Making the transition from Theoretical to Applied in Engineering

College Majors Engineering Majors
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<p>This was actually brought up on a college-specific thread regarding the "hardest" year of undergraduate engineering, but it got me to thinking about transitions and specific skills needed to push through for that undergraduate degree. In high school almost everything is book-learned, further-explained, extended by the teacher, tested and graded. Even the first 1-2 years of undergraduate engineering are engineering basics, if I can use that term. You've got to have a solid grounding in Math, Chemistry and Physics to begin to apply that knowledge in the specialized, focused classes in your junior and senior undergrad years. Most high school students who get into a good college engineering program are at least used to the know-the-book/take-good-notes routine that got them the offer in the first place, but when you start to need to work collaboratively on projects, and you need experience with Matlab, and other cad/cam software etc, do many of the I'll-do-it-on-my-own bookworms begin to fall behind? How hard is that transition from the theory presented the first two years to it's application, which is the focus of the last two years for the most part?</p>

<p>My son is taking an "engineering" elective in high school where he's working on collaborative projects to build bridges, hot-air ballons etc, which I think is a very much needed introduction into what you'll actually be doing as an engineer. You take theory and make it work. This HS elective will give him a much better idea of whether he wants to pursue a degree in engineering, and he still does thankfully, but I think many others think along the lines of "I'm a good student who likes math and science. Those are hard classes. Engineering is a hard major. So, I'll be an engineer."</p>

<p>When they introduce you to Matlab etc, do they give you time to learn them, or do they just expect you to use them proficiently, and learn them on your own in the computer labs with your engineering buddies? What can you do to prepare beforehand to use these skills in your junior and senior years, and is a desktop better able to handle the strain of these graphics-intensive tools?</p>

<p>Heh, how's that for a multi-topic post?</p>

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<p>1) We didn’t use much CAD / CAM in engineering school. We had a class on it freshman year and then used it for the senior design project, but I don’t think I used it at all (for class) in between freshman and senior year.</p>

<p>2) Laptops or desktops can both handle CAD / CAM applications. At Boeing, we use laptops for airplane design work. But, I wouldn’t expect that your studnet will be doing tons of CAD / CAM work.</p>

<p>3) Matlab, Mathematica, and other computer programs are generally learned by the student on his / her own time. The professor might cover the basics in class and there might be one class that covers engineering software, but most of the functionality will be on their own.</p>

<p>4) The freshman and sophmore classes (Calculus, Physics, Statics and Dynamics) are usually considered the weed out classes. By the time they finish the first two years, it is very likley they will graduate.</p>

<p>5) We didn’t have a lot of group engineering work in upper level engineering classes. Engineering school is generally a do it by myself activity. While college is social in general, and engineering not an exception, most engineering stuff is done alone and not in callaboration with other students. The senior design project is a notable exception.</p>

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<p>When I was at Michigan State, sometimes a certain math course would have multiple sections (different class times, different professors) and that specific section’s “emphasis” was listed in the schedule of classes.</p>

<p>For example…</p>

<p>Differential Equations would be offered by 3 different professors and in the schedule of classes, each would have a footnote like:</p>

<ul>
<li>“Geared for engineering majors”</li>
<li>“Computer Option” (meaning more computer projects counted and less on exams)</li>
<li>“Geared for math majors”</li>
</ul>

<p>Of course anyone who passed Calculus III was eligible, but MSU would let you know the slant of that particular section.</p>

<p>I said all of that to say this…if your school offers an “applied” version of a course (applied calculus, applied linear algebra, etc) or something like “XXXX for Engineers”…take them so you will get a flavor for mathematical applications.</p>

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<p>^ Engineering service courses in math departments seem awful to me. I’ve been in a couple and it’s such a waste. Why? Well, the professors are mathematicians and they do a bad job of teaching the engineering applications, and the students are engineers and they do a bad job of understanding how to actually use it.</p>

<p>I much prefer the system where math courses are done by math people for math people and departments relegate the applications stuff to “Math methods” courses in the home departments. The only reason I can see for not doing this is that nobody in the home department feels qualified. If that’s the case, yikes.</p>

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<p>^ I don’t know about that. If I need to know about numerical solutions to differential equations, I rather have the man/woman who specialize in this for their research area when teaching the “computer section” of Differential Equations. If it’s overkill for engineering, so be it.</p>

<p>The real problem is that probable the best teachers (sometimes) for engineering courses are those industry folks who sometimes teach at a university and only have an M.S./MEng degree. Those instructors are often times regulated to the continuing education/distance education programs. I had a couple of those instructors for my grad courses in Statistics and Quality Control.</p>

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<p>Apparently bigtrees educational experience was significantly different than mine.</p>

<p>I guess I would start off addressing a major misconception in your post. Most high school students don’t come into engineering with the “know-the-book/take-good-notes routine” down pat. In fact, most don’t, especially at the top schools. They were the ones in high school who didn’t usually have to try very hard, so they get to college and have a real adjustment to make. That is why a lot of people end up with a low GPA their first semester or two as they make that adjustment.</p>

<p>bigtrees is absolutely right that, for the most part, classes like statics and dynamics are the weed out courses for engineering (or at least for mechanical, civil, aerospace, etc; for things like chemical or electrical, those basic level weed out classes will be different). Those courses are the basis for a lot of the rest of the courses that you end up taking, and they use them a lot for weeding out kids who can’t cut the mustard. Those classes are done pretty much entirely by individual students with no group work and no hands-on portion. For mechanical engineering at UIUC, thermodynamics was also a weed out class since it was to the thermal fluid sciences what statics/dynamics were to the mechanics portion of the major. Those subjects assessed the individual and weeded out the ones who weren’t good enough or weren’t motivated enough. Still, for those of us who actually belonged in engineering, those weren’t the hardest classes for most of us.</p>

<p>For me, once junior year started, the classes got tougher simply because it was an adjustment from thinking like I did before and thinking in a way that made sense for a mechanical engineer. The mindset for solving engineering problems is totally different from that of solving statics problems in a lot of cases. So when you combine the near complete lack of non-technical courses once you get farther along with the fact that adjusting your mindset from the mundane, cut and paste solutions of the weed out classes to the mindset of the higher level classes where the problems require some degree of insight, you get what is, in my opinion, a more difficult set of classes. After a semester or two, you get your mind molded the right way, so my senior year ended up being probably the easiest and most enjoyable of my four years of undergrad. Junior year was my hardest. Despite being more difficult overall, Junior year was still probably the second most enjoyable simply because I really enjoyed the subject matter, even if I didn’t have all the intricacies of thinking like a MechE down yet. The first two years is definitely where most of the people who didn’t make it ended up dropping out, but the third year is where all those who did make it spent the most time and effort on classes and had the least amount of free time.</p>

<p>At UIUC, the basic CS class required for all engineering majors covers both Matlab and C, so we all formally learned those two. That still only covers the basics. Most of what I know in Matlab I still picked up on my own over the 3 years following that CS 101 course.</p>

<p>As for desktop vs. laptop (since I am the one who probably started that debate) is pretty much personal preference. I chose a desktop because I could get more bang for my buck. The only time that really was a huge advantage over a laptop was when doing signals processing labs, which require quite a bit of computer power, but even then, it was just the difference between the computer taking 6 min to think and taking 30 sec to think, although that becomes noticeable when you have to tweak your program slightly and run it again a couple times. Desktops are very much an advantage in CAD/CAM work if you are using all the really robust features of such programs, but most people don’t go that deep. I did use quite a bit of FEA code later in undergrad, and running that on a desktop was much faster than a laptop. The laptop was so portable though that I had a hard time deciding, so what really ultimately pushed me over the edge was the fact that I wanted to be able to play some of the more graphically intensive games on it from time to time, so I went with a desktop and got all the added benefits of a desktop and just used the computer labs when I worked on campus. Honestly, most of the people I knew used the computer labs when doing work on campus anyway because you need to use different programs that either we all didn’t have on our personal machines or we needed a desktop’s power for. I definitely used more CAD than bigtrees seems to, as a good third of all my group projects involved CAD to some degree.</p>

<p>Additionally, in my second half of my 4 years, most homeworks and projects were encouraged to be done in groups so long as it was collaborative and not just one person doing the work and 4 people copying. The reasoning behind that is that (1) most engineering in the real world is done in groups, (2) it is almost always easier to learn with a group of people than on your own, as someone else might understand the parts you have trouble with better than you and be able to explain it differently than the professor, and (3) if someone just copied on homework in their group, they would pay for it on the test. It honestly always seemed to work well for us. That seems to be a trend among most of the people that I work with in grad school now as well. Most of them had plenty of group work like that in their respective undergraduate schools.</p>

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<p>That works for Statistics, for example, but not for more cutting-edge classes. As someone that has taught with just a master’s degree and with a doctorate, I can tell you that it is a completely different experience. Active researchers are better able to see where a field is going rather than where it has been, and if they are teaching a topic in their own field, they can interject new material and theories that aren’t found in any book. It’s truly a different experience and gives students’ different levels of understanding of the concept.</p>

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<p>It depends on whether or not the student can get the material. Many students need groups because they just wouldn’t be able to figure something out on their own. That’s not a bad thing, it’s just a different way of learning. </p>

<p>The greater concern would be how a “I’ll-do-it-on-my-own bookworm” would act in the workplace. </p>

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<p>At the top colleges, you’ll never leave theory. Even applications are taught from a theoretical perspective. If you understand theory, application is trivial.</p>

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<p>You learn on your own, but professors generally recognize that and start simple and move into more complicated applications later. Most software these days is pretty quick to pickup, even highly specialized computer simulation software.</p>

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<p>Laptops these days are fine to run any software, and many schools actually require laptops (so professors can require you to bring them to class for in-class exercises). The highly specialized and complicated software (at least at the undergrad level) will be provided in the department (or engineering) computer lab and will be too expensive to buy, anyway (no comments from the peanut gallery, please).</p>

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<p>Bone,</p>

<p>It depends what a person calls “working callabotively on projects.” I generally think of collabrotive projects similiar to a junior or senior design where a bunch of engineering students work on one thing together. At my school, we had a senior design project but not a junior design project.</p>

<p>We did occasional group projects for a couple classes, but most students don’t like doing them and didn’t care for them. And we usually had the option of working individually if we wanted to.</p>

<p>Homework was often doing in groups or pairs, but I don’t think that falls under the “working in callaborationi on projects” category.</p>

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<p>It doesn’t fall under the working in collaboration on projects category, but it sure falls into the collaboration category, or at least it did for us. We definitely made it a group effort.</p>

<p>Also, starting junior year, probably half of our classes each semester had at least one major group project in it. Things like Mechanical Design I & II had 3 to 4. My FEA class had 3 as well.</p>

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<p>I had a very very different undergraduate experience from yours. For the overwhelming majority of my upper level engineering courses, we had at least one group semester project per course. </p>

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<p>Most of my classmates liked working in groups. We usually didn’t have the option of working alone because the scope of the projects were usually too large to do by oneself. Maybe we just got along better with each other.</p>

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<p>Not for me… at least not formally. We sometimes did homework together, but they were individual submissions.</p>

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<p>Ours were individual submissions too, but we were not discouraged from group work, and sometimes were encouraged as long as we didn’t flat out copy. It was a stipulation that it had to be a true group effort if you worked in groups.</p>

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<p>boneh3ad, we were encouraged as well.</p>

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<p>Thanks for the info guys. I guess it boils down to whether he can cut the weedout classes during the first two years, and then begin to see and solve things as an engineer would. He’s cut it so far. I’m hoping he can make a successful transition to college level intensity of coursework.</p>

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<p>Yeah, I agree. I took a math dept. course in complex analysis targeted towards physicists and engineers and it was a terrible class.</p>

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<p>See I took a match department class for Calc I - III that was titled “Calculus for Engineers” at UIUC and it was amazing. Then again, it may have been because it was only taught by one guy, who was an ME undergrad and Applied Math Ph.D. and really knew his stuff. He has since moved on to UPenn, but that class easily left me more prepared and with a better understanding of both the basic concepts and the applications of the basic calculus sequence. Again, I think I just had an awesome professor, though.</p>

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<p>Nice to know that he moved on…sigh</p>

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<p>Must have been made an offer he couldn’t refuse.</p>

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<p>Oh I forgot about that one. Yeah I took the same class. That class though was harder and more thorough than the normal calculus II though . . .</p>

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<p>Oops, that was supposed to say math, not match, haha.</p>

<p>So wait, are you a UIUC guy/girl, silence_kit? The class I had with Rob Ghrist at UIUC was absolutely amazing. Hard as hell, in depth as hell, and an unbelievably good class. I learned more in his Calc II class than I did in almost any other class my whole time in school.</p>

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<p>Yeah, I’m a student at UIUC. Ghrist really was an excellent professor.</p>