<p>Does it get any easier? haha, Im a freshman and CS sucks right now. Do MechE's even have to use this in?</p>
<p>I'm an AE and learned it in Sophomore year. Junior year and we're needing it. My class taught me nothing useful--who need to know how to make an address book? I want to know graphing, etc! So, I guess it has a steep learning curve, but you will use it for engineering.</p>
<p>Yeah, MATLAB starts to get easier. It was kind of annoying at first, having all these ridiculous MATLAB assignments, like, "Plot a fern using the following equation!" (Plot a fern? Are you kidding me? What the...?)</p>
<p>But honestly, it's teaching you how to get comfortable with MATLAB, which is more or less a math-centric programming language. All that footwork gets you comfortable with writing various functions in MATLAB.</p>
<p>Y'know how they say that a milling machine is the only thing that you can make using only another milling machine? MATLAB's got that kind of versatility.</p>
<p>Also, you can imagine that before academia lets you loose in the real world, they want you to really know the ideas behind the programs you're going to use in industry, because when you use them wrong, you can seriously screw things up.</p>
<p>What better way to learn how all those programs work than to make you write 'em yourself, from scratch? <evil laugh=""></evil></p>
<p>But seriously... If you stick it out through a highly crunchy grad program in engineering, you'll end up writing some finite element processing code, and analysis software, and stuff like that, including all the math that goes into it.</p>
<p>Doesn't particularly get easier, you just get used to it, and it gets less pointless.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Doesn't particularly get easier, you just get used to it, and it gets less pointless.
[/quote]
Isn't that true of an engineering education in general? :)</p>
<p>I know that was true of my science education.</p>
<p>LOL. Good point.</p>
<p>If you get into real engineering, yes - you can use it.</p>
<p>Plot a fern using an equation? wth? My matlab class teacher and his heinous self-published textbook (so bad it's not a hard exercise to wonder why no one would profession publish his book) made us learn matlab by solving DEQs, circuit networks, and pipe networks without actually teaching us about DEQs, circuit networks, and pipe networks. I seriously learned more Matlab in my Diff Eq class from two projects than an entire semester of copying code from a matlab book.</p>
<p>They're making us learn it right now at Mudd for Systems and Signals, a class everyone at the school has to take.</p>
<p>In my 3+ years at college, I've used MatLAB for maybe an hour freshman year and haven't used it since. Haven't seen a really practical use for it in my civil engineering courses so far.</p>