<p>Which is harder? Serious question. Which stimulates your brain? Which do you have more stress? Which do you have to work harder? Which takes more effort? Which work is more fun and interesting?</p>
<p>So suppose you are an EE major. What was harder, taking those hard EE courses, or the work you had to do in EE once you got the job? I always wondered this.</p>
<p>This also goes to other majors as well. Business majors, science majors, liberal arts major, etc. I'd also like to know in general, which was harder, undergrad or real-job?</p>
<p>I’d suppose the job would be harder, due to application in various ways of all that you had learned in college. Lots of complexities associated with a job, as opposed to written in stone text from which one learns.</p>
<p>Your school work would be tougher because your resources are limited. In RL you can pull from more sources and can approach your problem with a wider range of potential solutions.</p>
<p>What make life tougher than college is finding the motivation for progress. You will not get far merely by doing your job. Feedback is readily available at school, but not in RL. So, you may be doing your job just fine, but not succeed because you aren’t doing it as well as others expect you to… and you might not find this out for a year or more, or you might find it out quite quickly when they can you. </p>
<p>The challenges you will have the hardest times with in life have nothing to do with your schooling.</p>
<p>I don’t know what field you’re in but we don’t have a lot of ‘written in stone’ stuff that we learn, at least not after the first couple years. Yeah, the basic math and classes like Statics and Dynamics are pretty ‘here’s the equation, here’s when to apply it, have at it,’ but Junior year and, from what I’ve heard and seen, Senior year are quite different. There is a lot of original thought that has to go into problems and projects that you’re not going to find written anywhere, let alone in stone.</p>
<p>I think if you get a job you like, working on something you’re interested in, and working with great people you will probably find it to be easier than school. On the other hand, if you dread going to work every day the ever present thought of “get me the hell out of here” will likely drag you down and make things harder than they should be. The same concept applies to school, though.</p>
<p>Also, some jobs are just ridiculously easy. I know someone who has quite possibly one of the easiest engineering jobs ever. He spends most of the day browsing the internet and chatting.</p>
<p>Real life is tougher. In school, everything is usually “ideal conditions,” which is never really the case. On my current construction project, there have been hundreds of design changes so far and the superstructure isn’t even complete yet.</p>
<p>And then throw in politics and overly demanding and unrealistic clients, and you got yourself a potential disaster.</p>
<p>I have two uncles who are both engineers (ME and CheE) and they both say school was a lot harder. It’s probably because after a while, you do the same things at your job. They say that you barely use any of the technical stuff in your job after a certain point.</p>
<p>The only ‘real life’ experience i have is from my 4 co-op work terms and I’d say school is definitely harder for the simple reason that it never ends. I do assignments / study until 10:00pm on weekdays and about 10hrs per day on weekends whereas on work terms I’m done at 5:00pm and don’t work on weekends.</p>
Depends on the job. I’ve worked on two projects in the past that has required the team to work 70-80 hours a week to meet the deadline imposed by the client. My daily routine for two months (Mon-Sat or Sun) was get up, shower, go to work, eat breakfast at work, work, have lunch, go back to work, have dinner at work, go home, sleep, repeat). See my post above regarding overly demanding clients. Good thing I didn’t hate the job!</p>
<p>Then again, I’ve also had a job where I did more or less nothing everyday.</p>
<p>Vastly. I’ve had days on this job where I went home after a several-month-long string of 14 hours days and couldn’t form coherent sentences until I’d sat on my couch for an hour, letting my brain recongeal. I once scared the bejeezus out of one of our interns when he walked in at 3AM on a Sunday night to show his girlfriend the office and I was still there running calcs for Monday morning. College was like running a series of sprints, but real life was like running a marathon. There were no answer books to tell you what the right answer was, it was all life-critical so you had to get the answer right, and even the top principals of the company would disagree on what the “right” answer was-- nobody’s ever done the stuff we’re doing before.</p>
<p>In college, there were always some classes where I worked harder than other classes, but the material was varied throughout the day. I’d sit and concentrate through a two-hour lecture at most, and then do a lab for eight hours, and then I’d work on problem sets for another four, but I could take as long of a lunch as I wanted, I could work on my own schedule, I could work wherever I wanted (I liked working in the food court of the local mall for all its brightly-lit open space and white noise), I could take a nap, or I could go completely off-radar for two days and wouldn’t take too much crap for it. You can’t really do any of those things at a desk job. While the pay is great, and while I get a lot of satisfaction out of what I do, being tied to a desk and asked to do the same really tough calculational sort of work day-in/day-out, all while being pressured to crank out calcs more quickly and more accurately than you’ve ever done in school… it kind of sucks.</p>
<p>Now that that project is over, I’m working in a more managerial job function, and my tasks are varied and I get to talk to clients and contractors. Long hours are still occasionally required, but I do more coordination, and now that work’s let up some because of the recession, I’m able to go home at a reasonable hour like the rest of the yuppies.</p>
<p>The one thing that surprised me about getting into my real job was how much actual thinking it requires. Like y’all, everyone had told me that once you get into the real world, you can shift into autopilot once you get the hang of your job, and that once you learn the ropes, it’s easy and boring… I was incredibly surprised. That’s just not the case if you’re working with a superstar firm that gets the work that pushes the limits of the industry. Your brain may bleed out your ears at the end of the day, but you will not sit around and be bored.</p>
<p>I hated doing schoolwork in college because I found it tedious and boring but it was structured and I knew what to expect. In my job as a power plant engineer, everyday can be different. One of the engineers I work with has it rough. Every single day there are several major problems, all of which require his attention. When a pump fails he has to see the repair job through to completion, with several mechanics waiting him to give them orders and him trying to fight with his managers to get money for the repair. 25 years of doing this has given him some health problems. My baptism by fire experience was a steam turbine overhaul. Never worked on one before and I was lucky to have some good field engineers. The amount of mental pressure to perform well was intense. I always felt I would succeed but I was still nervous. Failing to do succed could have cost the company millions of dollars. That’s a heavy burden to carry, especially as an engineer with less than two years of experience and no turbine experience.</p>
<p>College life was easy because of the structure. Real life has many curve balls, especially after you get married and have kids. Some jobs don’t really give much consideration about the fact that some workers have families.</p>
<p>Yeah…if you’re working for, as you said, a superstar firm. But let’s face it, most firms aren’t superstar firms. Most firms don’t do cutting-edge work. The work at most firms is quite white-bread and routine.</p>
<p>I would argue that college (engineering) is harder, by a long shot. I’ve never heard of an engineering company that weeds out 50-75% of its employees in the span of a single year, and even if one did, most of those employees would still be able to find decent engineering jobs at other good companies. You get weeded out of engineering in college and no other decent engineering school wants to take you because they don’t want to admit anybody who performed poorly in his previous school.</p>
<p>As tough as those weeder classes are, there are still solutions to all those extra-hard problems. That is not necessarily the case in real life.</p>
<p>Actually, I would argue that the fact that there are solutions to those problems makes the weeders even more painful. Weeder problems would be significantly easier - in fact they wouldn’t be weeders at all - if they had no solutions. After all, if a problem has no solution, then by definition, everybody will get it wrong, and so no differentiation within the curve can be made. The problem (no pun intended) arises when a question has a solution that, while being highly difficult, is still nonetheless solvable, such that you know you have to find it because you know that certain gunners in the class will too, thereby ruining the curve and sticking you with a failing grade if you don’t find the solution. </p>
<p>And sometimes ‘finding’ that solution means bending the rules of the game. Let me tell you a story. I remember one prof who was well-known for drawing all exam questions from the chapter-end questions from the course textbook (with perhaps a few minor modifications of the constants). The textbook included all of the answers, and you were also allowed to bring in a ‘cheat sheet’ to the exam, but the textbook had hundreds of questions, so it was thought infeasible for anybody to simply copy every single question and answer from the textbook onto the cheatsheet. Well, one ingenious student (unfortunately, not I) actually figured out how to do just that with some desktop publishing software and brought into the exam a modified microscopic lens array, which was not disallowed according to the rules at the time. He then simply looked up the exam questions on his sheet, transcribed the answers, and thereby completely smashed the curve and stuck everybody else with bad grades. That incident caused such an uproar that soon everybody was investigating their own lens system until the course prof officially banned all cheat sheets from future exams. But they let that guy’s high score remain standing because he hadn’t actually violated the rules at the time, thereby still augmenting the overall grade curve for everybody else. He unsurprisingly got the A+ and plenty of others got tagged with failing grades. </p>
<p>Like I’ve always said, if you’re going to weed people, do so in the admissions process. That’s what companies do. If a company doesn’t think that you’re going to work out, they’re just not going to hire you in the first place.</p>
<p>The difference is companies are paying you, and you’re paying the colleges.</p>
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<p>But in “real life,” you don’t know if there’s a solution or not. Is this impossible to solve? Or just impossible for you to solve, but not competing firms?</p>
<p>That’s right - which only makes the weeding process even more painful. Think about it: you are paying to have the college weed yourself. That’s just adding insult to injury. </p>
<p>If a company were to weed you, you get kicked out of your job, but at least you got paid. When a college weeds you, you pay to be kicked out. </p>
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<p>So? If you get an exam question that you can’t solve, it doesn’t matter that some people can solve it. You’re not one of them, and that’s all that matters to you. </p>
<p>On the other hand, in the workforce, if you get a problem that you can’t solve, maybe somebody else can solve it. On the other hand, maybe it truly is impossible to solve, and if it’s the latter, then you have a ready-made excuse. You don’t have such an excuse during the weeder exams. </p>
<p>Like I said above, the exam questions were solvable and one guy, through his savvy cheatsheet/lens apparatus, was able to solve them all. But you didn’t. It would have been better for everybody if the questions truly were unsolvable for then his cunning scheme would have failed.</p>