That’s a really interesting and helpful way of looking at the college decision!
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University of Chicago was much more subtle. In the 1950s, as the southside of Chicago started to deteriorate and crime soared, the university threated to leave for the suburbs if the city did not implement an urban renewal program in Hyde Park and increase police protection. The university created a buffer between the campus and surrounding neighborhood by buying land for green space and houses for faculty. Washington Park to the West, the museum campus to the East and Midway Plaisance Park to the South serve the same purpose as USC’s fences.
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Yes, all that (some of which was not without controversy), plus U Chicago’s own private police force, one of the largest in the country…which is not so subtle.
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True, much subtler barriers and perhaps why I never got that same visceral reaction as driving around USC. The one good effect of those iron fences is they force you to think about their intent and effect.
Don’t recall private police at UChicago but that seems to be common at all schools now, including publics.
Also to clarify - the fences (or the neighborhood) aren’t the reason my D is not applying to USC, just one observation added to her overall view of the school.
The University and the South Side – Chicago Maroon has some more description about University of Chicago’s historical practices regarding the neighborhood.
Also, the US crime wave started more in the 1960s than the 1950s. But “deterioration” used to describe many neighborhoods before then may have been a polite way of saying that “some Black people moved in” which some White people did not want to see in the neighborhood.
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Some colleges have their own dedicated police departments, but others do not. It is important to know the distinction when reporting an actual crime.
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No doubt there was white flight from the Southside in the 1950s driven by changing demographics.
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Columbia is also not the same wrt campus as USC or Chicago. There’s a defined campus sure but it’s a little more integrated with their neighborhood, Morningside Heights, which btw would be considered a nice neighborhood.
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Ooops, forgot to quote. This is about kids not knowing what engineering entails until their third year.
You could save me a lot of time, if you could sum it up here. My D is interested in engineering, but I am not sure this is what would suit her best. At the same time, she can’t afford to major in music or any of her other talents. She’s good with math and science, I just think she doesn’t love those subjects enough.
I can’t explain it myself. I’m not an engineer. The issue is that the knowledge base is very cumulative. By the time engineers get deep enough into the curriculum that they are taking classes that will be useful on the job, the concepts and nomenclature are well beyond what lay people can grasp. I barely know what a tensor is for example, let alone what calculus of said thing would do for me. I get it only in the very most rudimentary terms. I don’t have the math foundation to get it otherwise.
The best I think anyone can do without that background is to get a basic definition from a “what is…” Google search.
An academic engineer did tell me that success is tightly correlated with math level and facility.
Sorry I can’t explain it better. 
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Not an engineer. Related to many engineers- some of whom love the discipline with all their hearts, and some who are just talented but have other passions as well.
My takeaway after years of living with and observing-- they all love math. Not just calculating and measuring stuff (but they do that constantly), but they think in mathematical terms. You can’t have a conversation about Covid and mask requirements in elementary school without one of them pointing out that if herd immunity is achieved at 90% immunizations, and if we are vaccinating adults at the rate of X million people per month, school kids will only have to wear masks for 9 more weeks to get the mortality rate to below that of the flu, adjusted for the last ten years. Seriously- stuff like that. They just like numbers and can take virtually any concept and tie it to a formula or an algorithm.
The engineering piece (as distinguished from just the math piece- since I have a few of those in the family as well) is a drive to tinker. Some of it is physical tinkering- a fridge that makes noise has to have something wrong with it- “here, let me take a look”, some of it is general problem-solving tinkering “If the city reduced recycling pickups to three times a month instead of weekly the taxpayers could save X million dollars which could be used to expand the backyard composting program in 70% of households”. Some of it is childish wonder type tinkering, “What happens when you push this button on the cable box” (one time it resulted in about 10 premium channels showing up for free for three months) and then trying to reverse engineer the entire cable box to figure out how it happened.
All of them love the latest and greatest in technology but many won’t spend the money for upgrades because “I can do it myself” by downloading some open source code.
Does any of this resonate? I’ve got theoretical physicist cousins- and they are NOTHING like this except for the math and numbers piece. They are more cerebral, their houses have broken stuff like everyone else, they line up at the Genius Bar for help with their phones like everyone else. PhD’s in physics- but not tinkerers, button pushers, people who take apart the self-cleaning control board of an oven “just to see”.
Everyone else can chime in if I’ve reduced a very complex set of intellectual and spatial skills into a hash of stereotypes- but the engineers are really problem-solvers and thinkers and fixers more than some of the other math-oriented professions.
Actuaries- got one of those. He can’t hang a picture without bashing in the wallboard (but his wife, an engineer- loves fixing drywall so it’s ok).
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The only thing I’d add is that those qualities are not necessarily obvious in high school. My son is undaunted by anything technical now. He has a very deep understanding of how things work at the machine level and at the system level. He wasn’t like that before college though. He is literally a different man than the one we sent off to school. The math piece is huge, as is curiosity and drive. The rest, for most engineers is taught. The inherent tinkerers often tire of the math, or simply just can’t hack it and don’t make it through. N=1. YMMV.
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Agree, especially on the problem solving part, you’ll be doing a lot of that in engineering, as opposed to say understanding the theory behind things, as maybe the physicists do. The first two years in colleges definitely emphasize the problem solving part and are math and science heavy. You may not take a engineering course till late soph or junior year, outside of maybe a lab or modeling class.
I’m just going to hop on my soapbox for any prospective engineering student who reads these descriptions and thinks engineering isn’t for them. I went to MIT - I know approximately 5 zillion engineers - the vast majority of them had exactly zero interest tinkering in high school and even today hire people to fix things that break in their home. I think this antiquated notion of who’s suited to be an engineer is a HUGE reason why our country has to import engineers and women specifically are discouraged from engineering.
Are you good at math? Are you good at science? Do you like to problem solve? Are you willing to work hard and fail and keep working? By FAR these are the most important criteria for being successful in engineering. I’m so frustrated that we continue to discourage people who weren’t interested in taking apart their toys or weren’t in a robotics club from engineering. It’s an extremely narrow view of engineering.
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In my experience the opposite has indeed been true. The tinkerers, who for the most part weren’t strong at math, didn’t make it through engineering. I’ve only known one super hands on student who worked on cars and motorcycles in HS that did make it. He’s now a grad student at MIT. The rest have just been like my son. They had a deep understanding of math, were driven and relentlessly curious.
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I am an engineer and married to one and have tons of friends who are engineers and I agree with this. I will try to fix some stuff but my husband and many of my friends have no interest. We are are computer engineering/Computer science if that matters.
The common theme is the problem solving and Math/physics interest are common themes among most of my engineering friends.
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And most of the imported engineers (I’m not using that term negatively, I’m also an imported engineer) that I have met through my work were definitely not tinkerers. My husband and I are both engineers. He’s amazing at fixing stuff and I suck (I’m a better cook, so it all works out 
)
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Thank you so much for saying this. I was so bummed thinking my daughter’s not a tinkerer so she maybe shouldn’t really be considering engineering. I’ll let her explore what she finds interesting and support whatever she ends up in. Thank you. 
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Maybe my son is an anomaly. He has always done well in STEM classes and he loves to tinker. If he is not using a forge he made to melt aluminum cans, he is 3D printing air engines that function. I think he tore apart every small appliance that ever died in our house. I am a bit afraid that he watches crazy Russians on Youtube performing experiments with no regard for safety (and a bit of vodka lubrication), which he then tries to re-create. So far, he has not burned the house down, so we got that going for us. Which is nice.