<p>How much of the weed-out material is one likely to **need **in future classes, especially with software like Mathematica, Maple, and the like? In Civil Engineering, we only had one course where we got our money’s worth out of Calculus (Plates & Shells) and come to think of it, (a) you never really see such things in real life and (b) you aren’t likely to do these by hand any more than you’ll be doing finite element analysis by hand… </p>
<p>Likewise, is anyone in real life designing antennas by hand? doing Bode plots with an HB pencil? Not any more than anyone is doing board layout by hand, or VLSI design by hand, or FPGA coding by hand…</p>
<p>I can’t help but wonder if engineering schools are stuck in the ‘hangar full of engineers wearing white shirts and ties, using vertical drafting tables and slide rules’ era.</p>
<p>Some fields have gotten the clue and have adjusted the curriculum to accommodate modern stuff - Why teach assembly language or COBOL when 1% of the students will ever use it? why teach drafting when AutoCAD can do the work instantly?</p>
<p>In EE we sure used the stuff we learned in Freshman and sophmore classes in junior and senior year. I still do rough three phase circuit calculations on paper all the time. Why learn linear programming or any ops research stuff when there is software to do that s well? Because it helps you understand the results. And where in the world do engineers learn cobol in school?</p>
<p>Are universities still teaching COBOL? I haven’t run into any COBOL courses in a long time.</p>
<p>Computer Science spans hardware and software and assembler is likely to be the lowest level that software engineers will see. Assembler is useful for reading crash dumps, or doing optimization or exception handling that is difficult or impossible in a higher-level-language.</p>
<p>It will also provide the software engineer with an appreciation and understanding of the annual architecture changes that we’re seeing from the CPU vendors.</p>
<p>You’d be surprised to learn how close ABAP (SAP) is to Cobol :-)</p>
<p>We suffered thru calc & differential equations and everyone told us that it will help us “understand the results”… Well, I’m afraid that I will disagree here. I’d rather focus on real life use of, say, concrete plates & shells rather than spending a semester focusing more on math and less on what the subject is all about…</p>
<p>Engineering schools are very good in teaching all the details - but not how the details go together. We spent a semester learning Heat Transfer - and not a minute learning how to size HVAC for a building (“the supplier will do this”). We spent another semester learning Fluid Mechanics, and maybe a minute learning how to ensure that there’s enough water if all the toilets flush at the same time (real homework question). We spent endless hours in architecture studio but not one minute learning how to deal with construction managers (“it’s someone else’s problem”). </p>
<p>I see the exact same problem with new college grads we recruit. They all have great technical skills on a subject-by-subject basis, but not so good in figuring out how all these things come together to solve the puzzle de jour.</p>
<p>I wonder how I managed to have a 30 year engineering career when I learned about Z transforms and root locus in school instead of how to deal with contractors.</p>
<p>BTW Turbo you <em>re the oned who claimed it was valuable rto learn how to work tr</em>veling salesman, integeer and linear programming, etc. Isn’t there also software to perform those tasks as well? So why bother learning how to draw out the little graphs and other nonsense?</p>
<p>Shinkwrap - I’m delighted to hear that your son is having a good start to his semester! </p>
<p>“With all that you folks are saying about weed out courses especially in large state universities, do any of you have any words of wisdom regarding how a kid can survive these?” - There’s good advise above. Some kids can “wing it” through hs. That’s possible with some college majors at some schools… but typically that does not work for engineering. You can NEVER catch up if you fall behind. </p>
<p>In my experience, freshman/sophomore prereq knowledge was used a lot for junior/senior classwork. Often it is not used much in the “real job”, but that can be said for many professions. I think that AP/IB courses can help some students decide that they don’t want engineering. And they t can help other students lean that direction… but the college courses are how they will know for sure.</p>
<p>In my field of work, I may need to do some linear programming programming, i.e. implement computer code that does the actual work, as a software developer. In that case I need to know how to do linear programming. Likewise, I’ve had to write code that inverts matrices, in which case, I need to know how to do it by hand, or, more likely, how to find a good algorithm and code that. I.e. the knowledge of how to solve a traveling salesman problem IS the problem. </p>
<p>In other engineering disciplines, I’m not so sure the analogy holds. In real life, in many engineering disciplines the computations required to ‘do it by hand’ may be well beyond the ability of an engineer (or ten) to do it efficiently. But they’re available off-the-shelf. It may be very manly to do Fourier transforms by hand when I’m designing an antenna (I’m not…) but I’d rather trust Matlab with the calculations. It’s faster, more likely to be correct, and I did not waste a day doing it.</p>
<p>I realize that my approach is less than scholarly, and wish I really did have time to invert matrices by hand or calculate structure frames by hand using the Csonka method like we did 30 years ago… Besides, my buddy who designs the antenna is not doing the Fourier transforms by hand either. </p>
<p>Maybe “Dealing with Contractors, Consultants, and Cut-Rate Offshore Resources Forced Upon You By Management” ought to be a senior level course in its own right.</p>
<p>My experience across four widely different areas of engineering practice is completely different than yours, I’ve attempted in earlier posts to explain how various elements of this technical knowledge has been valuable in my career, and how my colleagues and myself still use it. You weren’t interested.The idea of using a Bode plot knowing nothing about transfer functions or poles and zeros is absurd to me. Your notion that there is somehow inherent value in the theory behind linear programming, but no other technical area makes no sense to me.</p>
<p>BTW Nobody is suggesting every Fourier transform or differential equation must be calculated by hand. In fact, it’s likely many of them can’t be solved by hand. Most things probably require numerical solutions to get precise answers.
That doesn’t mean there is no value in learning the theory behind these concepts and solving a few of the simpler ones.And that doesn’t mean that in some cases you can’t make simplifying assumptions to ballpark things.
It isn’t all that tortuous. Some people even enjoy it.</p>
I’ll heartily disagree with these sentiments :). Having gone through structural engineering and physics degrees I can assure you that calculus was essential to the bulk of it. Physics is basically applied calculus, and engineering is applied physics. Understanding the concepts in an indepth way requires understanding and internalizing their mathematical roots. Otherwise you are just running the software. We can teach monkeys to do that. </p>
<p>As for drafting, I actually took drafting during one of my experiences, and there is a lot to be said for learning how the drawings SHOULD look. It was my experience as a structural engineer working with actual draftsmen that those who only knew CAD had no idea what they were supposed to be producing, as the schools at that time were teaching the software and not the age-old drafting standards. I loathed it. They thought they were such whiz kids, but they produced crappy drawings. Whether that has changed I don’t know.</p>
<p>ucbalumnus, BCEagle91, and sylvan8798; Thank you for your comments regarding freshman success. I am saving your comments and I will share them with my son when he is preparing to being his freshman year this coming fall.</p>
<p>I am a recent EE graduate who has been through the weed-out classes. The things you mention aren’t part of such classes. I’m especially confused about doing Bode plots with an HB pencil - most of my classes, including the weed-outs, had heavy reliance on technology. </p>
<p>The genuinely difficult aspects of these courses are to understand the fundamental notions of the material being studied and to be capable of using these to solve problems. That is the challenge, and that is what people struggle with mightily. The high failure rate in these courses has nothing to do with technicalities or gotchas or anything of that sort.</p>
<p>Matlab is a major tool being used at every engineering program I know of. It’s absolutely a major part of every signals and systems class I’ve taken. Do you have an example of an engineering program with a course (outside of introductory differential equations) where Fourier transforms must be done by hand?</p>
<p>I’m sorry to be critical, but it sounds as if you do not know what engineering programs and engineering courses typically look like today.</p>
<p>I don’t doubt that there’s plenty of calculus in structural engineering - in my case Structures I, II, Plates & Shells, and Metal Structures if memory serves right… But, that was 30+ years ago and DIY was the only choice. In fact, the reason I got into computers in the very early 80’s was exactly because I thought there was a better way to do this. Bought myself a mini Basic computer, started writing Basic code to do Civil Engineering calculations, and realized that I was good at it. The rest is history, and after building one structure in my birth country I moved on. </p>
<p>Today things have changed, all in the name of efficiency. My customers back then did not have all day to do the calculations by hand, especially early on when they were playing with alternatives… Things that took us days now take minutes - do you think that employers would rather have me do the finite element analysis calculations on a shell by hand, or feed it to a computer and move on to the next job?</p>
<p>We will agree to disagree here, and I know I’m in the minority - but I did some pretty complicated stuff in my days (considering how puny computers were…) and don’t recall doing any physics, chemistry, differential equations, and the like. Sure, you need the background, but how much? </p>
<p>Maybe running the analysis in software is monkey work - but consider Statistical Analysis. Would anyone using SAS or SPSS be considered to be doing ‘monkey work’ or should they do the manly thing and do it the hard way in Excel or by hand ???</p>
<p>That’s my point. If nobody does Fourier transforms by hand, because everyone has access to the right tools, why bother teaching how to do it by hand? Spend the time teaching what it means and where you use it, not how to do it by hand…</p>
<p>Agreed 100%. Would you rather spend a semester learning differential equations which chances are you’ll never use again, or would you rather have the extra 3-4 credit hours to spread out important concepts in major courses a bit more? </p>
<p>Bovertine, my experience is along Civil Engineering, Computer Science & Computer Engineering, and Industrial / Human Factors Engineering (with degrees in all areas). </p>
<p>There’s some value in learning ‘the basics’ but I question the need for a lot of the depth of ‘the basics’, especially given the technology that is available today… It’s hardly a question of whose theory is more or less useful…</p>
???</p>