<p>I am about to start my first semester of engineering at Purdue (yes I will change nickname at some point) and I am a little bit confused how is it going to look like. Some say that 2-credit classes can take 20 hours of work every week, that calculus, physics and chemistry are only designed to scare newcomers or that getting 3.0+ in engineering takes your whole social life and most of your sleep and health. Is this all I mentioned for real or just senseless gossip made up by those who could not make it in engineering? I created my plan for first semester and I will be glad to hear your feedback including you OP. I just want to know if you think something should be changed as it is 16 credits while most advise 12-14 credits for first semester. Here it is:</p>
<p>Multi-variable calculus (4 credits)
General chemistry (4 credits)
English composition (4 credits)
Transforming ideas to innovation (2 credits)
Introduction to aerospace engineering (2 credits)</p>
<p>Thanks for help.</p>
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<p>Well I suppose that could happen, but that doesn’t mean it is normal for that to happen.</p>
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<p>People say that because they are used to high school classes where they basically have the material spoon-fed to them. As soon as college hits and the material is not only more difficult, but more rigorous and the expectations are higher, they flounder, hopefully just at first, until they figure out how to become an independent learner. Introductory classes like calculus, physics and chemistry are designed to teach you the basics of calculus, physics and chemistry at a level that puts you in a position to succeed when you start coming across all those concepts in your 300- and 400-level classes later on down the road. If it also happens to discourage the students who are either too lazy or too entitled to do the work, then that is better for all parties. Professors are not out to get you. I have never met one who delights in making their students’ lives hell. Generally, they are happiest when you succeed; they just aren’t going to hold your hand and force you to succeed.</p>
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<p>I like to tell this anecdote as a counterpoint to this claim. As an undergraduate at Illinois (not exactly a slouch engineering school), I only missed 2 home football games and 2 whole basketball games in the entire 4 years I was there (and yes I was only there for 4 years). I made weekend trips to Chicago and St. Louis regularly (probably monthly or so) and I had no problem going out with friends most of the time. Sure, I wasn’t going out 5 nights a week, but going out to the bars or the movies or wherever else 2 or 3 times in a week was usually not out of the question. I did all that and still had a GPA high enough to get into a top 10 PhD program in my area. Oh, and I met and dated my eventual wife.</p>
<p>The secret: time management. I wasn’t even particularly good at it compared to some people, but I was good enough at it to make everything work. As long as you don’t get into the habit of going out and getting hammered 6 nights a week you should be able to develop good enough time management skills to have plenty of fun.</p>
<p>The bottom line is you just need to be willing to work and develop study skills and time management skills. Yes, every once in a while you need to postpone social plans for a particularly daunting assignment or an exam or something, but most of my friends and I never really found that to be much of an encumbrance once we got our sea legs.</p>
<p>Herein lies the problem with threads like this. You start scaring people who haven’t started yet, and if they haven’t even decided for sure yet, they may not even try to succeed even if they were perfectly capable.</p>
<p>Bschoolwiz: Do your classes have curves?</p>
<p>RaysGatorsFan: I’m a current Purdue engineering student. ;D
Stop by the Purdue subforum or hit me up with a pm or something.</p>
<p>ENGR 131/132 is the class that everybody complains about (Intro to Engineering). It’s 2 credit hours, but… yeah, homework and assignments can take 10+ hours. Don’t procrastinate in that class unless you’re willing to dedicate one full afternoon/ night/ morning to it… Chem 115 is EASY if you took chem in high school. Study, do the labs, do the homework, and you’ll be fine. Nothing out of the norm there. Calc and ENG kind of depend on your professor. Calc is difficult. Work on it and always email your professor or go to office hours if you need help. Don’t just sit there. My ENGL professor sucked and we all got A’s because he didn’t grade anything. Ugh, hate those professors.
I took 17 credit hours first semester (ENGR 131, CHEM 115, ENGL 106, EPICS, MA 162, Woman in Engineering Seminar). Ended first semester with a 3.91. Currently have a 3.90 and I’m a rising junior.</p>
<p>Yes, both classes had curves. With General Chemistry, the grade breakdown before going into the Final was something like F 5% 10% D 60% C 15% B 10% A. The C range was ridiculously wide, so people who ended up caught near the middle( 55% average) had no chance of getting a B after Test 2.</p>
<p>I am not trying to discourage or “scare” people like Ray but I think it is important to have an idea of what you will be facing- I knew it was not going to be easy but had no idea it was going to be this frustrating.</p>
<p>This semester was truly a “learning experience”- it was frustrating but at the same time, I have a much better idea of how much effort is needed, some of the things I need to change and I am way more motivated to do better next semester.</p>
<p>On the other hand, I can see how some people can totally lose their motivation after having a not-so-good first semester.I know I am never going to give up but many people do.</p>
<p>Please describe your breakdown and how I can avoid it when my candidacy exam comes.</p>
<p>It had everything to do with spending way too much time trying to study for the quals and not enough time just relaxing or interacting with other human beings. I finally did the intelligent thing and went to the doctor, who said it was pretty clear I was suffering from major depression and 6 months of light medication later I was better. Moral of the story: make sure you make time for yourself. If you burn the candle at both ends for two long you will snap.</p>
<p>On the bright side, I took the qualifying exams while suffering from depression and still scored among the top scores for that year, so there’s that…</p>
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<p>Don’t buy this BS. You can do very well in engineering and not like a Calc I or Chem class. They have little or no bearing on how well you will like engineering once you get into real engineering classes. Solving brain-teaser calculus problems that some math prof dreamt up to force a curve is not an indicator of success in engineering.</p>
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<p>The prof you had sounds like a screwball. If 75% of the students are below a B then there is something wrong with the prof and he/she should be disciplined or at least removed from the classroom. </p>
<p>It’s a travesty that idiotic profs are going out of their way to discourage students from going into engineering while at the same time Congress is falling all over themselves to open the H1B floodgates and inundate the country with foreign engineers. I don’t know why the engineering profession allows this while in medicine they keep a tight clamp on letting foreign docs in.</p>
<p>Most engineering is unlicensed and unregulated. And a good thing too, although I agree the government shouldn’t artificially raise demand for cheap, foreign-born engineers by making the immigration system favor engineers and scientists.</p>
<p>Lake: They are not going to remove this professor because often, it is the head of the department and a committee that decides how intense the exams and the grading are going to be. </p>
<p>For example, at Iowa State, all the Calculus Midterms and Finals are administered by the Math Department, so even if a professor is great and really cares about teaching the material the “right way”, we still have to take the Departmental Midterm and Final.</p>
<p>One of my favorite Calculus I test questions was, Find the derivative of x^x</p>
<p>Probably 90% of the people got this one wrong- I guess-most people tried to use the Chain Rule but that is not how you do it. </p>
<p>I got so mad after the test that I did this problem at least 20 times and I still remember the answer by heart x^x(ln x+1) LOL</p>
<p>I guess, you either accept things the way they are and go with the flow or it can be very frustrating.</p>
<p>Maybe in the future, I will come across an Engineering problem where I will have to find the derivative of x^x :)</p>
<p>You’d be surprised some of the funky derivatives that will come up. That said, you probably won’t find x^x anywhere. The point of that problem is more about whether or not you understand u-substitution and the chain rule or whether you are blindly following a pattern even when that method clearly breaks down. It sounds like most were simply pattern followers. The chain rule WILL come back again… a lot.</p>
<p>That said, it sure seems like there’s probably a better problem to test that with that doesn’t require obscure solution methods.</p>
<p>I was hoping to be able to graduate with honors in college… In engineering it doesn’t seem possible</p>
<p>What does graduating with honors matter? No one will really care when it comes time to get a job. Go ahead and strive for it but don’t convince yourself that it is necessary to be successful or anything.</p>
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<p>By itself, this isn’t that crazy of a question as you just take ln of both sides, use implicit differentiation and substitute y=x^x back in for y.</p>
<p>The issue is whether this problem came out of the blue and how much time was spent on implicit differentiation and use of the ln method. What I can’t stand is classes that teach at one level then casually throw problems at two levels higher than what was taught. It’s a great way to create a nice curve but accomplishes little else. It’s like asking middle schoolers to solve a quadratic after only teaching linear equations and expecting that they’ll “figure it out.”</p>
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<p>This describes my current physics professor to a T. He loves to test cleverness while kind of sort of relating to what we have covered. As much as I believe most teachers aren’t out to screw you, my physics professor openly says things to the class “It’s my job to lower your GPA.” or “The average was too high on the last test, this next one will be fix that;” it did. The engineering classes I’ve had so far (statics, mechanics of materials, circuits) have never given brain teasers beyond maybe recognizing a simple algebra/geometry trick. To be fair though, often time the answer to a physics problem is a one-step, almost trivial computation, whereas the engineering class problems require multiple steps, often requiring a page or more of computation.</p>