<p>Interesting take on the subject ClassicRockerDad. I, too, went to MIT and struggled my first two years. I attributed a lot of my struggles to poor study skills as I rarely needed to study much in high school but MIT was quite a different story. However, the first year and a half or so is taking a lot of basic skill classes; calculus, differential equations, basic chemistry, etc.; and hardly any “real” engineering. Tougher to buckle down and study the basics, much more interesting when you have a more realistic problem to solve. </p>
<p>Second half of sophomore year I got involved in the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) and started to get those “real” problems to solve. School became fun again and my grades went up, as well as my ability to study since it was now fun.</p>
<p>My daughter was wondering which schools to apply to. We did the tour of MIT. We also toured WPI while we were in the area (we live in SoCal but visit MA once in a while as we have family in the area). She decided not to apply to MIT but applied to WPI (as well as several west coast schools). </p>
<p>She ended up going to WPI. They encourage freshman to take one of their “seminar” classes that try to give simple “real world” problems that they can solve. I like WPI’s approach. After all, engineering is really just taking a physical system and understanding how it works to the point you can make a mathematical model of the system. You test that math model to see if it matches the known behaviour of the system, then using that math model to predict behavious under other conditions. As you stated, the sooner you learn to break the problem down into those understandable and managable bits, the quicker you understand engineering. Those seminars at WPI seemed like a good start at that. </p>
<p>I believe that engineering schools would better serve their students with seminar type classes in engineering earlier rather than later and the same with UROP type programs earlier.</p>
<p>As an aside: How many of your classmates thought about going into engineering and opted not to at MIT? My experience was very few. A lot were GPA challenged as l was at first, but most stuck it out and did fine as upperclassmen. Be interesting to see MIT’s statistics on that. I believe that they still do a straw poll of the incoming freshman as to their intended majors, having to typically only designate a major your sophomore year.</p>