No kidding - I’ve noticed that on CC as well. There are far more opportunities than Google, Microsoft, Apple, and the like and I’m talking about opportunities with large companies that pay well and have decent benefits. I don’t know why people keep bringing up that same small number of companies.</p>
<p>It’s anecdotal but having just done some hiring of new grads I’m surprised by the ‘lack of’ qualified CS/CSE candidates available (ones who aren’t from another country who need to be sponsored to work in the USA) from the higher end universities for CS.</p>
<p>I don’t want to take this thread off track but it’s not a totally bleak job scene for new CS grads.</p>
<p>Perhaps it is a similar limited view of the field that causes some people to obsess about a small number of well known universities (e.g. HYPSM).</p>
<p>Indeed, I am in flyover country, but a lot of the problems in the CS/IT market are not limited to Flyoveria, KS. </p>
<p>Seattle, Portland, Sunnyvale, and the like may have lots of companies, granted, but they also have lots of competition - which helps with salaries and messes up cost of living, granted but does not help the overall job market. Last I checked, California’s unemployment was a lot higher than Flyoveria’s. </p>
<p>Worse yet, today’s grad kids may not be willing to be the all-out economic migrants that we were. In my days it was typical to move with friends in Santa Clara for a month and hit the interview road, until you found something. That worked for a decade or two until the web got in the way. Now a job search is global, and one finds themselves competing with people from all over.</p>
<p>The advice we are giving our son is to study and major what he finds interesting, not what is the “hot” engineering at the time. He thinks he’s interested in electrical engineering, though what really has always fascinated him is any kind of energy type thing - when he was little he desperately tried to solve perpetual energy and even now as a hs senior is really interested in battery power - either making batteries work better for computers and how to store more power, for instance like with solar power - storing the power. I have no idea what that falls under. I don’t know if that will stick, though he’s been circling around this since he was 8. </p>
<p>The hard part will be seeing where he ends up after college if he doesn’t want to come back to the DC area.</p>
<p>Manage, manipulate, and protect data is largely an IT function. I thought I was pretty good in IT up to maybe 10 years ago when the latest and greatest fad, Business Intelligence (Mrs. Turbo’s specialty) popped up. </p>
<p>An EE or CSE can write code, sure, heck, this summer we had a Mech Engr intern write Android Apps for us… But corporate IT is a different beast. Up to 10 years ago I understood enough of Oracle, VB, and the like to do IT. Right now Corporate IT has evolved to unheard-of complexity and specialization…</p>
<p>Would you care to provide some broad details? I.e. general geographical area, industry sector, and skills desired?</p>
<p>We’re in Flyoveria, USA, doing consumer electronics, and generally have no problems hiring either new or experienced workers for things like embedded Linux, Windows CE, C++, agile programming, and the like… Do we expect to hire Linus Torvaldis for $60k a year? no, but we are usually pretty good in finding and hiring qualified grads.</p>
<p>“The good news might be he is also not talking about quitting…I THINK that is good news” - If he is liking his schoolwork and hanging in there, I think it is great news. </p>
<p>For parent support and education, you may want to try the “Engineering Majors” area of CC. I think there were some good threads with engineering type descriptions, FAQ, links etc.</p>
<p>When my son was a freshman engineering major, I noticed that he phoned me the day before every exam. I eventually realized that he wanted me to give him a pep talk, and psyche him up to do well. So I did! And it helped him a lot. When he was psyched up, it helped him to focus his studying, not panic, and do well on the exams. Just like a halftime pep talk from a coach. Engineering weeds out about half of the people who start, so keeping your son in a good frame of mind will help keep him from panicking when he sees others dropping out.</p>
<p>I am an engineer and do not recommend college grads go right to grad school. Go out and work a few years, find out if you like what you do or want to specialize in something else. Maybe get an MBA instead. The best part is most larger companies will at least partially pay for grad school. </p>
<p>Not sure your S’s major, but most of the professional engineering organizations encourage undergrads to particpate in local meetings. Here is the link to IEEE.
[IEEE</a> - Student Resources](<a href=“http://www.ieee.org/membership_services/membership/students/index.html]IEEE”>Home - IEEE Students)
This is a great place to go and talk to folks in the field, hear talks about what they are working on and maybe get leads on internships. </p>
<p>Sorry can’t help you with a parent support group. :)</p>
<p>Our kiddo recently got his EE. Even tho he had taken AP Calc AB & AP Physics B & AP Physics C & AP Comp Sci (2 semesters) & done well in ALL of it, he & most of his peers re-took ALL of the courses, so they were basically cruising for the 1st 3 semesters of engineering. (S & peers all got As & 5s in their AP math/science coursework.) </p>
<p>This can be part of the problem–the other kids were VERY WELL prepared and cruising because their coursework is just review of what they had covered in HS (like my S who said he only started learning SOME new stuff in his 4th semester of engineering).</p>
<p>ONE student we know challenged and was exempted out of some of the basic math & physics courses so he could start with the more advanced coursework (he’s graduating in 4 years with 2 bachelor’s–engineering & finance & a masters in finance).</p>
<p>Would definitely recommend having your S confer with his advisor(s) and dial back his schedule so he can do very well and start boosting his GPA and foundation.</p>
<p>Dialing in late but whatever… Engineering requires a solid foundation in calculus and diff-e-qs; I recall it took me about a year before freshman calc began to make intuititve sense to me. Solid basis now will pay off later. While a heavy calc + sciences load is tough but may be manageable, I second the advice to dial it down from 11 next semester. </p>
<p>My own experience, plus S’s & D’s current experience, is a lot of (most?) college advisors are functionally clueless for class and program of study recommendations until you are in their specific department where they have 1st-hand knowledge of courses and want you to be a success in THEIR department. Department faculty, TAs, classmates/dormmates who are high-performing in the subject, and in my case, in-major upperclassmen in my fraternity house, can be invaluable in deciding what to take/not to take, and in getting tutoring and help during. And your S has to do the work to make it happen. Good luck!</p>
<p>Seems to me that your son and his classmates wasted a semester’s worth (or more?) of time and tuition repeating stuff he already knew (al well as raising the curve against those taking the courses the first time).</p>
<p>Maybe I think differently, but I thought that one of the purposes of attending a university was to learn something new. Skipping the stuff one already knows effectively gives the student additional free elective space to take whatever interesting (in or out of major) courses s/he likes, which would be a more worthwhile use of time and tuition. Doing so for math was pretty common among engineering students even back when I was in university (when far fewer students took AP tests). Of course, there were math majors who were jumping into junior level math courses at freshmen, and graduate level math courses as sophomores and juniors.</p>
<p>But perhaps many students are just looking for the easiest route to the credential of a bachelor’s degree in the chosen major and do not care about learning beyond the minimum. However, even in that case, moving ahead and graduating early to save a semester’s worth of time and tuition may be more optimal for this purpose than repeating stuff one already knows.</p>
<p>Thank you all so much. I am giving him some time to think about it, and asking him to check in with an alum who has extended himself. If son continues with engineering, he sounds like a great resource ( I think society of black engineers or something like that).</p>
<p>I am not sure what THIS means;
"dial it down from 11 next semester. ". Does that refer to number of classes? I am encouraging him to think about dropping physics, and keep the others, and think he will have 15 credits and then be two classes “behind”. He needs 12 credits to be full time, and I wouldn’t mind if he dropped down to 12. He plans to go to summer school for Calc II. Not sure what this will mean for the rest of the sequence, and hope his advisers can detail us a five year plan before the class drop date.</p>
<p>After thinking about the last several posts, it occurred to me that the engineering students might include most of the merit scholarship winners, and a handful of very high math scores. Its a smallish department, and they may not be enough to change the 50-75th percentile, but enough to blow out any curves in class.</p>
<p>I happened to find this.</p>
<p>“We examined normalized gains and pre-instruction scores on the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) for students in interactive engagement courses in introductory mechanics at four universities and found a significant, positive correlation for three of them.”…“We analyzed individual normalized gains for students at Loyola Marymount University (LMU), Southeastern Louisiana University (SLU), University of Minnesota (UM), and Harvard University (HU).”…“It is reasonable to assume that a great majority of the Harvard student population tested would also show very high scientific reasoning ability and no correlation between scientific reasoning ability and FCI pre-score; 75% of all Harvard students score 700 or higher on the math SAT, and math SAT scores have been shown to correlate with formal operational reasoning.23, 24 In contrast, less than 10% of LMU’s science and engineering students have math SAT scores ≥ 700.”</p>
<p>If your son decides not to take physics this spring, he may want to add it to his summer course list along with second semester calculus. That way, he will theoretically be “on schedule” next fall, if he wants to continue staying on an 8-semester plan.</p>
<p>However, a 9- or 10-semester plan is not necessarily as awful financially in engineering as in some other subjects, if he can come up with a good well paid internship in the extra summer (or co-op job in the extra summer plus a semester off).</p>
<p>We are not so worried about the money, as we are about knowing if this is the right path for him. It is HE who is worried about getting “behind”, and I am not sure why. I imagine it is a peer or self esteem thing, but also imagine that as he progresses, there will be more of a mix (freshman, sophomores, and maybe juniors) of kids in the make up of his classes.</p>
<p>^^ I think he should keep 15 credits at the beginning of the term. At the end of the drop period, he can drop one class that does not work out for him. Or he can keep all 15 credits if things are on the positive side. If he enroll only for 12 credits then there will be nothing to drop when he does not do well.</p>
<p>Dialing it down - Meant he’s working at an “11” on a scale of 1-10. Sorry for the confusion, both my kids are home from college and I’m picking up some of their lingo. </p>
<p>He should definitely maintain enough credits for full-time status, but back off from an overload so he can concentrate on doing well in his core subjects. And take something fun! (engineers should know something about their culture and society and write well, anyway, IMO). </p>
<p>Coolweather has some good advice - lots of kids use the free drop period to decide which courses they are going to stay in. And yes, you will find lots of math wizards in the engineering department, although the less skilled can do well, too. [I survived 1st 3 semesters on lots of help and plug-and-chug; the fundamentals started to make intuitive sense to me after that.]</p>
<p>He could even enroll in 18 credits & plan to drop one OR two courses, when he has a better sense of which ones will be manageable for him next term. This will help him keep a full courseload while have some feel for the courses available to choose among. This type of “shopping for courses” is fairly common on many campuses.</p>