his kind of attitude would have made a horrible engineer anyway! As my Statics professor says: "When engineers make mistakes, people die. You must be ever vigilant, and you must be perfect." And the only way you can do that is if you really enjoy what you're doing.
If this guy did become an engineer, he'd kill people!
Re:It;'s about the attitude. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is true. Of course, it is true for a lot of fields, including the low-level "serfs" that engineers look down upon. When a construction worker makes a mistake, people die. When a quality control person makes a mistake, people die. When the driver of a Hummer makes a mistake, people die. When a CEO makes a mistake, people die. When a politician makes a mistake, hundreds of thousands of people die.
Stop claiming that the potential for harming people means that a field needs to be a bitch to get into. It isn't true.
Re:Article summary (Score:3, Insightful)
If we're going to churn out students with a passion for engineering studies that actually KNOW their stuff, we need more teachers like Dr. Richard Feynman and less TA's who learned barely enough English to fill out their student visa forms.
And he's right. Some of us decided to suffer through our science and math courses, but many students turn to majors that are a bit less stressful in order to actually enjoy their college years. What's the fun in studying 5
Re:Article summary (Score:3, Insightful)
Watering down the material won't help anything. Instead of students giving up/failing because the material is "too hard," you'll end up graduating students who lack the skills necessary to do good things(tm). Engineering is a challanging field. If students don't learn how to accept and cope with challenging problems, then they'll fail in the real world too. I'd not want to be hooked up to a life support system or drive in a car designed by a D- engineering student.
More glamorous? Tou
Re:Article summary (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Article summary (Score:4, Insightful)
"Blah Blah Blah.....I was the bomb in highschool everyone said I was smart I even me....blah blah blah.....Mom and Dad sent me an school......blah blah blah.....teachers didn't coddle me like in high school....blah blah blah......nobody loves me.....blah blah blah......Math was tough.....blah blah blah......I quite and switched to a BS degree.....blah blah blah....This is why America doesn't have engineers.....blah blah blah."
Gimme a break artcle writer, and take credit for your own failure, blaming others is one reason this country is going in the shitter, no one takes responsibity for their own actions, it is always someone elses fault.
Re:Article summary (Score:5, Insightful)
1) He was basically taking the 5th year of high school physics. The professors have absolutely no interest in wasting another year of their life treating trivial material to anyone (even a brain).
2) Grades are a joke. They use a bell curve. You hope you don't get in a class with the next Hawking- because he will get the "A". The main point is to reduce the number of people in the senior classes to a managable level.
3) If that engineering wasn't easy for him, then he would have never cut it as a real engineer. So he was properly filtered out by a system designed to do just that.
Where I do agree with him...
College used to teach- now grad students do the work- and in many cases they cannot teach.
What is not mentioned in the article...
These days, you go through all that hell, and in many cases you can't get a job at ANY pay level because a foreign national is willing to do it for a fraction of the pay. That's niether right nor wrong- it's just a fact. There is no point in smart but sub-genius level american's going into these fields right now. There may be in 20 years when out economies even out or we have a war and see the stupidity of relying on foreign nationals who are not U.S. citizens for our critical programs.
A smart but not genius person will reasonably pick the highest compensated field with good employment prospects that they enjoy or at least do not actively despise.
Geniuses are different tho- they will fight the material easy with or without help- usually will get to bypass the trivial courses and skip straight to the good stuff by the time they are 20 (if not earlier). And they will always find employment at decent wages + benefits.
Outside of geniuses- there are about 3 billion people smarter than average who are increasingly competing for the same jobs.
Re:Article summary (Score:4, Insightful)
The actual summary went more along the lines of: above average high school student attends Engineering school where the teachers cannot, and often do not, teach. Important material is covered infrequently and as quickly as possible by the teachers (beit a TA or not). Desires a learning environment where students are both encouraged to learn topics and where they are actually TAUGHT the topics. Also would like a place that does not put all of the burden on students.
It's idiots, and more specifically, professors like you that are causing the problems that this person talked about. "Weeding out" is exactly as he put it, the process of having students accept failures simply because of the inability of teachers to teach. For one thing, he never even said the math was particularly hard, but the teacher and the TA never TAUGHT it. No, instead, they forced students to read the book and go with it from there. I could only imagine what in the hell I would have thought as I looked at Discrete Math symbols used in lower level math books (MVC as he mentioned) that usually carry some sort of teachers explanation; I am very good at math, but I would be lying if I said I could read straight through a new level of math and understand it completely, especially before taking Discrete Math.
I am an engineer/programmer that is not failing his courses, but only out of my own abilities. My level of care for my courses is near the, "I could drop out tomorrow and not give a damn" level.
Re:Article summary (Score:3, Insightful)
I've got news for you, folks:
I went to one of the "top" Computer Science schools in the country and the TA's and Professors there, with a few exceptions, were atrociously bad. I had Profs who
Re:Article summary (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously though, it sounds like he needs a better college where they're actually focused on TEACHING.
I went to Rose-Hulman where it is made clear to profs that their FIRST responsibility is to teach and make themselves available to the students. Some went as far as giving you their cards and their home phone numbers - normally with strict restrictions like "don't call me after 10pm".
When you go to a college that doesn't value undergrads, you'll suffer as a result.
Re:Article summary (Score:5, Insightful)
I think your sig says more about why no one's going into engineering than the story does. Until engineers get interviewed for nearly every job they apply for, and have some choice of jobs and mobility in the workforce, I DON'T CARE if there aren't any new engineers out there. Bring on the much talked about shortage of engineers.
There is no demand out there in the job market at this time to justify anyone going into engineering right now. Companies crying about not being able to find engineers in this country are just hypocrites looking for an excuse to outsource all of our technology development.
Hard work (Score:5, Insightful)
Any of us in the sciences can relate horror stories like the molecular neurobiology exam that I took where upon receiving my midterm exam found myself stunned to be looking at a grade of 48%. My look of pain caused the professor to exclaim to me: "What are you worried about? You got the class high". Or how about the mid level Calculus course I took that was taught by a TA who could speak little english, but perfect Russian and often lapsed into it along with weird non-traditional symbols. She routinely exclaimed to us that we were stupid and she should not be teaching a "remedial" class, which honestly may have been, but for someone who came into the sciences from being a film major, I needed the refresher as the only previous Calculus I had was in high school.
But you know what? Science and engineering are hard. That's the honest truth. The classes are difficult, and sometimes you need to show initiative by going outside the class to other resources to master the material in the face of crappy teaching assistants. Part of the system is making it through all of the obstacles like late nights of study, long hours in the lab, poor teaching assistants, etc...etc...etc... It shows that you can 1) persevere, 2) learn, 3) troubleshoot and 4) Work Hard. I am not saying that things should not be improved. Rather, I think they should be improved, but I don't want our scientists, physicians and engineers to be sliding by either.
For those students who may be learning challenged, I am sensitive to those issues as well, but there may be some things that are simply not achievable for all students. That is a reality and those students should be counseled to pick a major that is doable for their skills. Or they should simply realize that it may take them longer to graduate. And before anyone starts shouting me down on this, you should know that I have dyslexia and tend to be a slow reader which makes things for someone with a doctorate a bit hard, but this is the career I wanted and to compensate, I spend more time reading than my colleagues. I knew I could hack it though and just work harder than others to stay current.
Re:Hard work (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hard work (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it is a passion. I get to learn new things that nobody else knows yet. I get paid to do that.
So you can have a 10-year career lifespan
Screw that. 30-or more year career lifespans in academia are not uncommon.
nd then be laid off by the guy who did start his classes at 10 AM and end them at 3 PM, then went out drinking; who, incidentally, makes more than you?
If you were smart, you would be the one doing the science and calling the shots. I make it a policy to hire people that are smarter than I am, work hard, and the ex-jock business major can go work for someone else and make their life (perhaps yours?) miserable.
calling the shots (Score:4, Interesting)
It has been my experience that very, very few engineers actually understand business. I'm not going to defend The Suits, I'm just saying that as a person with a Business degree who works as a technical designer (PCB's to be precise) I have often been amused by engineers who offer naive opinions of what is going on in the business or what the managers should do in a way that makes it clear that they don't grasp all the fundamental concepts. And whats more, I'd have to teach them the terms first before I could even begin to explain why they were wrong.
See, just being smart or having common sense or mastering something that is really hard, doesn't mean you can just pick up something else you don't understand and figure it out. Not without the fundamentals.
Re:Hard work (Score:3, Insightful)
Because some of us are actually passionate about science and are willing to suffer through the intense education required to practice it.
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
2) Alot of theory with little practice
3) Less time to socialize (alot of work)
4) Pay is less than other professions that require less work.
5) No girls in class, and at work after you graduate.
Did I miss something?
Re:Why? (Score:3, Funny)
That's usually why universities MAKE you take liberal arts classes.
You missed: it's going to get worse in the USA (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, there are some jobs that must be done locally, but the supply/demand ratio looks grim. Seems like a lot of hard work and expense to compete for such dismal prospects.
Still, engineering makes a lot more sense than computer science, which in turn makes a lot more sense than math.
Law school is the only way to go. An easy $150K after a few years. In the future, all USA citizens will make their living suing each other.
It's Not All That Bad (Score:3, Insightful)
I've gone back and forth and back again on this...and right now I'm of the mind that if you can't learn math by sense of smell, well, na-na-na, hey-hey-hey goodbye. Nobody held my hand through Asian, Russian, German and Indian math and computer science profs and incompetent grad student assistants and a myriad of other difficulties (in getting a BA mathematics). Yeah, it's not a perfect world, but if this kid was half as smart as he thinks he is, he'd have made it despite any obstacles. I mean, he kept going on about being a "verbal" learner...and if you're out there, dude, math is not a "verbal" topic...just FYI.
Why are fewer people becoming engineers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Since then, I've steered bright kids into an engineering *hobby* and a far more lucrative, less stressful career in management.
Hear, Hear -- Note the *important* article portion (Score:4, Insightful)
Business increasingly treats math & science talent as fungible and freely exchangable across borders, in an effort to cut costs, and salaries fall. And we all know how much social status and respect we afford to those skilled in math & science, right?
Add that to hit-and-miss quality of instruction, and in some cases, an intentionally withering gauntlet to run, and I agree with the author. The truly smart are looking elsewhere.
Me, I studied Mathematics.
Re:Why are fewer people becoming engineers? (Score:5, Insightful)
If America really wants to recover it's position as the technically elite nation in this world, it's time to throw out the old-boys-club culture of management that consistently rewards and promotes corrupt morons who think technology is just magic pixie dust.
It has to do with *how* it is applied. (Score:3, Interesting)
While getting my Master's in CS we had a course on software development. We spent a whole class talking about whether programmers today are engineers. My conclusion is most definately no.
Why not? I spent a short time working as a junior engineer doing power and lighting for buildin
The guy is right. (Score:3, Insightful)
You know what? Bullshit. He has a point.
During my four years of undergraduate, I did my share of engineering, CS, physics, and I threw in an extra liberal arts minor just because I was bored. My experience was exactly like his. The only difference is that I didn't want law or medicine, and was determined to suffer.
I learned mostly outside of class - primarily on the job (I paid for school by already working in the field I was studying). There are always exceptions, and exceptional teachers. Few and far between. For the most part the place was ridiculous, and I constantly pitied the kids who had to actually rely on the teachers to learn.
The sad fact is, the pedagogical technique is absolute shit at the university level. Absolute shit, even in some of the supposedly "great" American schools. The comparison to the secondary level, with its few remaining standards and shattered, vague but lingering sense of professionalism, is stark. These people often have no idea how to teach, and there is very little expectation that they should. There is no requirement for communication skills, metaphorical skills, or even language skills. The grading practices are ludicrous - almost dadaesque. There is no oversight. No standards. For fun, add critical first year classes with 250 students to a teacher. And of course, quite a few of them just plain suck altogether. As an educational environment, it is completely out to lunch.
The math curricula is particularly noxious, but the problem is by no means limited to mathematics. The best I can say of them is that the department may have seen itself as a filter rather than a teacher, selecting the few people who already know as much as they do and can prove it through arcane and torturous inquisition, and discarding the rest. But were they really such big believers in "natural talent" and "high standards?" This theory flies out the window when you see the entire class curved up 50 points. I once saw someone who failed a midterm and skipped a final curved up to a C-. It wasn't about standards. It was just completely non-functional. But this guy expresses it much better than I do.
Making excuses for these people is pointless. If you paid thousands of dollars to learn Differential Equations and got a gibbering 24 year old who barely understands them himself and can even more barely speak your language to explain it, you just got robbed.
I hate to say it, but it feels like the final stages of the great educational decline. We've been letting the public educational system burn at every level for decades, and now I think our higher educational institutions are finally starting to break...
duh (Score:5, Informative)
Depends on the type of engineering (Score:4, Insightful)
Weed out courses (Score:5, Interesting)
With that said, this guys real problem was not that the university was too tough. The real problem is that his high school did not prepare him. More likely, it coddle him into thinking that he was one of the top. However, with US grade inflation, he was most like average. Hitting top course right off the bat would be difficult.
Now, as to the prof who could not teach, well, there are a lot of them out there. No university and curriculum is immune from it.
no point to be an engineer in the US (Score:3, Insightful)
Companies are giving real incentive to be an engineer.
That's what I did, and now I'm in med school, training for a job that can't be outsourced.
Re:no point to be an engineer in the US (Score:5, Informative)
Reality Check [washingtonpost.com], let alone potential visa doctor attacks. H1B's are not just for computers.
Snippets:
Three months ago, Howard Staab learned that he suffered from a life-threatening heart condition and would have to undergo surgery at a cost of up to $200,000 -- an impossible sum for the 53-year-old carpenter from Durham, N.C., who has no health insurance.
So he outsourced the job to India.
Taking his cue from cost-cutting U.S. businesses, Staab last month flew about 7,500 miles to the Indian capital, where doctors at the Escorts Heart Institute & Research Centre....replaced his balky heart valve....Total bill: about $10,000, including round-trip airfare and a planned side trip to the Taj Mahal.
"The Indian doctors, they did such a fine job here, and took care of us so well," said Staab...
Last year, an estimated 150,000 foreigners visited India for medical procedures, and the number is increasing at the rate of about 15 percent a year, according to Zakariah Ahmed...
Although they are equipped with state-of-the-art technology, hospitals such as Escorts typically are able to charge far less than their U.S. and European counterparts because pay scales are much lower and patient volumes higher, according to Trehan and other doctors. For example, a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan costs $60 at Escorts, compared with roughly $700 in New York, according to Trehan.
Moreover, he added, a New York heart surgeon "has to pay $100,000 a year in malpractice insurance. Here it's $4,000."
. . . .
True, it may not eliminate the entire need for local doctors, but it could glut the market for a long time.
Re:no point to be an engineer in the US (Score:3, Interesting)
me (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm a college freshman. I eventually want to be an engineer.
I also want to learn other things too. Enginnering schools are simply not conducive to doing that. Every course you take is likely to be tied to your major in some way or another. That doesn't sound very fun to me.
Right now, I'm taking Psychology and Economics in addition to the requisite Physics & Calc I'll need to go to grad school for enginnering. Although I don't see myself becoming an economist or psychologist, I'm thoroughly enjoying the courses, and can definitely tie what I'm learning back into real life and just about any career I choose to go into.
Next semester, I'll probably be taking some english, and possibly some history. I really don't think I could bear loading my schedule full of science courses (which tend to have a disproportinately large workload). Friends I have at engineering schools seem to be bored out of their minds and stressed beyond reasonable limits.
Simply put, if you become an engineering student, and find out that you hate it, you're pretty much screwed. If I end up not going into engineering, I'll still have a great liberal arts education to fall back on, and at the very least, I'll be able to write well.
Want engineering but also lib arts? Do science (Score:3, Insightful)
You're right that engineering schools in general aren't conducive to learning much liberal arts/history/whatever (though some may do a decent job of it). Science curricula, however do allow for more of the liberal artsy stuff, and will let you go into engineering later if you want, or something liberal artsy (with maybe a technical twist) later. I did physics (and eventually went on to a PhD in it) and managed to stud
Re:me (Score:3, Interesting)
Philosophy (upper division)
Abstract Mathematics (Specifically complex analisys)
Quantum Mechanics (Yeah, I have weird hobbies)
Practical Theater
Modern Dance
And that's just picked from three arbitrary semesters. What's this about me being screwed now?
Oh, and I seem to recall Dr. Asimov deciding one day that he didnt' want to be a chemist and switching to a career in writing. It's honestly not that hard to do something else with an
Reaction to globalization? (Score:3, Insightful)
He is, sadly, right. (Score:5, Insightful)
There are those that have said that this must have occurred because this guy lacked aptitude or passion, but having seen a large number of people with both who simply got caught up in an often fickle system where if you entered during the wrong semester, you got Professor X, who was interested in the reputation of his school (and thus wanted to make the course "hard") but was totally uninterested in whether or not his students learned anything (because he had research to do or books to write or whatever else). This is more avoidable as an undergraduate than as a graduate student, and the fact of the matter is, there were courses where the folks that excelled were the people who'd taken the course before. Or (more often) the large groups of people who were cheating.
Science and math are hard, and anyone who tells you differently is selling something. The thinking isn't "better" than in the liberal arts, but the learning curve is steeper, and it's frankly a lot more work. I've done both, and it is a lot more work. But there are plenty of talented individuals who really want to work in engineering fields who simply get to the point where they say "screw this" because they realize that research universities are, in general, a lot more interested in funding and their reputations (often apparently judged by how many people they cut from the program in the first semester) than actually teaching anyone anything.
People, as they grow up, learn to cut their losses. We need to start worrying about the quality of education and not necessarily only admitting those to the discipline who will say "Yes, sir, can I have another" after every boot to the head.
*shrug* (Score:4, Insightful)
-everphilski-
What complete BS (Score:5, Insightful)
My first chemical engineering professor (Dr. Edmond Ko) set me on fire. He taught us how to solve problems. He even built up our confidence with his great proclamation: "I can solve any engineering problem. I simply apply the same principles, be it chemical engineering, mechanics, electrical engineering, whatever. Once I apply basic principles, I can look up any specific equations or methods I may need." He made us believe we could do the same.
Throughout my engineering studies, I had professors that blended humor, real world experience, and good 'ole basic problem solving to give me and my fellow students the tools to succeed. To this day, I still attribute my success to their efforts.
Did I have bad professors? Yes. I had the ones who had no heart for teaching, passed the buck to untrained TAs (who were just as frustrated as me), and couldn't teach a fish to swim. But they were few and far between.
Engineering is in trouble in the US not because of education but because of the business world. Why study engineering when some bonehead MBA can get a big bonus while still screwing things up? (And I have an MBA!) Why devote your skills and time to building a great product when your job is going to be shipped overseas anyway? I, like many other engineers, came out of college eager to apply my skills and help build new products and processes. It's been the business world, and its utter lack of respect for the abilities of engineers, that's crushed my love of engineering.
Re:What complete BS (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What complete BS (Score:3, Insightful)
Once I apply basic principles, I can look up any specific equations or methods I may need.
Uhhh, right. Just try that with software engineering and we'll see what kind of code you'll write. I suspect the same thing is true for Electrical engineering (go design a good CPU with some basic principles and "equations"). Not all engineering is that "plug and chug" cr
Re:What complete BS (Score:5, Interesting)
What he described sounds suspiciously like the Computer Science department at my alma mater. Though we did have additional joys of professors asssigning problems that they haven't even bothered to look at first, which frequently resulted in professors who COULD NOT SOLVE THEIR OWN PROBLEM. Now, they'd be happy to give you the final answer, read out of the list of solutions provided by the author, but go ahead and ask them how to solve it. Ummm... errr....
I even took one course where it was the professor's first year teaching that course (not teaching a CS course at all, just this one) and all he did was use the lecture notes left from the previous professor. That doesn't sound too bad, does it? Well, imagine going in EVERY DAY and having your lecture consist of reading from the notes used by the previous professor for that day --whatever they are. You can't be bothered to glance at them beforehand to see what they're about before you walk into class, let alone actually READ them beforehand! You're a busy man, right? And yes, this even extended to our midterm. After which, a friend of mine confronted him in the hall and asked if our dear professor even wrote that midterm himself. "I...uh...
I don't know, is a 75-90% drop-out rate in EACH class normal? I don't mind tough courses, but at least be able to teach the course. All I got out of university was what I taught myself while trying to wade through this mess.
Yes, I graduated. Yes, I got a good GPA --thanks to the wonderful grading curve. Perhaps my mind is still stuck in my public school years, but if the highest grade I received in a class was a 53%, shouldn't I fail? No, instead I pass the class with flying colors because everyone else is just as lost as I am and the grading curve saves the day, doesn't that mean there's something very, very broken here? You can blame the professor, you can blame the students, you can blame the system, but can you really say that there's nothing WRONG?
D in Discrete Math (Score:3, Interesting)
Engineering is not about pain and suffering. (Score:5, Insightful)
I do not think that Kern said things in the right way, but I generally agree with him. Look guys, engineering is not about pain and suffering. An engineering curriculum should help you learn about a limited set of facts and theoretical basics that will enable you to solve complex design tasks that real-world situations will throw at you. It is increasingly obvious that the ability to design creative solutions to real-world problems is at a premium (and this is not something that a typical curriculum teaches). Pain and suffering are not part of that equation. Kern is pointing out that there is an unnecessary amount of pointless heartache, wasted hours in lectures given by inept teachers, and horribly crafted textbooks. To those of you who get on people's cases when they complain about the inefficiency of the engineering-education situation: Aren't you just bragging? Or lying? Or just beating your chest because you were able to manage the pain?
I think the most important part of his article came at the end:
I'm not sure if Kern meant this in the way that I take it, but to me he hit it right on the head. It's about design. The ability to solve certain known sets of problems computationally is essentially solved--it can be delegated out to machinery or people in other countries, even if they don't speak your language. The most interesting problems facing people these days are those that are not well-defined, or "wicked" problems as some would call them, and the only way to solve them--to engineer a solution--is by a human being, well-versed in the subject area, to creatively apply their knowledge to the area.
Good design can't be automated, but this automation is exactly what the American engineering environment is producing, because of this machoistic culture that has taken root. Engineering students are rewarded when they are able to play to a system that assesses everything that is quantifiable. Those things that are not quantifiable (such as the ability to effectively solve problems with teams or design new solutions to problems) are not graded and therefore students can't afford to spend time honing those skills. I think Kern is right; we have an engineering education system that is inefficient, and I think that system is producing exactly the wrong kind of engineers for the American engineering environment to be sustainable in the future.
Some reasons... (Score:3, Insightful)
2) It's hard to party the night away when you have 20 FSA's to compile into REGEXes. See 1)
3) Some see it as ``grunt'' work with no future, and in particular, no economic future due to dubious hiring practices abroad.
Hence, while previously a lot of people went into say, CS, because it was a money tree, now the only people hanging in there are those that actually are interested in CS.
I have some ideas (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm way too social of a person for my own good sometimes, and I had a terrible time finding friends who were interested in anything that I liked. Nobody to go to concerts with at the various great venues in Atlanta. Plus, the school was fairly "greek or die" with respect to socialisation, and I despise the Greek system by and large (and I did, in fact, pledge a fraternity despite that) so my options were a bit limited. My impression of most of the other engineers/science majors there was that they were very antisocial, introverted people, whereas I was not.
Having switched to a school with few engineers, and changed my major to an outwardly-focused one, I'm so much happier.
I would bet there are other engineers/computing majors like myself who are smart enough to "hack it" in the program, but for one reason or another, simply cannot deal with the lifestyle that goes along with it.
One "tip" for dealing with professors. (Score:5, Interesting)
I had a very smart college professor (Dr. Verma) who was notorius for being a very hard class (even weedout levels- 50% drop/fail rates). Here is the tip that gave us close to an 85% pass rate that semester.
I figured out to ask him for a "trivial" example. When he gave a "trivial" example, at least half the class would understand what he had been trying to explain for 15 minutes. And often, the understanding was like "Oh my god- that's so easy, why was he saying it so complicated?"
Sometimes, all you need is just to comprehend a little edge or corner of the problem and suddenly the entire problem just peels open for you. The professors are speaking in jargon that you barely comprehend- if you can get them to drop the jargon and give an easy example in english, it may help.
Good luck!
Can you say "Self-Centered?" (Score:5, Interesting)
There is no complex cause for the engineering shortage. It's all right here, in his story. Only in his story. Hear it and learn.
Remember: Kern = real good at math and science.
Just because he got a 43 on a physics final, don't think he's dumb. Oh no! It was the system. The bad TAs. The ignorant teaching he got. He's quite smart, you see. Why? Well, because he says so right there.
"Discreet Mathematics" is "how Kern dropped that class along with the rest of his engineering course load and signed into liberal arts classes, all on the last day he was eligible to do so, because he couldn't stand the stress, abuse, and lack of comprehension anymore."
Apparently, getting a 2.7 GPA is considered abuse. Maybe he should be calling his lawyer. We don't want his inner child stressed any more.
I know what you're thinking, and you're wrong. She was as American as I am. Spoke perfect colloquial English.
It seems that if someone can't communicate with him, we are to immediately assume that she's not a native English speaker, because, well, it couldn't be HIM that's the problem, right? After all, Kern is smart.
If you want more engineers in the United States, you must find a way for America's engineering programs to retain students like, well, me
No explanation for the self-centerdness needed here.
Personal note: I say these things as a man who went through something similar. I graduated High School with honors, got scholarships to college to study engineering, then found it exceedingly harder than I had ever imagined school could be. I matched Mr Kern's 2.7 GPA my first semester. I endured for a few years before Engineering school kicked my ass, and I flunked out. Not just the engineering program, but college entirely.
And I moped.
Then, six months later, I decided I was going to finish what I started, and I worked for three years just to earn enough money to pay my way back to finish college. Three years after I re-enrolled, I graduated with a Bachelor's in Electrical Engineering.
I graduated. I didn't bitch that the System wasn't to *MY* liking. I didn't whine that education had to change to keep more students like *ME*. I didn't complain when I had bad TAs as instructors. I didn't automatically assume that when an instructor and I couldn't communicate, it was due to their lack of mastery over the English language. I persevered.
That's what *I* did.
I didn't write an article blaming my quitting engineering on the system that didn't adapt itself to keep students like *me* around.
That's for a certain liberal arts major to do.
Wimp (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Wimp (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm normally not the "mod parent up" type, but thank you for voicing this. I was growing increasingly nauseous as I scrolled down and read sympathetic whimper after whimper. Frankly, I thought many more people here would post this position and we could all chuckle together at this person craving sympathy.
Engineering for the money is a tough way to go. (Score:5, Insightful)
As an engineer I wouldn't recommend going into it unless you really like it and you're really good at it. Even if you're good you run into a big wall called marginal income taxes and the alternative minimum tax, if you work for a salary, once you start making six figures.
Going into engineering for the money is far more attractive for people who live in countries where the wage scale is wildly skewed to the point where you can live very well on a regular salary if you're an engineer making $20 an hour because the guy who works at the supermarket or cuts your hair or makes your clothes or cooks for you makes $2 a day (80 times less than what you make) not the $12/hour or even higher union wage they're making here.
WHAT A WUS !! (Score:3, Insightful)
On the first day of my first semester of calculus, the instructor asked how many in the class had 3-4 semesters of calculus in high school. A smallish number of hands went up. He then processed to ask how many had at least 2 semesters, then 1. At the end, there were only 2 of us without our hands raised, one of which was me. I remember feeling the mildest of twinges of concern (hey, I was 17, who knew?) and thinking "Wonder what THIS means?" Some of the guys had 4 semesters of calculus using the SAME textbook we would be using.
I had a rough time, but managed to hang on and learn. In my first course in differential equations, I was frantically struggling to take notes as fast as the instructor was filling the blackboards, until somebody next to me stopped me and pointed out that he was merely copying the text to the blackboard, word-for-word, from memory. As soon as the class was over, I went straight to the bookstore and purchased a copy of Schaum's Differential Equations, as I knew that if I was ever going to pass this class, I would be doing it all on my own.
And you know? That was one of the most valuable lessons I learned in my time there. Repeat after me:
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS TEACHING. THERE IS ONLY LEARNING.
All that any instructor can do is present the material in a manner (hopefully more than one) that will stick when flung at a student's mind. Anybody wanting to be spoon-fed knowledge has watched the Matrix a few times too often, and thinks they can have knowledge downloaded into them.
The way I think of the learning process is that I'm building a neural net in meatware. It takes motivation, concentration, and reinforcement in the form of repetition to get good at anything. This process is called learning. It's a very active process, nothing passive about it.
In my day, motivation came from the fact that we were allowed only 2 failed courses before being ejected out of the program and losing our draft deferments, a sure trip to the far east. IF we successfully completed the program, we were virtually guaranteed well-paying jobs and lifetime employment. If we completed with a high enough GPA, we got a free ride to the grad school of our choosing (I didn't make the cut, had to pay for my own graduate degree). The stick and the carrot, time-honored tools in motivation.
But you know? We had people entering our program that had exited other programs which were suspected by the rest of us of being "more difficult". Those people invariably breezed through our program without breaking a sweat. I consider those schools Tier One (MIT, CalTech, any of the military academies). Guys that washed out of our program went on to breeze through state schools with good names -- names like Purdue, Northwestern, U of Michigan, etc. I consider those to be Tier 3 schools. And there are a large number of lesser (Tier Four) schools that turn out perfectly serviceable engineers. There's a definite hierarchy of engineering schools out there.
I have no sympathy for someone who isn't willing to do the work. Just because you were hot stuff in high school means very little as you move into larger ponds. You'll find that this situation exists in Med scho
Solution: Community College (Seriously!) (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Top AP scores (5) on Calculus AB and Physics, and a really good (4) score on English Lit/Comp.
2. Four semesters of partial failure at my first Smartypants U, much of which didn't transfer.
3. Computer-type vocational training at a Community College (that didn't transfer at all), and finally:
4. 30 or so hours at another CC to finish up an Engineering Associate's and make damn sure my time at the uni was minimized (i.e. no GE, nothing at the uni that I could take at the CC).
What I've learned from all this is that the CC is the best value for the time and the money from both a hours-treadmill perspective and from a "what you actually learn" perspective. Period. Too many full-on universities (or at least uni profs) ignore the educational needs of their students, and Engineering, CS and other Math and Science-related degrees are too damned hard to entrust smart students to people who don't care.
Community college instructors, on the other hand, generally have no writing/research requirement, and often have interesting day jobs that directly relate to their material. They are generally better at teaching (as opposed to researching), and there are never any TAs that the class is pawned off onto. Lecture-hall classes of hundreds of students are unheard of (common in lower-division at big unis), and class sizes are generally smaller overall. At best, CC instructors match up nicely with the better uni profs, and at worst, they're at least waaaay less expensive and distracted.
Furthermore, if you live in a state where the CC and uni systems are tight (like in California), there are things like direct course articulation (e.g. http://artic.sjsu.edu/ [sjsu.edu] and general ed certification, so you can plan for and avoid transfer pitfalls. And CCs are at least an order of magnitude cheaper. As long as you stick to stuff that will transfer, you (and whoever's financing you) WILL be happier at a CC than slogging your way through lower-division at a big uni.
I enthusiastically recommend CCs to all incoming freshmen and to anyone returning to school with lower-division left to complete, doubly so if their planned major is tough. CCs might not get much respect in the academic world, but they are far and away the best bridge from the generally conscientious (and professional) educators in high school to the part-time, often lackluster educators in big unis. While not necessarily all CC instructors are top-drawer, they're far better as a class than those at Smartypants U, and far cheaper.
Things turned out okay for him... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Students leaving engineering but no shortage ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Students leaving engineering but no shortage ? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:CS = Too much math, so I quit too! (Score:3)
Hard work in college just doesn't pay off (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe. But when I look around and see my friends, many of whom dropped engineering for economics and business/finance degrees, making 2-3X more money than me at this stage, I wonder why *I* work so hard. They go home at 5pm. I work until 10pm regularly. They have social lives. I don't.
And don't even get me started about college lifestyle. My engineering-dropout friends were out partying with their fraternity brothers Thursday night through Sunday night every weekend, while I worked away diligently in the computer clusters and electronics labs. One of my old friends kept asking me, "Dude, why do you do this to yourself?"
I justified the work in several ways. First, I value designing and creating more highly than managing or analyzing. The engineer's status in society, in my view, is noble. Second, I assumed that all my hard work would pay off in the form of a good career, while all the partying hooligans drinking away their most productive years would have a rude awakening when they hit the workforce.
But when *I* hit the workforce, it took 11 months to land a very entry-level job. By contrast, one of my friends who started something called the "12-hours club" (the minimum number of credit hours to remain a full-time student) got a job immediately as an "investment analyst" at a major Wall Street firm. 5 years later, he makes roughly 3 times what I make, and the gap is growing. We're both smart people, but there is no question (he'll readily admit it) that I worked much harder in college.
I was wrong. They were right. I'm just willing to admit the truth. I still feel morally superior, in that all of my hard work produces things which add value to human life, but when I compare the relative benefits to my life (social life, financial life, stress, etc), I still feel shortchanged. But it's no one's fault but mine: I chose this profession. And I chose poorly.