“Let’s not pretend this is in any way typical, though. … It would be far more believable to me if they said their job was to research.”
Hopefully no one read it as “typical”. Undergrad engineering instruction can be anything from two senior faculty team-teaching an introductory course, to TA instructors, to the obviously extreme “UCI” example related to me (along with that exact quote) by a student who had taken the class and was serving with me on a “Careers in Engineering” panel (where one topic ended up being how access to professors differs between programs).
I want HS students who might visualize engineering instruction as monolithic to understand that there is variation… and so, if talking to undergrads, they might want try getting a feel for how things tend to be at one school they are considering vs another. Not just who’s doing the teaching, but how it works out with the large class sizes typical of introductory engineering courses in even modest-sized programs. Is there a good “support network” of TA’s or whomever available to help with homework, or equivalent ways to get one-on-one help when needed?
“I’d wager the students taking the most away are usually somewhere in the middle.”
Sounds right to me, for students in a given program. Rewording my thought to be more clear: “Presumably students in a program which requires more work in order to make it through the four years have more to show than students in one which requires less.” So to Dunshire et al: In making a college selection, give some thought to the Goldilocks aspect. Which schools fall into the not-too-easy/not-too-hard range for your particular abilities, desires, career plans, etc. In Ivy-specific forums I’ve tried to highlight how different one is from another – even that cohort is not one-size-fits-all. The variations of course increase beyond that.
Closer to home, my son went Early Decision to a name-brand college he had the hots for which ended up being too easy for him. His workaround was to do a Bachelor’s + Masters in four years (saving his folks some money : ), but a tougher undergrad academic program might have been a better way to go.
The “more work” can also be in the form of labs or team projects. When people think of “hands on” sometimes they consider that to be at the expense of theory. It doesn’t have to be. They just have to have opportunities.
My incoming electrical engineering freshman, picked EE because she did a program last summer “REAP” Research in engineering apprenticeship program, an Army outreach program. The sponsoring professor at our uni is EE. So she learned about circuits, micro-controllers, etc. This really helped her decide EE is for her. She is doing the same program this summer with the same professor.
“The ‘more work’ can also be in the form of labs or team projects” As I put it in another forum, “hands-on projects may be end up being even more valuable [to some students] post-graduation than some of the academic studies. Especially projects involving collaboration, since that’s the modern work environment.”
I reached out to the international admissions officer, and she said that the foreign language requirement doesn’t apply for international applicants. Ironically, I have to submit a test that proves english proficiency.
There’s no doubt that engineers learn more as they go on throughout their careers. They have to get their foot in the door though to start said careers.
My son has a deep mechatronics and fluids academic background. It was the fact that he developed a medical ultrasound calibration device with two other students for his senior project and an aerospace testing device for his thesis that got him his job. He was the first new grad hired by a startup run by seasoned Apple veterans. Had it not been for the proof that he could actually do what he was trained to do, they would have never hired him.
“He was the first new grad hired by a startup run by seasoned Apple veterans.”
… which brings up another thing that today’s HS applicants will be concerned with a few years down the road, as they start considering job opportunities: The size and nature of the company. My wife’s trajectory started out somewhat like your son’s, at a small custom-IC company which only a few years before had consisted of its industry-veteran founders sitting at a card table in one of their garages. Their hires had to be spot-on – no room for “average”.
I signed on with Big Aerospace Company. Three thousand engineers, at just my particular plant, and lots of room for “average” ; ) Various college hires would come through my group, but if they couldn’t hack it they weren’t fired. There was always some position in Weights, or Airport Compatibility, or Flight Test. – engineering positions where an engineering education was deemed desirable, but little to no “college” engineering figured into the daily tasks.
I will mention this last example as a potential stress-reliever for when, a few years from now, one of you current high-schoolers is staring at a troublesome engineering school GPA and wondering if your life is over: A recent civil engineering grad of my acquaintance, sporting such credentials as a D in Structural Analysis, landed an “engineering” job with his state’s dept of transportation. His work started out as driving one of those amber-light state trucks to various road construction projects, watching while a contractor made repairs or whatever. See that all the boxes were being checked (literally, on a piece of paper). Next was some training in that DOT’s CAD system. It would seem he is on his way to a secure (state employee) and satisfying engineering-related career, despite his prior struggles with college engineering subjects.
[Legal disclaimer: I am not recommending you screw around because something is bound to work out. This is more about how sometimes “things happen”, and young people have a bias towards thinking that their life is over (e.g. didn’t get in to XYZ College) a lot more often than is actually the case. And so, my attempt at de-biasing.]