Comments attached to the video also give some real life perspective
My son is an engineer. That’s a pretty good summary. The complexity and volume of work required are simply different than most other majors.
I remember vividly him telling us about getting the homework key from his first weekly assignment in Fluid Mechanics II. It was 96 pages of complex math. That was expected every week, for a single class.
Even the brightest can struggle.
1 Like
Have a buddy who is a retired engineer (ME). His daughter was a math major until her junior yr and switched to something else (I forget). I remember him telling her that Math is hard in college. He told her not to feel bad because at some point, many discover they just can’t do the work as it gets harder and harder each semester.
My oldest brother was a Chem E and added economics as a double major late in the game. He’s told me that economics was far more interesting then engineering classes but nowhere near as difficult.
I think it comes down to how you’re wired.
2 Likes
I think my engineering recent grad son summed it up. He said in college “We all struggle together”. These were all top kids in high school. Lol.
This is why my D loved being in a school with thousands and thousands of other engineering students…she didn’t feel so alone in grinding so hard! ; )
1 Like
I watched the video after this one that popped up about engineering. The guy said something like “Get used to sucking”. I think that is so true. Your GPA usually drops, getting through exams is hard and to study by yourself and why studying in a group setting works so well. There is just too much material to do it on your own. He said most people suck early on till they get the hang of it. This is true.
Let me offer a different perspective. I think Engg is no harder than many other majors like History etc. But it gets a rep that it is hard, just like math in high school gets a rep that it is hard. I find engg to be a reasonable load. I myself did engg many years ago. It is some work. Not terrible though. Very manageable. In fact easier than majors where you need to memorize tons of stuff. These days they even let you bring pages of formulas to the exam. I never got two pages of formulas. That was unheard of back in the day.
I enjoyed the challenge if most of my engineering curriculum. I didn’t enjoy honors physics or electrical circuits.
My engineering classes were definitely harder than my non-engineering ones. I looked forward to the break!
It depends on the person. I have 3 degrees in engineering fields. I usually found engineering courses easier than humanities type courses because the answers were more objective. I find it easier to objectively plug some numbers in to an equation than to write a subjective paper. However, most people seem to be the reverse. If the course involves math, it is labeled as hard.
This also contributes to the relatively larger number of hours required and other factors. The average reported study hours are usually higher for engineering than humanities. However, the reverse can also be true. Some people solve problems quickly and don’t race through writing long papers or reading texts.
One area that may not have been mentioned (did not watch whole video) that objectively makes engineering more difficult is having a larger number of required courses, with a smaller portion of courses towards degree being electives. At many colleges, the number of required for engineering is double the required courses for certain other majors. For example, back when I attended colleges, the number of required units for different majors were:
Civil Engineering: 116+
Chemical Engineering: 115 to 124
Mechanical Engineering: 114 to 119
Electrical Engineering: 113
…
Computer Science: 96 to 106
…
Physics; 76 to 79
Economics: 75 to 80
Biology: 74 to 76
Math: 64
Philosophy: 55
Psychology: 55
Spanish: 50
Chinese: 43
1 Like
It came pretty easily to my son, and he ended up with a high GPA, but he had a strong work ethic and spent a lot of time at it. In his class he was an outlier.
I find myself in disagreement with almost everyone here. Everything is relative. Engineering is far from being the most difficult major. Because of the nature of engineering, it may have more prescribed/required courses to complete for a degree. Physics and math, on the other hand, cover a much wider area of knowledge, and more importantly, in much greater depth, so only a tiny subset of the most basic courses are required and the rest are all optional for students in the major to explore (and by the time they graduate, they only barely scratch the surface). I also disagree that the amount of materials to memorize has anything to do with difficulty. In a truly difficult subject, memorization often isn’t necessary or even useful.
There are a few different ways that a major can be “difficult”:
- Intellectual challenge. In theory, any major can be “difficult” in this ways, depending on the student. There are probably many engineering, math, physics, etc. students who would find analyzing English literature more intellectually difficult than their major subjects. However, many other students are scared off by math, or the need to learn substantial lower level foundational material as prerequisites for the more interesting upper level material.
- Volume of course work. As @Data10 noted above, engineering major bachelor’s degree programs do tend to have relatively high volumes of course work in the major and for general education compared to many other majors.
- Workload per credit. Engineering majors are often high in workload per credit, because some courses have labs in addition to the usual class time, assignments, and exams. Courses with design components also tend to have large term projects, which can add workload almost as much as an additional course. But note that these features are also shared by other majors, some of which have labs (or art studio or performance) or large term projects.
#2 and #3 above, plus the tendency of many people to think that anything with math is “difficult” in the #1 sense, means that engineering majors get “difficult” reputations in all of the above. Note that this does not necessarily mean that engineering majors are the most “difficult” in any of the above.
But there may be other majors, such as music, that also appear “difficult” in the above ways.
1 Like
I agree completely. There are different definitions of “difficult.” The perception is going to depend on the skills one brings into the program. Someone who has great facility with math probably won’t find engineering terribly challenging from an intellectual standpoint. There’s no getting around the volume required in most programs though, no matter who you are.
My father is an interesting n=1 anecdote. He did his BS and MS at MIT, and then 7 years later went to medical school. He always claimed that practicing medicine was easier than engineering. Medicine didn’t require synthesis of new information, but engineering did.
1 Like
Wouldn’t it depend on what kind of medicine? Primary care or emergency physicians could see patients come in with anything and potentially have to distinguish between different conditions with similar symptoms that may not be precisely reported. But some specialists may see a much narrower range of conditions, although they may require highly specialized skills to work on.
New general medical information also comes into view. For example, we know more about COVID-19 now than we did three years ago.
For the most part, novel diseases like COVID aside, when a patient presents to any specialty, they have something that is known. It’s really a matter of whether or not the provider recognizes it.
Breadth and depth in healthcare are a different story, but still, it’s not, except in the very rare cases, known information.
Interesting video. My kids would completely agree especially with the endurance piece. I think that is why certain personalities are a better fit for engineering. Our oldest was an athlete and did competitive gymnastics for over 10 years before high school. Her sports were technical and required hours each day working on repetitive, over and over skills to compete well. Ability to focus for long periods of time on boring details is a personality trait that is almost as important as superior math knowledge. Her brother (also engineer) breezed through high school, so when he got to college and the second semester workload kicked in, he got a huge wake-up call. It took a few semesters for him to adjust to the “endurance” part of engineering. He was also a lot more social so curbing that part of his school experience was difficult. Our last kiddo is a rising freshman engineer as well. His high school physics class was a grind this year. I hope that he has developed some of those endurance mental muscles he will need to be successful.
I am kind of surprised that no one has brought up the issue of grade inflation in high school and how that impacts performance on STEM majors in college. In difficult math courses, teachers give a lot of 2nd, 3rd and 4th chances to redo assignments. There are open book & open note tests. Teachers bend over backwards in too many cases to give As so they don’t have to deal with parents. These same kids don’t do well on AP exams, or the math section of standardized tests, but parents say, “My kid isn’t a good test taker.” or “My kid had a cold that day.”
Then, their kid with a lifetime of straight As in Math goes off to university. Perhaps a large state university that has weed-out classes for STEM. These kids get Cs, Ds and Fs (which they likely should have received in middle or high school) for the first times in their lives. I’ve seen this. I don’t think teachers in high school are doing kids any favors by handing out undeserved As in math.
2 Likes
In the case of my kids the first two made 5’s on the AP exams in calculus and our last kid thinks he did well will find out in July. Our rising freshman went to a high school that is top 30 in the nation for stem so I am not worried about easy high school classes for him. His physics C class this year had no grade curves for any of the exams super tough; but the AP results in the past have yielded a majority of 4’s and 5’s so we will see.
I think your kids, and their high school, are the exception and not the rule.
Each kid went to a different high school so a mix of curricula. I will say they all have an aptitude for math/science so that helps, but Kid #2 had a harder time adjusting to the endurance piece of engineering.
I am not big on standardized tests, however, I do think that aptitude for math in general shows up early in school. Kids that consistently score in the 90th+ percentile in math, in my observation, tend to have the mental horsepower to do well in tough science majors… but need to have the study stamina.