<p>I was wondering if the engineering classes are really personal and small. Is the teacher accessible and are there a lot of oral projects (and other interactive stuff)? Or is just a ton of busy work and the professors are impersonal?</p>
<p>From what I’ve heard from upperclassmen friends, the first semester EngE class, Engineering Exploration, is terrible no matter which professor you get. They give you busy work which isn’t hard, but still annoying. They teach you ideas that you must memorize, and some of those ideas apparently have logical fallacies. I don’t know about the other EngE classes.</p>
<p>It starts off with huge, impersonal classes with a lot of busy work. Once you hit your in-major classes though, which starts in sophomore year but really kicks into gear junior year, you start getting much smaller classes where you do get to interact with the professor. By my senior year most of my classes were 15-20 people, and a couple were less than 10. Also it gets much more project oriented.</p>
<p>Mostly what chuy said.
I only have experience with ECE/CPE and CS(which I’m finally graduating in next spring).
It’s been years since I took freshman/sophomore level physics/calculus back in 2006 but my roommates took it as recently as last year and it’s pretty much unchanged. For Physics the classes are always going to be a few hundred students. However recitation was smaller. Size was never really an issue for me since it’s just a lecture, if you have questions you have to wait until office hours/recitation or after class. However all my math classes were always around high school size (25-30 students). As you get into your upper level classes engineering courses your class size will vary between 25 and 40 students on average. I had a few CS classes with maybe 50 students tops.</p>
<p>As for the teacher being accessible, it all varies on the professor/instructor/gta that you get. I always get some good professors/instructors and some bad ones each semester. One professors I had never (not kidding) responded to any of my e-mails unless it was extremely important. Another would always respond pretty quickly and answer any questions pretty thoroughly. I tend to rely on the TA’s and office hours first though. All professors and TA’s have to hold office hours. Mostly they are pretty helpful but some TA’s really suck and don’t answer any questions or have any clue.</p>
<p>A phenomenon I’ve noticed over the years with TA’s I’ve had is that a lot will try to “toy” with you and ask you a question in return to your question and try to get you to “figure it out”. While I understand that approach, it personally doesn’t work for me since I always try to “figure it out” before I even go there. Often times I don’t figure/can’t figure it out unless I’m shown at least a few examples since I’m a visual learner and learn mostly by seeing things in action. However a fair majority of TA’s are straight to the point and are pretty helpful. So yea, it all varies with the particular professor/instructor and TA’s you get. I’d suggest doing your research using sites like srefook(read backwards)/rateVTteachers/ratemyprofessor and see if there are any reviews about the particular professor your taking. I try to leave thorough reviews on those sites of professors I’ve had to help others. </p>
<p>As for oral projects and other interactive stuff. While you won’t do that in every engineering course, there are at least a few that will require group projects and several individual or group presentations. You may not have a course that does that every semester though. In particular you will usually have a “engineering professionalism” or technical writing course that does that stuff. The 2nd semester freshman engineering courses (after ENGE 1024) will do some group presentation stuff unless they’ve changed when I took them. </p>
<p>As you get to your upper level courses you will have some presentations too although they are often more serious projects/topics and more important as grades. And yes your first few engineering courses will often be busy work. It’s frustrating when I’m given work that has no relevance or realistic application in the actual field and it’s assigned just for the sake of being hard. </p>
<p>Sorry for being long, but I try to be as thorough as I can. Here’s a link to a similar thread I posted back in 2009. </p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/virginia-tech/817619-beware-engineering-majors-general-especially-computer-electrical-engineering.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/virginia-tech/817619-beware-engineering-majors-general-especially-computer-electrical-engineering.html</a></p>
<p>I am very curious about the first two “engineering exploration” classes. All I’ve heard about them is that they are weed out classes and some of my friends have had major trouble while some have done perfectly fine. What actually goes on in those 2 classes?</p>
<p>Sent from my SCH-I400 using CC App</p>
<p>You do a lot of busy work and they knock points off of your assignments for banal things like having your header in the wrong order. If you just do everything they tell you (there isn’t even that much to study, it’s mostly just doing everything just they way they say) you’ll be fine.</p>
<p>For the first semester engineering course ENGE 1024 or something like that, I actually took that at Northern Virginia Community College the summer after my freshman year. The main reason was because I wasn’t in general engineering yet at the time and was wait listed for the course, but looking back I would highly recommend taking it at a community college over the summer. Tech takes the transfer credit last time I checked for some/most VA community colleges. </p>
<p>The course there was like an easy high school course. We got a few simple homework assignments that had maybe 1 or 2 engineering type problems with math involving algebra 2 and basic trig at the most. The exams were almost identical to the homework. I got an A with minimal study time although you just need a C or higher and the grade doesn’t transfer, just the credit. Also it saves you time and “busy work”. Of course if your up to the challenge, do take it at VT. I believe the 2nd ENGE course you have to take at tech but I’m not certain on that. But why go through that if there’s an easier alternative. There’s plenty of hard courses you’ll take at VT anyway. Just my 2 cents.</p>
<p>If you want to see what sort of material ENGE 1024/1114/1104 covers, you can go to ******* and look at past tests. Homeworks were probably the biggest pain in these classes. They would take me 3-6 hours and usually contained about 7-12 pages of a word document. One of the worst parts about the homeworks is that they would force you to use your tablet pc by having to draw something on it, whether it was a graph, sketch, flowchart, etc. This would be extremely frustrating for most since the tablet pc’s are hard to use, especially when you are trying to keep your homework organized on a word document.</p>
<p>Other than that, you have a lecture and a workshop every week. Lecture is where the professor goes over topics in an auditorium. You sign into a program called DyKnow (for dynamic knowledge) and “interact” with the professor on the projector screen. I would recommend never going to class and just signing into DyKnow from your dorm room to collect all the information you need. They will threaten pop quizzes, but this only happened to me once in ENGE 1114, where I got a 50% on a quiz. It didn’t matter though because they dropped the lowest quiz/homework/classwork grade. </p>
<p>Workshop is even more interactive where you do in class projects, whether it’s building a lego car with a circuit board, developing a program in Matlab for a certain scenario, or creating orthographic sketches on your tablet pc. In ENGE1024 I would routinely get out of workshop 30 minutes early (a 1:50 class) but in ENGE1114 I had to stay the whole time. It depends on your TA.</p>
<p>EngE is frustrating because every engineering student has to take at least two of these courses, and often times the student won’t be happy with the material they are covering. For example, I really dislike computer programming and algorithms. But in ENGE1114 1/3 of the class was Matlab and algorithm development, which was a pain for me to learn. </p>
<p>In the end, it’s just a class you have to power through if you want to do engineering at Tech. If you try your hardest you will probably end up with a B+ and if you’re lucky an A-. You can alleviate the pain a little bit by taking the ENGE1024 equivalent at the New River Valley Community College in Christiansburg. A kid in my dorm did this and he didn’t do half the work we did in ENGE1024. Good luck!</p>
<p>that starred out word up there is K00FERS</p>
<p>Thank you for the advice. I was admitted into general engineering though so Im not really sure how I would go about taking that class at a community college rather than at tech. I guess I will just tough it out through those classes</p>
<p>Sent from my SCH-I400 using CC App</p>
<p>I also have a question: How hard is it to get an A in EngE 1024 and 1104? Kfers shows that only 14% get an A in 1024…</p>
<p>Hey dfmlege!!!</p>
<p>As a fellow freshman, I found this epic website that gives all the grade distributions for every instructor for every class!</p>
<p>At least I found it useful…</p>
<p>[Institutional</a> Research - Grades](<a href=“http://www.ir.vt.edu/VT_Stats/grades_contents.htm]Institutional”>http://www.ir.vt.edu/VT_Stats/grades_contents.htm)</p>
<p>Apparently, not many people get A’s in ENGE classes</p>
<p>I think 14% is a high estimate.</p>
<p>Getting an A in EngE 1024 is pretty simple, you need to do well on the tests. The actual questions tend to not be very difficult, but they can try to trick you so make sure that you look over every question. If you did well on the SAT/ACT you should do fine here as well.</p>
<p>Thanks. If I managed a (weighted) 3.97 GPA and a 1430 SAT (reading/math) score with little to no effort, should I be able to get the A in EngE with reasonable effort? Looking over at Kfers for an exam, the questions didn’t seem too bad at all for someone who pays attention during lectures (some math problems, logic circuits, reading semi-log grids, the creed of an engineer or something, “What did this guy say in this video?”). I’m trying to aim for a 4.0 GPA my four years (an alumni who I know majored in CS and math, as I will, managed to do it)…seem ridiculous?</p>
<p>Well, my general observation has been that whatever GPA you got in high school, subtract a full 1.0 from it to estimate what you will get at VT engineering if you put in the same amount of effort as you did in High School. I slid by with a 3.5 GPA in high school but never studied until the night before and did homework the morning of, and as a result of devoloping poor study habits I’m getting by with a 2.6 GPA in engineering at tech. it seems that the majority of my peers though average anywhere between a 2.8 and 3.2 in engineering. Maybe a handful of students in my classes have 3.5+ GPA’s in engineering. </p>
<p>With that said, since you got a 3.97 GPA in High School your looking at around a 3.0 GPA in engineering if you put in the same amount of effort/work. A 3.0 GPA in engineering is actually pretty good and was my original goal. I have yet to meet an engineering student with a full 4.0 GPA. That’s pretty rare, even the smart international/chinese students here usually have like 3.8 or 3.9, and they work non-stop. Never have seen a 4.0. The most extreme case I ran into was a guy double majoring in CS and Aerospace while taking 21 credit hours that particular semester and managed a 3.5+ GPA. I asked him how the hell he could possibly do that and it turns out he had extra time in the day since he apparently had insomnia. </p>
<p>If I were you, I’d focus on your first semester and see if you can pull a 4.0.</p>
<p>Everyone is different and has their own limitations and motivations of course. I’m just saying your going to have to take very few in-major classes at a time or work your a** off to pull a 4.0.</p>
<p>Great information! I don’t really want to stray too much from the topic, but I think I’ll be fine maintaining at least a 3.6+ GPA (which is what I need for a second shot at Honors) as long as I try harder than I did my high school years.</p>