How hard is calculus 2/3 in UIUC??

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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<p>First, you got a 3.6 in your engineering courses while simultaneously blowing off easy As in general educational courses and running block I. A 3.6 is a B+ or an A-, which is significantly above average for most engineers. The average engineers I know don’t go to every football and b-ball game, they don’t run block I, and they barely get a 3.0, and usually lower. They don’t blow off their gen eds, those are some of the only As they’ll ever see at UIUC. So you proved my point, you don’t reflect the typical engineer at UIUC. You also proved my point that you are indeed one of “those guy” by flaunting how you blew off Economics and CLCV class.</p>

<p>Second, summer term two is 8 weeks, not 10. That makes a big difference. I have yet to meet someone who took two hard core engineering, science or math courses at the same time. As an engineer you should design on the safe side, that’s why I don’t suggest to some UIUC newbie that it’s a good idea to take two summer engineering courses at once.</p>

<p>Third, I’ve yet to meet someone from UIUC who had an internship after freshman year. Where I work, they specifically changed their policy to hire juniors or older. After freshman year is the best time to take some summer courses for most people. With today’s economy and competition, there might be no internship after sophomore year either. Of course, with your background and probable involvement in all sorts of student stuff/leadership goodies, you probably nabbed one. Good for you, I suggested that chriscollege also try to find an internship but that summer courses after first year would be the likely course of action.</p>

<p>Finally, I admitted that aerospace is more intense than civil. However, the list of courses you provided proves little. I would probably take none of those courses in graduate school, but besides that point, with the exception of the pavement design course, the other courses are not full of crazy math. CEE 501 is about materials testing; it’s basically a lab where you use different methods to test materials. CEE 502 is a chemistry heavy course, not a lot of differential equations and other goofy stuff. Finally, I would not do a thesis master’s, and most civil engineers, do not.</p>

<p>In layman’s terms I’m gonna go from learning how to build with simple concrete beams to learning how to build with wooden ones, and with cooler concrete beams. If I wanted to figure out how concrete twists at the molecular level, or the mathematical formula for the deformation of non plastic bodies I’d be a TAM major. Civil is still math intensive, but we’re not building the atomic bomb or modeling an atom of oxygen around an airplane wing.</p>

<p>Before giving advice boneh3ad, as yourself this question:</p>

<p>How likely is it that the people I’m giving advice to will attend every UIUC football and basketball game, run block I, and graduate with a 3.6 GPA in their technical courses?</p>

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<p>First of all, I never said I didn’t do well in school (though I hardly had a great GPA by grad school standards). I said that I wasn’t a workaholic or antisocial or any of the other stuff that you directly said or implied in your previous post. That would prove that I am not an overachiever since I had no problems getting a B and didn’t get all worked up when I flunked and exam here and there. In fact, the only time I got worked up about a grade in an engineering class is when I thought I was going to flat out fail my signals processing class. Thankfully, apparently everyone else was in the same boat and the curve saved all of us.</p>

<p>As for the summer length, I don’t honestly have a response to that, because I never took summer classes. Most schools seem to have something similar in length to 10 weeks for the summer, or two 5 week half sessions. It just varies by school. If UIUC is 8 weeks, that is great, but it doesn’t change the fact that it is then exactly the same thing as taking 4 engineering classes over the normal 16 week semester. I don’t know how you don’t know anyone who did that, but I know plenty of people who did. I suppose most of the time people took 3 in a semester, not 4, but I know a lot of people who did 4 off and on. For example, in the ME department, they even suggest in your junior year taking ME 320 (Heat Transfer), ME 350 (Design for Manufacturability), ME 360 (Signals Processing and Controls) and ME 370 (Mechanical Design I). Those are all required, core ME classes. That is identical to taking 2 engineering classes in an 8 week time period.</p>

<p>Now, you could certainly make the argument that as a freshman, you shouldn’t hit yourself with a load like that, and I agree with that argument. It would be crazy to do that when you are still getting acclimated to campus. I would even argue that unless you are just itching to graduate in a certain amount of time, that taking summer engineering classes is entirely unnecessary and that you should either work or take easy classes over the summer to recharge your batteries. Still, I never said it would be a great idea to do it, just that it wouldn’t be to bad in the sense that it wouldn’t be any worse than what happens during some normal semesters.</p>

<p>You are correct in making the point that internships are rare after freshman year. I have seen it happen a couple of times, but not very often. After my freshman year, I got a job with IDOT essentially shadowing the engineers and getting paid near minimum wage to do a lot of work. It was a great experience but not really an internship. I also had to sort of sneak into it since I knew someone at IDOT. However, in my original post on this subject, I said internships/co-ops, and co-ops are known to hire freshmen more often simply because they can get them earlier and get a better return on investment. When I interned at Rolls-Royce my junior and senior year, there were a surprisingly large number of freshman co-ops but no freshman interns.</p>

<p>As for those courses, I wasn’t trying to provide an exhaustive list of courses. Go look at the ones you would take. I bet there is something in there that would signal a more theoretical, math-based approach, whether you recognize those signals or not. You may not realize it, but even in that CEE 501 class, it says it does theoretical background, which means it will go into continuum mechanics, and that is very math intensive. I just finished a continuum mechanics class last semester and let me tell you, it was a completely different and more mathematical way of looking at solid mechanics than what I took as an ME undergraduate. With that CEE 502, chemistry is heavily governed by differential equations. Exactly what is covered in that course I don’t know as I am not a CivE, I only have a suspicion that it is more than you are making it out to be. I suppose I could hit up my friend who just finished his MS in Civil at UIUC and see if he knows, but it isn’t really that important. What is important is that you are in the same boat as me. I expected the first classes (Masters-level classes) to basically be just a more advanced version of what I had taken, with some math backbone but largely focusing on the concepts and applications. I was wrong. You can choose to not believe me if you want, but I am trying to help you out here. It will likely be more math intensive than you seem to be willing to admit right now.</p>

<p>Your point about doing a non-thesis degree is well taken, but unless I have misread the requirements for the non-thesis version (here: [Course</a> Information Suite, Course Catalog, Class Schedule, Programs of Study, General Education Requirements, GenEd](<a href=“Course Explorer”>Course Explorer)), you will be taking the same classes as your thesis-based counterparts. I don’t know what classes you are planning to take, but just keep in mind that civil engineering has a lot of theory in it too. You may not be a TAM major, but things like continuum mechanics are integral to civil engineering and are also very mathematical and theoretical.</p>

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<p>I can honestly say that I know a fair number of people who did this, or were pretty darned close to it. They guy I know in civil who just finished his MS that I mentioned earlier did the same thing as me. He was a Block Head, active Orange Krush member, and did even more extracurricular stuff than I did. I also know he had a lot more all-nighters than me. I have no idea what his GPA was or any of that jazz, only that he got into the MS program.</p>

<p>The thing is, engineers come in many flavors, especially at a large school like UIUC. Some are very active socially, and some are not. Some of those have good GPA’s and some don’t. I know a lot of PhD students who are and were total slackers and a ton who are and were workaholics. I know perfectionists and non-perfectionists. You can’t just generalize everything and say that all PhD students were workaholic perfectionists who breezed through undergrad. I had a lot of fun but I still worked my tail off. The only things that really all PhD students have in common is that they love their subject area and want to do research in it, and through some combination of hard work, luck, and sheer intelligence, they made it through undergraduate with a good enough application and enough drive left over to get into graduate school. The exact combination of those varies wildly.</p>

<p>I know I worked my tail off. You can try and paint it another way, but I did.</p>

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<p>two “engineering” classes during the summer is definitely doable depending on the course/teacher. it’s more about whether or not you get really sick of learning and wanting to enjoy your summer than the difficulty of courses. i’m actually in summer school right now, i took two social science classes during the first session, and in the second, longer session, i’m taking mcb 250, and a 200 level “engineering” technical course (actually studying for the finals right now.). i have been doing well gradewise, but at many times during the summer i really just didn’t care about school or going to class.</p>

<p>im taking a break from studying cuz i was thinking about next year and was wondering about my classes will be. so what i have been wondering is you all’s opinion on the difficulty of classes as time progresses. i haven’t had the chance to talk w/ too many upperclass engineers about this, and you two seem like knowledgeable people. i’m going to be a sophomore next semester in general engineering w/ an engineering related minor. generally what i have heard is that freshman year you have a lot of “weedout” classes (maybe calc 2/3 are considered in this category). but a recent graduate suggested that those freshman classes are “weeding out” non-engineers from engineers and that there are also weedout classes within engineering classes that start to come out jr year. however i just read another post about the grades in upper level classes tend to be higher. do you think this is a result of work ethic? are there really engineering weedout classes? if so, what classes are these?</p>

<p>another thing i was wondering is whether or not school recognition really matters with employers/graduate school… in my personal opinion, i feel that “general engineering,” even though it’s not really “general” doesn’t that great, especially since a lot of engineering schools don’t even offer “general engineering” (in fact many ones that do label it as “systems engineering”) and u of i’s ranking in this major isn’t even that great. in fact, i can’t even find a ranking online for GE, the only rankings i can find are for industrial. the reason i was wondering is i was thinking transferring into a different major, maybe cheme? but is it worth it to transfer based off of individual rankings? to be honest i haven’t developed that much of a liking to GE, but i know other majors any more. im more concerned about job opportunities.</p>

<p>two more things: does having an engineering minor help at all? i feel like a should, but i’ve also read it’s not a big deal (i might feel the same way considering the difficulty of obtaining the minor). also, where do you guys get the internships? just from career fairs at the union?</p>

<p>i know i have a lot of questions, but i’d appreciate your input. also, don’t mind my sn, it was used as an inside joke/to ■■■■■ early last year.</p>

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<p>HYPSMaster-lots of good questions…you should probably start a new thread …don’t know if you will get a response with this one. I am interested in any info on engineering too. I am surprised you took back to back summer sessions. Didn’t the first summer session start in May? You really did not get any break from school at all? I don’t think I could do that. I would need a break. As far as taking 2 classes, do you have a couple of hours of work to do every night? How about weekends? I was hoping to getaway some summer weekends, is that doable?..or is the workload pretty heavy that you need the weekends to catch up?</p>

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<p>i think most kids who take summer school take classes in both sessions. in fact some upperlevel classes (some accy and cs) extend through both. it did start in may, like three days after the last scheduled final. it’s a lot more relaxed than the regular school year, but like i said i personally just didn’t feel like doing work a couple times. it might be because of the classes i’m taking, and my work ethic, but it wasn’t that bad 2nd session. the only real work i did was pulling around all-nighters for the nights before mcb tests. i guess that counts as catching up, but i barely worked during the weekends. maybe an hour or two of hw a day. i don’t have a job here, so i had a ton of free time, and i definitely had a lot of fun (esp around greek reunion). it might seem like an empty campus but it’s not that bad at all. i didn’t go back home because my parents just moved to a different state and i know literally nobody there. assuming you’d be carrying a not-so-terrible workload you can have a lot of fun and go back home during the weekends. so to summarize it’s definitely doable and you’ll easily get over your lack of work ethic/boredom.</p>

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<p>Hey HYPSMaster; start a new thread concerning your issues with general engineering and I’ll give you my two cents on general engineering.</p>