<p>The high numbers of people initially choosing to study engineering and then leaving it are known to many here but what are the reasons besides the work load? Do some students have a false impression of what engineering really is?</p>
<p>I am currently a freshman in college and I get the impression that many people came into college deciding to be engineers having the wrong idea about engineering. Some think that being an engineering of any kind involves working in a lab day in and day out neglecting the fact that the real engineer deals with a lot of other stuff such as paperwork, dealing with clients, etc.</p>
<p>In my current university, first year engineering students have a engineering design course with two projects in the fall semester. It was hands on parts of the time but the bulk of the work came from the paper work, documentation, presentations, meeting minutes documents, etc. The tinkering and the hands on work was fun but most people seemed surprised that engineering wasn't all about the hands on lab work part. As an analogy, I get the impression that some people think that engineering is like getting Lego bricks and designing something when in fact, it's actually also about the planning of the brainstorming of ideas, evaluating those ideas systematically, recording meetings with teams to keep track of time, maintaining Microsoft Project files to keep track of schedules, presenting ideas to peers and management (or professors), etc. before actually having a final design and product as was the case in the projects for my engineering design courses.</p>
<p>I noticed that this realization dismayed a numbed of students who realized they were in the wrong field of study after these projects. The others that stayed still tend to dislike that side of projects as there will be more next semester. Don't get me wrong, I still like engineering (well as much engineering as a freshman does) but all the paperwork and documents got a tad annoying given how i was not used to such a approach to project work. However, I do feel that the first year engineering courses have been an invaluable experience overall in teaching me and others how to work systematically and effectively as a team.</p>
<p>This is my general impression and there have been some generalizations. I may or may not be correct so please correct any of my misconceptions if there are any.</p>
<p>People have a general idea of what each major is, but you realize what each major does more as each term passes. I didn’t know what I wanted to do before I got to college, but I chose engineering because I liked math, physics, chemistry, and problem solving. It worked out based on what subjects I liked. My school doesn’t require any engineering labs until later on. The Intro to Engineering design class for freshman is a good wake up call in seeing what engineers do but freshman probably just don’t know what they like or don’t like yet so they’re doubtful because maybe their struggling in their first semester in college.</p>
<p>I think the number one thing that causes prospective engineers to drop is that they don’t actually understand what mathematics are until they get to college.</p>
<p>Why do I say this? I think there are a few classes of people who end up dropping engineering.</p>
<p>(1) In it for the money:
It seems a lot of people get into engineering thinking “I am not all that interested in engineering but I hear the money is good and I have always been good at math, so I will just power through it.” Then they realize that the majority of math education in high schools in this country is pretty crummy and that they aren’t as good as they thought and aren’t into engineering enough to be motivated to get good enough at math. Then they drop.</p>
<p>(2) People who think engineering is just playing with LEGOs:
I don’t think they even know that it is very math-heavy to begin with and those that do figure they have always been good at math before, see explanation (1).</p>
<p>(3) People who were stars in high school and figure they can keep coasting:
These people were very successful in high school by coasting and, not fully understanding just how “hard” actual mathematics can be, they figure they can coast through college, too. Then by the time they realize they can’t they are in a hole too deep to develop decent study habits and climb back out. (I admittedly fell into this category but caught myself in time.)</p>
<p>In short, I think it can all be traced back to math preparation first and foremost, with a smattering of other issues like a lack of understanding of what engineering is.</p>
<p>I will second the math preparation as the primary reason why so many drop out of engineering. It is not only understanding how to crank out a math problem but understanding the principles behind the math. A lot of engineering can also be called applied math. You also have to understand the physics (or chemistry, or ??) of the problem and then figure out how to describe the physics mathematically.</p>
<p>Doing the coursework will also stress your study skills and your time management skills.</p>
<p>I think people often don’t appreciate the difference between the mechanic and the engineer. </p>
<p>The mechanic’s tools include a whole host of socket wrenches, power tools, etc. </p>
<p>The engineer’s tools are the mathematical concepts that allow the engineer to analyze problems of increasing complexity and design complex systems. </p>
<p>Engineering is brainy stuff, and if that’s not how you want to spend your time, it’s really unpleasant. </p>
<p>Failure to ace those first calculus and physics courses really puts the engineering student in a hole. Unfortunately, these courses often coincide with the first year of college and a whole new life. Not everyone adapts well.</p>
<p>ClassicRockDad, I’m aware that there are some people who confuse a Mechanic and a Mechanical Engineer. I think part of the reason to the confusion is that both names have “Mechanic” in it. Another source of confusion is that while they don’t necessarily work together, they work on related things. For example, a mechanic might work on an airplane or car that a mechanical engineer was involved in designing.</p>
<p>Also, referring to what you said about how the “failure to ace those first calculus and physics courses really puts the engineering student in a hole”, I think part of the problem is do to those that the above commenters before you pointed out on how some engineering students don’t realize the extent to which mathematics is utilized. One problem I think there is is that the Calculus course doesn’t do squat to demonstrate the value of mathematics in engineering effectively. Applied Calculus courses dedicated to engineers might be helpful in demonstrating the value of mathematics in nearly everything an engineer is involved in.</p>
<p>Honestly…before I came into college, I thought I knew what I was going into. I was interested in chemistry and mathematics. I wasn’t all that great in science like physics… I thought chemical engineering was for me because of the word “chemical” which relates to chemistry in my sense. Now here I am first year studying chemical engineering and i’ve definitely realized that engineering is heavy on problem solving, math and physics which those I’m not very strong in. Maybe now I really have no idea what to go with this.</p>
<p>One thing, in my opinion, that is not emphasized enough in college is the ability to play the game of job politics. There is simply no escaping this reality… It doesn’t matter if you’re a low-level engineer or a tenured PhD professor - you need to know how to deal well with different people/personalities, what to say, when to say things, who not to make upset, etc.</p>
<p>In the end, the engineer who doesn’t have these skills ends up losing that research/project funding to the guy who does have the skills.</p>
<p>I do not like the idea of applied calculus courses. That is too much of an open door to watering down the curriculum, and teaching watered-down calculus to engineers is a recipe for poor engineers. All you have to do is realize that calculus is effectively the study of rates of change, which happens to be exactly how the world works. If you are interested in physics or engineering, knowing that fact should be the justification you need to actually sit down and learn calculus. I think this fact gets lost on a lot of students.</p>
<p>I was teaching a junior-level engineering class recently and asked them to set up a problem where air was leaving a pressure vessel into a vacuum, so the flow rate changed with time. They struggled connecting it with derivatives (and this setting up the differential equation). So I asked them what a derivative was and was appalled that some of these students responded with things like “the slope of a line”, which is such a narrow definition. The point is, I think calculus education as a whole is lacking, even in a lot of university courses, and that hurts prospective engineers and physicists down the road. I don’t think applied flavors are the answer, though. Sure, include examples that reach back to real-world problems, but the course itself should be rigorous enough that the students can actually understand calculus, not just use it for a set of cookie-cutter problems.</p>
<p>From engineers I have talked to they always emphasize how money orientated engineers have to be in their designs, planning, and everyday work. One common misconception about the field is that engineers are given a blank check and told to put something together. It is not as innovating as one would like to think but that all depends who you work for.</p>
<p>I agree with the OP and would add that most engineering students who stay and complete their studies aren’t prepared for the real world. Not just the politics but the biggest part of engineering is the fact that you have to sell a product or service in private industry. You can’t think of your work as just paychecks for completing projects. If you can’t sell the product or service, you are unemployed. It seems intuitive but it isn’t.</p>
<p>Part of selling something, or acquiring funding for research is playing politics.</p>
<p>Just to be clear, we’re not talking about republicans and democrats here, we’re talking about the act of getting on certain, powerful peoples’ good side.</p>
<p>College students are often used to everything working like a perfect meritocracy, only to find out when they start working that things don’t always work like that.</p>
<p>Watering down Calculus for an EE student is a recipe for disaster. Your first semester sophomore circuits class will deal first and second order RLC circuits. These concepts are taught in Diff Eq which is after Cal I,and II. </p>
<p>I had two take 2 Diff Eq classes for EE. The Diff Eq II class delt with mostly Taylor Series,Fourier Series,Fouireir Transforms ,half-range cosine and sine expansions.</p>
<p>Few engineers ever have to bother themselves with the actual marketing of the product. You don’t have to be some marketing guru or salesman to be a successful engineer. The majority of engineers really can think of their work as just paychecks as long as they perform that work admirably. You only need to worry about more if you aspire to move up the ladder, but most of those skills you will likely learn while you are still a peon at your job anyway before those decisions are yours to make. The only other time I can think of that this makes sense for the average engineer is if you have an idea and are trying to sell that idea to superiors as it pertains to the project at hand, but that is really just about communication skills and having a sufficient grasp on the engineering principles to make a strong case.</p>
<p>It is not and should not be the responsibility of a university to teach engineers how to play politics. The support that a university should give engineering students in helping their salesmanship should really consist of helping them improve their written and verbal communication skills, but that’s about it. Most programs these days do or at least try to do exactly that.</p>
<p>This statement is very untrue in my case. I wish i had marketing gurus. oh that would be heaven if marketing guys knew about three phase power,reverse current, or even the basic concept of how transformers work my job would be cake. </p>
<p>For engineering in the classical sense, how would a marketing guy know how a product you designed works? </p>
<p>Here is how marketing guruship works at my job. “Hey i have a neat idea on how we can better expedite warranty information to our customers give me a raise”</p>
<p>I’m going to bring this up in a meeting. This will be comedy gold. Im gonna say “maybe we should have the marketing department interface with the utility companies”.</p>
<p>Going back to what I said though, most engineers are not sales engineers and don’t interface directly with the customer. There are a subset who do, but that is not the norm across the set of all engineers. Most engineers only have to sell ideas to the more senior engineers and to team members, and for that, technical communication is the name of the game, not salesmanship.</p>
<p>I can agree with not having engineering majors START with “Applied Only” courses but upper-level applied-only courses can help (in my opinion). Maybe courses like “Mathematical Modeling” or “Methods of Applied Mathematics” should be included in a curriculum…but only after the initial (and regular) Calculus sequence.</p>
<p>In a way, it is done now as some schools have “departmental versions” of Numerical Methods and let the math majors have Numerical Analysis (which is like Numerical Methods plus theory plus error analysis in depth).</p>
<p>I have had both “Probability & Statistics for Engineers” and separate “Probability Theory” and “Mathematical Statistics” courses and the “Probability & Statistics for Engineers” really gave you what an engineer would need.</p>
<p>I don’t underestimate it at all, and deal with it all the time. I just don’t think it is a suitable mission for universities to be schooling engineering students in office politics. Navigating office politics and organizational politics is something you should learn through social interaction with other human beings during college, not in class. This is precisely why in every thread it is relevant, I am an advocate of people not hitting the books so hard that they have no time for a social life.</p>
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<p>Indeed, it is quite important, especially in academia. However, this again comes back to technical communication (which many universities already at least try to teach) and sociability (see above).</p>
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<p>This is why I also advocate internships, even for students planning on going straight to graduate school. Sure it is useful for helping you decide, but it also gives you that experience with an office environment.</p>
<p>The original post I was referencing when I made my statement about most engineers not usually being salesmen is the following:</p>
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<p>My point is not that engineers shouldn’t know how to sell themselves or their ideas, but that very rarely is the engineer in a position where he or she has to be out selling products to the world, especially in industry where most engineers are working on one small set of parts or one subsystem out of a greater whole and probably don’t have the breadth to go sell the total package anyway.</p>
<p>As an example, you don’t see the design engineers at Boeing flying out to United Airlines to pitch their product; you see the business guys doing that and sales engineers in support. Most of those guys doing the pitching also have been in the business for a while and have built up the experience and rapport to be effective. Sure, some engineers will go into sales of that sort, but most do not, and that is not, in general, a skill that an engineer must have to hold a job as implied by the original post with which I diagreed.</p>
<p>I disagree 1000%. I was a C-D-F student in math until I took an applied calculus class. Up until then, math was useless letter juggling and pointless proofs. The applied calculus class finally showed me there were real world uses for math. I got an A, and there’s no way I would have gone into computer science if not for that class.</p>
<p>Given how badly most Americans are at math, perhaps schools should focus less on math theory and more math practicality.</p>
