Dealing with Frustration and Hopelessness

College Majors Engineering Majors
1

Hi,

I’m wondering how successful engineering students deal with massive waves of frustration in the following situations.

  1. A student is working on homework for a class but gets stuck on a bunch of problems so he consults his friends, his professors and his textbook for help but they all confuse him and the homework is due soon. He then works on another class but he gets stuck and his friends, professors, textbook, and online help confuse him even more. What should a successful engineering student do in this situation?

  2. A professor assigns homework that requires lecture concepts on the day before the homework is due. However, the lecture is confusing to the student and there are no office hours after the class and before the homework to get help. His fellow students don’t understand how to do the problems either and the textbook and online help is laughable.

  3. The student works on a computer program for a class but does something to break the program for 2 hours. He then spends the next 2 hours trying to fix the code and is frustrated he spent the last 4 hours getting basically nowhere. The code is over 1000 lines with multiple files in it and no one wants to go through all of it and see what is wrong.

So basically what would you do if you were the student in these above situations? Is the key to being a top engineering student the ability to avoid these things?

P.S. the average grade in my college courses is a C.

2

Engineering is problem solving. You do what you need to do.

If you have truly exhausted all your options, sometimes you just have to do your best and turn it in.

3

  1. If your friends, professors, textbook and the internet cannot make you less confused, then I’m concerned that you don’t have a strong understanding of the course’s concepts. I hope you didn’t procrastinate on these assignments. If everybody else gets it and you don’t, you need to figure out why. What are you missing/ not understanding?

  2. Sometimes you just have to say “I tried my best” and turn it in, then learn the concepts based on the homework solutions. Obviously people don’t get stuff right on the first try every time.

  3. Spend the time to go through the 1000 lines of code. Spending hours on code is just how it is. Same thing when you have pages and pages of hand-calculations and you get the wrong answer. Go back. line by line, and check everything. Sometimes you type it into a calculator wrong.

The key to being a top engineering student is not to avoid these things, as they happen all the time. The key is to acknowledge these situations and work through them. Don’t understand something? Why? What are you missing? Do you have a strong understanding of the core concepts? What are your weaknesses? Maybe you need to review some past notes. The key to being a top student is acknowledging that you might have to do tedious work and make near 0 progress sometimes before you move foreword. But you have to also balance this with the knowledge when to stop and turn in what you have, knowing it’s the best you could do.

4
  1. Avoid skipping over things you don't understand. When you skip over things, you are just accumulating confusion as you move from one topic to the next to the next, which clouds your thought process and makes you even more confused. Instead, focus, and put 100% effort into solving the problem at hand, even if that means playing stupid and asking for clarification multiple times from friends/professors. Don't let up asking questions until you understand the material. If you're burned out, take a break and go do something fun until you feel ready again.
  2. Again, persistence is key here. Ask a different professor for help. Tell them about your situation, and why you went to them with questions instead of your professor. If that option isn't available, seek out a tutor or someone else you know who may have already taken the class.
  3. Don't be afraid to ask for help. Repeat that to yourself about 10 times... Talk to your professor, or another professor who teaches that class, or other classes within that department. If that fails, find a tutor. If that fails, find a trustworthy, loyal friend. Friends, in my experience, are generally pretty flaky when problems become laborious. It's usually best to ask professors or tutors first.

Good students usually avoid problems by staying on top of things. This means not being afraid to ask for help, being persistent if you don’t understand something, and knowing how to be resourceful.

5

I graduated with high honors, but there were still engineering courses I really struggled with. Circuits, for one! Good Lord, I still don’t understand electricity for some reason! It’s like a mental block. So I hired a tutor and spent a LOT of time with him. I think I squeaked out a B and was very happy. You can tell that the word “persistent” keeps popping up, so pay attention! That really is one of the biggest keys.

6

When I first ran into those problems, my initial answer was to drink beer, more beer and even more beer. Looking back now I can tell that awesome strategy didn’t do much for my GPA, but it did make me happier. :">

After a year of that strategy not working, I started working closer with my classmates. I found them much more knowledgeable than I (perhaps due to less beer consumption?), and that 3 or 4 of us could solve a program (and beat the answer into my thick head) far better than 1 or 2. We then would complain to the professor about any “unfair or confusing” homework assignment or question as a group. The professor was much more willing to take our concerns into account, when we could get must of the class to back up our complaint. If your study group is a bit small, try to expand it.

7

I had a tutor for two of my courses last semester and spent around 4 hours with him every week on concepts I had issues with. He was a grad student and the sessions were successful and I’d think I would go into the finals being ready but then the tests left me under the curve and so it sucked knowing that I spent so much time and effort on something only to be tested and doing badly. I ended up with a C+ on both classes he tutored me for.

Other issues though:

What do you do when you get help from a professor/t.a. on a concept. Then office hours ended and that concept unlocked another concept to understand but you don’t understand it and it is necessary to unlock other concepts. You text/call your friends but they take forever to answer and so you get even more stuck and behind and you’re sleep deprived and you need to pay rent.

8

Also, I know what you mean by not skipping over things but what do you do when you get stuck on a concept then? Especially when that one thing you’re stuck on is required to know before you can have any understanding of other concepts? You’re supposed to ask professors/grad students/classmates but what if they’re not readily available at that moment and so you move on to another topic in which case you inevitably get stuck on something you can’t solve on your own and require more people who can’t help you at that moment. And so you get stuck and then you go to lecture the next day where the professor introduces concepts that rely on your understanding of the concepts you were stuck on the previous day and you don’t understand anything because you were stuck the previous day and couldn’t get any help to understand. So then you talk to who you need to talk to that day to get help on the previous day’s troubles and it works. However, you basically have to redo the lecture again you missed today and you unsurprisingly get stuck on a bunch of concepts there. But the bad thing is that the professor/t.a. office hours have already passed for that week so you’re left with only your classmates who explain things in ways you don’t understand so you go after more friends but they’re stuck trying to have a social life. And thus another lecture comes by and you get even more confused and the professors are busy with other students sucking up to them and the t.a. has his presentation to prepare for so he can’t have extra office hours.

It just seems like I’m drowning when I’m in school. It’s like being a rip current where even if I try as hard as I can I still end up dying.

How do I start floating?

9

Frankly, by learning how to teach yourself so that you don’t have to rely on someone else to help you each time you don’t understand something.

10

Where do they teach you how to teach yourself into learning difficult concepts. I turn to a page in my engineering book and there’s always a paragraph or two each chapter I don’t understand.

11

Ideally, you learn that in high school. Most people don’t go to high schools that emphasize that kind of skill though, so it’s something you have to pick up as you go.

If it’s just a few paragraphs, then it isn’t too hard to just try a few problems, look at examples, come back to it etc. There will always be something that you don’t get, but having to go to tutors regularly is a sign that you aren’t learning the material when it is being taught to you.

12

I’m in my fourth year of undergrad engineering. When i was in high school and I was stuck on something, there would be a billion resources for me to get out of that rut. Now though, there’s just usually one author, one teacher, one teaching assistant, all of whom don’t have the time to help me every time I need it.

13

You sometimes just have to learn to use what you are given, and to just figure it out from there. Very little is unintuitive in engineering and it is usually all based in your first principles. How do you think your other classmates manage to do it?

14

Generally, this is what they do: they go to class, take notes, do homework. If they get stuck on the homework, they look back to their notes and they immediately get the right way to do the problem. I’ve seen this phenomenon live in a lot of my classmates when studying with them and never once did I understand them. It’s like I would look at my notes 4-5 times too and I’d think that I inconspicuously passed out in class because I wasn’t seeing what they were seeing.

15

Sounds like a systemic issue - they probably had better luck learning how to study earlier in life. I’ll address it point-by-point.

Well usually it doesn’t come to this. If you are exceptional, you will probably be able to understand things as they are taught to you. And if you aren’t, hopefully you took good notes and upon closer inspection, the answer will be in there. Online resources are a waste of time and professors are not necessarily helpful. Sometimes the class is just straight up difficult and you won’t be able to get things that way; that is when this situation might come up. Otherwise, you might just be bad at note-taking.

Someone in the class probably understands. Again, this can happen, but more likely than not it is something you should be able to figure out for yourself.

Debugging, and more importantly writing code that has few or no obscure bugs, are important skills to have. Know how to write code following the rules of good style, use abstraction appropriately, and know how to systemically track errors. This is honestly something you should be able to figure out for yourself and never have to ask anyone for help with. The best students know how to remove errors systematically from their code and not to introduce too many of them in the first place.

And if you can’t really improve on those issues, you might just have to press on, learn the concepts the best you can, and finish the degree. If you practice it enough times on the job, sooner or later you will start to get it.

16

Once my D was stuck in coding for a couple days. On the day it was due, she tried to seek help from the tutor but there was a long line waiting. She took a number and waited in line and all of a sudden she found the solution. Then she gave the number to her friend. If it happens once once a while, that would be fine. If you always got stuck in doing homework, it suggests something is going wrong.

17

The internet does not have answers for your engineering problems? Google search or wikipedia will usually give you some information and you can then keep digging for information on the specific steps you don’t understand.

You are a senior, so solving problems is what you are learning to do at this point, the basics you have already mastered. And sometimes, you don’t have to understand why on every step, just follow the process and get the problem solved. The whys are actually much easier to understand in graduate courses where they start (again) with the basics and explain all the theory and the math to you, not just the “here is the equation and plug these values in here”. Fluid dynamics, for example, is all theory in grad school and all equations in undergraduate.

A tutor may get you through this year with less trouble since they are guaranteed to be available (if you pay them and have a session scheduled) and can help you focus on the real problem rather than a whole lot of things you don’t need to understand. The other people you mention have other things and other people to spend their time on.

Really, there are very few problems I encounter after 30 years as an engineer that I cannot get some information on in a google search. For simpler problems, you can often find solved problems sets, graphics, calculators (typically with references) all kinds of resources. For complex problems, you can focus maybe on equations suggested and then drilled down.

I don’t think on-line resources are a waste of time, but neither are they 20 minute solution sets.

Coding is mostly debugging. No single piece of code should be 1000 lines long, you need to break the code into parts and test them. Old fashioned solution was to output values at various points in the code. I am assuming that you are not a comp sci major, but you will have to learn to program in some software to do your job in just a year, so learn how to learn how to use software.

Also seems like you are waiting for the last minute. There is nothing stopping you from reading in advance of a lecture and nothing to stop you from working on problem solutions the moment they are assigned. Code can be writting the day it is assigned and handed in early or zipped up and not tampered with until it is due. And for gosh sakes, if something works, save a copy, everyone makes some error sometime, but the easiest solution is to go back to the last version that worked and just try something else …

You may also just have to grind through, working lots and lots of hours and maybe not getting your dream grades.

18

It’s easier to get answers for problems that a working engineer would have than to get answers to the specific types of exercises that you do in classes. Frankly, real engineering work is a lot easier conceptually than the curriculum, and it’s more likely that there are people who spent a lot of time finding good solutions.

It’s very common not to be able to find answers to problem sets on the internet. However, not being able to figure out the right results from your classes is something that suggests that the problem lies with the student’s understanding of the material.

19

What a senior level class should teach you is how to solve problems and how to find information that will help you solve problems. In the real world, no one wants to pre-chew your food, providing all the details on how to do your job, you are supposed to be able to take info given, find the info you are not given, and then find out how to solve the problem (much less linear process than college, but this is a training class per se). Otherwise, you aren’t really worth a 60K or higher salary.

I didn’t say that you could find answers to problem sets on the internet, but you can find explanations to concepts that you don’t understand by looking them up. Expecting someone to explain concepts to you in detail is not being reasonable, unless you hire a grad school tutor.

The answers are what you figure out on your own, from information given, from prior classes and theory and equations learned there, and from other resources like the professor, other students and yes, in today’s world, the internet.

Depends on what you classify as a “working engineer”, some people are doing things way out of the ordinary and new. Nothing particularly easier. The college problem sets wouldn’t be nearly as obscure, and funny thing is all the basics are on the internet …

Without more information on major or content of problems, I can’t tell you what you can find, but I doubt there is anything covered in an undergraduate course that is not covered by … I would gamble … wikipedia. The equations will be there, but not necessarily how to chow the info given into the right values for those formulas.

For example, I don’t remember a thing about distillation columns, but there are 3 lecture notes and an Excel solver in first 5 hits under google. The images bring back fond memories of those level things. wikipedia didn’t have the solution equations on first two hits, but I bet I could come up with a search term that would.

Don’t knock it until you try it. You do need to understand the fundamentals, but the OP is a senior.

Similarly, I just don’t think the lecture notes are going to have a play-by-play solution in a senior level class. Maybe a hint or two, but that assumes you are following along.

20

Is there a way I can be like my other classmates and just know how to do everything from the lecture notes? It’s like II go over the lectures, make sure I understand the concepts before doing the homeworks, but then I still get stuck on the homework problems and it’s super annoying. I do things like explaining the lecture concepts on my own without looking at the notes but is there really any way to make sure you know that you know the concepts?

Maybe the issue is that most of the homework problems are from the textbook and the professors at my school usually don’t follow the textbook? I also find that reading and understanding the textbook is a lot more difficult than learning from the professors themselves.