School vs. Industry

College Majors Engineering Majors
1

<p>Being a senior in engineering, I am about finished and done with school. I hate all these tests, endless homework, and what I view as useless information I'm forced to learn. And if I was forced to learn a certain way, I am tested a certain way and my INTELLIGENCE is based on a grade that supposedly describes how well I know the topic.</p>

<p>Take my communications class for example. I have been building radios since I was 14 and have a HAM radio license. In my communications class, I know all the topics and I can apply the concepts to real world scenarios. Where I suffer is the intense math and my inability to solve a problem the EXACT WAY my professor wants me to solve it. There's kids who don't know what modulation is, but because they are such robots at remembering formulas, they get better grades. Then an employer looks at that and thinks they must be really good at communications, which is a lie because they are brain dead in the design labs and as already mentioned, can't even describe what modulation is! </p>

<p>Why do I have to study data compression techniques when all I want to do is electronics? I rather be unemployed than be a data compression "engineer". </p>

<p>Why learn all this ridiculously crazy signal processing when basic ideas are just plugged into MATLAB? Once again, I rather be unemployed than be a signals engineer.</p>

<p>From all the internships I have done, working in industry seems more laid back. There's less expected of you, the stuff you learn is done on your own, and computers do 90% of the work. Also, 10% of ALLLL the stuff you learn in school is just the basics. All those advanced, impossible homework problems and tests mean nothing in industry because you never experience that kind of stuff at the actual job.</p>

<p>Jim Williams, the best analog circuits designer ever, once said the whole point of getting an engineering degree is to prove to the employer you can handle the potential stress of an engineering job.</p>

<p>Engineering school is nothing like industry. </p>

<p>School teaches you how to pass exams. Not to think outside the box. </p>

<p>School teaches you to follow a set procedure to solve problems. Not think creatively.</p>

<p>School forces you to take certain classes that you don't care about. I want to take more electronics classes, but taking too many won't count towards graduation.</p>

<p>Thoughts......</p>

2

<p>I certainly understand where you are coming from but it is what it is and unfortunately, there is nothing you can do about it. </p>

<p>When I took my IE 101 class(Introduction to Industrial Engineering), our professor admitted that he hated most of his classes when he was an undergrad and by the time he graduated, he had forgotten 90% of what he learned- I thought it was hilarious!</p>

<p>According to him, employers are willing to pay high starting salaries for people with an Engineering degree without experience because they believe that going through all this nonsense eventually will change your brain and you will be able to “think like an engineer” LOL</p>

<p>You are almost done, just do whatever they tell you and get the hell out, you wont be able to change the system. Good luck!</p>

3

<p>“You are almost done, just do whatever they tell you and get the hell out”</p>

<p>Hahaha. That is probably the funniest/best thing I heard since the start of the year. I like you’re way of thinking.</p>

4

<p>“From all the internships I have done, working in industry seems more laid back. There’s less expected of you, the stuff you learn is done on your own, and computers do 90% of the work. Also, 10% of ALLLL the stuff you learn in school is just the basics. All those advanced, impossible homework problems and tests mean nothing in industry because you never experience that kind of stuff at the actual job.”</p>

<p>Amen. Working my second internhsip (that I quite like) this semester. This is so true. Sometimes classes are so ridiculous and have no practical applications whatsoever. Those derivations and crap taught by ancient dinosaurs who have no concept of life outside of their academia bubble.</p>

<p>When you hit junior or senior year, you get jaded like us. All these pre-frosh are still keen on their acceptances.</p>

5

<p>I feel like there is something wrong with education in general. In the beginning of college I cared about my classes and actually tried to learn and understand. Did so bad that term its still haunting me.
I then switched my studying habits. I now have no clue what is ever going on in any of my classes and feel like I might have not have a deep understanding of the material. I cram the night/ two nights before for exams, show up and destroy many of the kids who “care” about the material. These same kids I would always be asking questions because I have no clue whats going on. I dunno I think its all a game and you just have to play the game. Study towards the test or something.
Its sad in my op, but my grades shot up massively when i switched to this method (same method, interesting enough this is how I studied in HS too and did well there).
I also goto a top 10 engineering school, so its not some random program…</p>

<p>Interestingly there will be a few classes I find really interesting and don’t just cram but try to get a good deep understanding and get a good intuition of the material. These classes I always do badly in and yet I am always answering other kids questions in these classes.</p>

6

<p>^so what you’re saying is, just know how to plug & chug (ie: apply) the equations and in what order to apply them, and you’ll be golden for upper-division classes?</p>

<p>Please elab on your high-grades tactics!</p>

7

<p>I haven’t been able to plug and chug in any of my computer science classes.</p>

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<p>I don’t agree with the first statement. However, I agree that college doesn’t teach you to think “outside the box”. You have to learn that yourself (I’m not fully sure how one would go about doing this though).</p>

8

<p>ehh not so much plug and chug. Dunno hard to explain but often knowing how to solve certain types of problems. CS classes are diff in that you must come up with solutions to moderate to large sized problems that have many solutions. Same with your design classes in upper level classes.
I was talking more about hw and exams. dunno its sort of hard to explain but I think my point is at the end you must study to a certain “recipe” for classes instead of trying to get an extremely deep understanding. </p>

<p>I do agree when it comes to projects and design school gets better. More creative thinking allowed. But you first three years in college is usually very little design or is guided design with little creative thinking.</p>

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With that kind of attitude, you might just get what you’d rather have - unemployment.</p>

<p>School is supposed to be hard; if it weren’t, it would be a waste of time. What your post indicates to me is that you don’t like challenges and probably don’t work well with others. Maybe what really needs to happen is that you take a hard look at yourself in the mirror and figure out what you can do to be happy. You can’t make universities stop teaching math, and you can’t make your classmates any worse at it. Your options are limited, but I think it’s pretty clear what the right thing to do is.</p>

10

<p>Peter,
You never know what you’ll need down the line. My s’s are both engineers and have had to call upon all sorts of skills they’ve learned that they might not have initially thought was going to be useful. Most of us in our various fields have to learn things that we may not use directly in our daily activities, but it broadens our knowledge and helps us understand others in the field as well.</p>

11

<p>@aegrisomnia</p>

<p>That’s what I said. I’m not making some kind of threat towards society, I rather be unemployed than do that stuff. End of story.</p>

<p>And by your logic, if a computer programmer doesn’t want to work as a mechanical engineer, does that mean he/she doesn’t like challenges? If a person doesn’t like a select few people in the work environment, does that mean they don’t work well with ANYBODY?</p>

<p>I’m not complaining whether college is hard or easy. I’m complaining that it doesn’t teach you to be a professional and the system is flawed in rewarding people for the wrong reasons (memorizing formulas, not understanding the material). I know what I want, but the education system thinks I cannot be considered a professional at what I love unless I can master the topics from marginally related areas.</p>

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<p>Well, don’t work as a data compression or signals engineer. But, seriously wouldn’t you want to be exposed to all this stuff so that you know when the computer is generating a garbage result?</p>

<p>Project work should allow you to think creatively. But creativity without discipline is wasted. Following set procedures to come to the correct solution to a problem teaches discipline. If you don’t have discipline you wind up with expensive failed systems. There are plenty of examples of failed systems in the working world.</p>

<p>Since you are almost finished with school the issue is rather academic (har har) at this point. Give yourself another ten years before you come to your final conclusions on education.</p>

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<p>school teaches you to find solutions to problems - not so much what industry wants in many cases, which is, define the problems to begin with…</p>

<p>There isn’t a manufacturing engineering program in the planet that will teach you why the wave soldering machine occasionally self-immolates (itself or printed circuit boards). And there isn’t an EE class that will teach you why radio frequency dependent protocols like Bluetooth and Wifi tend to fail when there’s LOTS and LOTS of signals around you (try doing a WiFi demo at the Las Vegas CES :))…</p>

<p>The result is that we get very intelligent engineers that can integrate and differentiate as naturally as fish swim, but are utterly helpless when they encounter the dreaded real world problems.</p>

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<p>While I’m sure there are plenty of mathletes that don’t know how to define a problem, have you ever come across a talented engineer who didn’t also figure out how to do well in school?</p>

15

<p>I know plenty of people that are engineering geniuses that were not so good students in college, for many reasons. Heavy course loads, money problems, domestic problems, bad high schools, etc. I have learned to discount super-high GPA’s and assorted accomplishments and focus more on problem solving and interpersonal skills that I can’t teach to my new hires. </p>

<p>The one skill that a lot of mathlete / academic superstar types seem to lack in real life is that of humility. When I have to save the world before Friday’s release, I can’t afford to be stuck with some high-ego individual who thinks he knows everything because he got a 4.0 in Differential Equations. Humble Pie is the food of choice in our line of work - those who can’t eat it should not be there. </p>

<p>Usually, good engineers were good students. I can’t always say the reverse. From my experience, the academic superstars are also the first to job-hop or change assignments if the current one is not glorious enough. I can’t generalize tho because my experience has all been with one company, 3 decades’ worth.</p>

16

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Oh, well then, that’s a perfectly fine attitude to have.</p>

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No; if an aspiring computer programmer weren’t prepared to do what was required to become the best computer programmer s/he could be, then that would indicate to me that they don’t like challenges. And not liking coworkers is fine, but not liking them because they are performing well? That’s toxic. That’s got “bad employee” written all over it.</p>

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turbo has been throwing around the word “humility” in some posts. Do you think that, maybe, you should defer to the authorities - your university, the IEEE, ABET, etc. - regarding what is required to become a highly-qualified engineer? Maybe they make you take math because it will make you a better engineer if you can learn to be good at it? Maybe?</p>

<p>Admittedly, this skirts the discussion of whether all people who are good at math are good engineers. Personally, I think that idea can be dismissed out of hand. The idea that it seems you’d like to dismiss - that there exist good engineers who aren’t good at math, or possibly that no good engineer is good at math - seems nearly as absurd. Take some responsibility for your education and your career.</p>

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<p>Since many engineering areas used a “structured process” to get to an engineering goal, that allows for many tasks to be handled by folks according to their strengths and interests. Hell, there are engineers who did much better than me in mathematics and I was a math major.</p>

<p>I was C+ student as a math major and somehow parlayed that into a 23+ year software engineering career.</p>

<p>I was not really a great programmer but for some reason, I was able to model data and manage databases. Sometimes, I would have to breakdown simple database concepts to some of the most talented programmers I know. They could make an abstract data type out of an abstract data type out of an abstract data type…and give me a blank stare when I give them a basic overview of referential integrity. It really depends on the individual.</p>

<p>I need folks who can get the job done. If I worked for more of a “think tank” type of company, then I may care more about schooling, but currently, I do not work in that environment.</p>

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<p>I will see your C+ and raise it (lower it :)) to a C- (math courses) by Elbonian standards which are quite a bit lower than ours (50% is enough to ‘pass’). Surprisingly enough I had no problem whatsoever with statistics, probability, numerical analysis, or discrete math, acing all of them. </p>

<p>What GlobalTraveller describes in data modeling is what the whole point of ‘talent’ is all about. I have described it (for CompSci people) as the innate ability to zoom from forest level to tree level to blade of grass level all in one thought. That is, the ability to see the big picture, decompose it into lots of little pictures, then continue decomposing until you’re down to one blade of grass, which is hard to mess up. Likewise, starting from lots of leaves and blades of grass, the talent allows one to synthesize the shrubs, the trees, then the entire forest.</p>

19

<p>"School teaches you how to pass exams. Not to think outside the box.</p>

<p>School teaches you to follow a set procedure to solve problems. Not think creatively."</p>

<p>You do need to learn the basics before you can start thinking creatively and out of the box.</p>

<p>I got my undergraduate CS degree in 1983, and we were complaining about the same things back then. Students just wanted to learn what they needed to get a job. Professors who had spent their whole lives in academia thought their job was to prepare students for graduate school.</p>

<p>Employers were also complaining that schools were producing graduates who knew a lot about theory, but weren’t ready for the workforce. While it’s not as bad as it used to be, it’s obviously still a problem.</p>

<p>I strongly suspect some of the things you think are useless, you’ll end up using later on. Professors can be very negligent in explaining how concepts you’re learning are actually used in the real world. That’s very de-motivating. I took a ton of calculus because it was required, and assumed it must be important. Yet I’ve never needed to perform integration or differentiation, nor do a mathematical proof, for work. </p>

<p>On the other hand, I took linear algebra and statistics without having a clue as to how important they would ultimately be. I ended up doing lots of computer modelling and graphics, and those “pointless” classes turned out to be foundational.</p>

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<p>I guess I was lucky enough to have a few professors who were adjuncts or who didn’t spend their entire career in academia. After the fundamental core courses, I felt that most things we learned had relevance beyond school. Most of my term projects after sophomore year were actually done in a format you’d see in a professional setting.</p>