<p>I'm taught mostly theory in class and told to purely apply them for homework and tests. Obviously, there is a connection but a clear difference in the two; application requires mastery of the concepts but mastery of the concepts doesn't mean that you can apply them to some problems, problems that I usually struggle with. I know that my professors would want to add more example problems during lecture though, but it's just so hard when you have 30 50-minute lectures every quarter to fit in everything.</p>
<p>Does anyone else have this problem and know how to help ease the pain?</p>
<p>I have the same problem and I don’t know how to ease the pain. I am taking an IE course in Ergonomics and it is a supposed to be a very straightforward course but the professor goes out of his way to add some senseless BS just to make it complicated.</p>
<p>I was talking to my friend about this the other day. Instead of giving us a real world problem related to something that is actually relevant and useful, they would rather give us some BS theoretical problem like: Here is an orange and a paper clip, make a car out of it using all the knowledge you have acquired.</p>
<p>Engineering professors teach a lot of theory because you have to be solid on theory to make good engineering decisions in the future. Engineering is the practice of applying physics and mathematics (and a handful of other topics depending on the field) to solve real world problems, so you have to have a solid grasp of that physics and mathematics before you can tackle those problems. The problem with overly specific example questions is that it may exercise a given topic one way, but that way is not going to be very general and likely only has a fairly small application to other topics that might benefit from that topic. The more theoretical problems are designed to test the broader understanding of the topic, which in theory (see what I did there?) should lead you to be more versatile when applying the topics. Of course there is a happy medium. You can’t ask only theory questions or you lose the class, and you can’t ask only very applied questions or the class doesn’t really learn the theory. It sounds like maybe you just feel your professor is skewing a bit too much to the former. Hang in there, though. You will likely have a mix of professors on both sides of that ideal line.</p>
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<p>No he doesn’t. The professor teaches what he estimates to be the most important topics. He isn’t going to waste his own time by teaching things with the sole purpose of complicating the issue. If you sit down and think of it objectively, you would realize that. Teaching something solely to make things more complicated only serves to make the professor’s job more frustrating and create an endless torrent of questions about things that he already knows don’t matter, so why would he do that? It just makes his own life harder. Stop playing the victim card like this. Just because you don’t personally understand a topic very easily doesn’t mean the professor is somehow at fault every time.</p>
<p>I don’t see myself as a victim but you are giving these professors way too much credit. Some of the Engineering professors I have had are complete morons. They may be “book smart”, have fancy degrees but a person who is book smart, has a fancy degree and zero common sense is still a moron in my book.</p>
<p>Perfect example: I took 2 hours to go to Office Hours because I genuinely wanted to learn and understand the material and the professor instructs the TA to not answer any questions about the homework assignment. They are only allowed to answer “conceptual” questions. Stupid!</p>
<p>Well, duh, they’re not supposed to do the homework for you. Ask them if you have the process right or if your are understanding what the question wants. Asking specifically about a homework question won’t teach you much about the general processes as a whole and will provide useless during exams and real life.</p>
<p>Real world problems can be surprisingly complex, and you might not have all the knowledge to analyze them correctly (anybody else have to analyze perfectly spherical objects in a vacuum with no friction?).</p>
<p>Your slew of posts complaining about professors in different classes seems to say otherwise. You have done quite a bit of complaining about it and always seem to claim the professor is out to get you.</p>
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<p>I am not, and you clearly would think that anyone who gives professors any credit is giving them too much based on the rest of this statement. Calling professors morons signals a fundamental lack of respect for what a Ph.D. entails and what they have had to go through to get to the position they have. Certainly not all professors are good teachers, and plenty certainly get jaded with teaching after varying amounts of time, but very few are “morons”. Very few are out to get students, and very few are interested in seeing their students struggle with material. Shoot, just the fact that many of them want to finish their teaching duties and get back to researching should tell you that they aren’t making things needlessly complex on purpose, as it is counterproductive to their own goals, too.</p>
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<p>That’s probably because the professor believes it likely that a TA will inadvertently basically do the problem for the students while answering questions about specific problems. Having run review sessions and taught my own course before, I can tell you that even if you personally aren’t doing it, a larger portion of students will continue asking questions until you have solved the problem if they learn that you you let them take it that far, and TAs are more susceptible to that sort of social engineering than are those with more experience.</p>
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<p>To illustrate this important fact, I’ll expand a bit. You know what the great thing about idealized models like that is? The irregularly shaped object in a viscous medium is likely to be impossible to solve without sophisticated software, but knowing about the sphere in the vacuum can get you a very nice engineering estimate without having to go to all of that trouble. What’s more, if you actually understand the material and the limitations of idealized solutions, you can get a pretty good idea of just how good or bad that estimate is and what needs to be done to refine it (if that is even necessary). If you just plug away at an unsolvable problem from the start, you miss all of these valuable skills. Of course, if you just sit there and mope about how the problem is impractical and a waste of time, you are probably missing those skills, too.</p>
<p>When I was getting my Masters in IE, the best professors I had were adjunct professors who still had full time industry jobs. They taught some theory, but they were able to explain how the theory applied to practical problems.</p>
<p>Many college professors do not have experience outside the halls of academe. They prepare you for graduate school, not the business world. Thus the focus on theory. That can be very frustrating for students who don’t want to go the research or PhD route.</p>
<p>I will say this: out of all the professors I’ve had, I’d say that as a whole, engineering professors were of the lowest quality. As a general rule, my math/chemistry/physics/humanities/etc professors had a far greater talent for teaching than my engineering ones - not because of the relative difficulty of the topics, but because of how good each of them was at actually teaching. My guess is that this has to do with how hard it is to get professors in engineering relative to the other fields, which would explain why they take lower quality teachers.</p>
<p>But I can’t agree with your objection to theory. At the end of the degree, you probably will remember nothing but the small number of important details that describe the theory; this is the most important part and it matters far more than remembering specifics which you can easily look up. Some professors certainly aren’t too good at doing this right, so your objections might be justified. More often than not though, it’s better to give them the benefit of the doubt unless they prove they are full of BS. I’ve certainly had professors I had no respect for, but I’ve found that more often than not the student has more than a fair share of blame for rotten experiences.</p>
<p>That’s not true. There are dozens if not over a hundred applications for a single tenure-track job posting, especially at the more prestigious schools. The real issue is that ultimately, research is king, and most schools are willing to overlook lackluster teaching if you publish high impact material and bring in money. There’s been a pushback against that approach, so in recent years many programs have ostensibly started to put more emphasis on teaching again, but you won’t see the benefits of that effort for a while yet.</p>
<p>I had an IE professor. Very nice lady, extremely friendly and helpful but she had no knowledge whatsoever of what she was teaching. This class was about VBA, SQL and Access. The TA pretty much did everything.</p>
<p>How can you even take a professor like this seriously? She worked as an Industrial Engineer for many years, never learned any VBA or SQL, yet she is trying to tell us how important all this stuff is.</p>
<p>Needless to say, I know at least 4 people who changed majors because of this course alone. I remember as we were approaching midterm, she goes like “I don’t mean to sound harsh but if you feel like you are not getting the grade that you want, you can still drop this class”</p>
<p>I kept going and the grading was ruthless. I barely passed it but I can’t even imagine retaking a course like this. I would rather go through torture sessions.</p>
<p>Personally, I felt my education (especially in IE) to be too practical and not-theory focused at all. It’s boring, and not especially useful to be taught mechanics on how to do a specific thing. I’d rather be taught the ideas and figure out the mechanics for myself. </p>
<p>At first as an undergrad I thought that it was too much theory and not enough practice. So, I got involved in an undergraduate research project that was quite practically oriented. We ran into a problem that we couldn’t figure out and went to see the prof in charge of the project. We had to delve even deeper into the theory behind what we were doing. I appreciated the emphasis on theory in the classroom at that point.</p>
<p>After working as an engineer, I became to like the emphasis on theory in the classroom even more. We had some tough problems to solve and the heavy emphasis on theory helped me to understand what was going on and then have the knowledge to solve the problem. </p>
<p>In my grad classes, I searched out those professors who emphasized the theory. It does take knowledge of the practical side of things to properly (IMHO) teach the theory. You have to know what to emphasize and where to back off a little. An occasional practical problem is good to demonstrate some theories that would otherwise be somewhat obscure, but those should not take away from teaching the theory.</p>
<p>It can be hard to just study the theory all the time. So, get involved in some research or project work and you’ll see where the theory can lead you.</p>
<p>@Vladenschlutte We are learning about MOST Basic in my IE 271-Ergonomics and Work Design course. </p>
<p>Tell you the truth, I still don’t understand what MOST is in physical terms, is it a software, a machine, a piece of hardware? So I went over the Powerpoint slides for the class, there is no specific definition of what MOST is, so I asked the professor: What exactly is MOST?</p>
<p>Answer: Well, it is a predetermined time system. Just remember that it is based upon MTM 1 and MTM 2, it is less detailed though but much faster to apply than MTM1.</p>
<p>This is only my personal opinion but I think academia can be a sort of last refuge of some very incompetent people. Every time I hear a romantic story about the “successful” engineer who woke up one day and decided that teaching Engineering was his true calling, I am very skeptical lol.</p>
<p>I’d suggest going to your professors and telling them this. I bet they’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter and would probably let you, the non-degreed engineer, tell them how they should be doing things.</p>
<p>It will all make sense in another semester or two when you take Material Handling Systems and learn about the accursed Pallet Stacking Problem >:) </p>
<p>Every major has things like those. Thankfully as Vlad mentioned IE is a lot more practical than other engineering disciplines unless you’re doing optimization stuff. Even then… </p>
<p>@Boneh3ad I was taught by my parents to think independently, challenge and stand up to these professors. You sound more like a conformist type who would be happy to sharpen their pencil or polish their apple. </p>
<p>Just because a person has a degree, it does not mean they are intelligent, competent or have any common sense. </p>
<p>I am sure many young people nowadays don’t care about getting their money’s worth- all they care about is graduating and getting a job but we are paying a lot of money for this and sometimes I feel that we are getting very little in return.</p>
<p>Many of these professors even with their fancy degrees are nothing but regurgitators. Thinking independently is not a requirement for getting any degree including a Ph.D. I will continue to stand up to their BS and propaganda until I graduate.</p>
<p>And that is all well and good, except that isn’t what you are doing. Instead you are whining and resorting to ad hominem attacks on the professors’ credentials and experience as engineers and scientists. You have shown precisely zero respect, not only for the human beings who are teaching your courses, but also for the entire process of getting a PhD that is required to teach those courses. Do you honestly think that these professors have zero ability to do engineering? I guarantee that is not the case. They may be bad teachers sometimes, but very few are truly incompetent engineers, particularly at large research schools.</p>
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<p>I fully agree, but not having a degree does signal that you are not experienced yet in that field and don’t actually know exactly what is and isn’t a waste of time in class. You may have wonderful experience elsewhere, but you are not yet an engineer and really don’t know what is and isn’t going to be useful, yet you act like you have all the answers for what should and shouldn’t be taught in class and how to fix these teachers’ teaching style.</p>
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<p>This is incredibly foolish. Yes, people slip through the cracks, but the entire point of a Ph.D. is to develop independent thinking and the ability to perform research. I would agree that a BS doesn’t require independent thinking and that an MS often doesn’t, though certainly benefits from it. But a Ph.D. is intended to require independent thinking. More often than not, if a particular professor is just regurgitating, it is for one of two reasons: either the professor is just checking all the boxes so he/she can get back to research, or else the curriculum is set at the department level and their hands are tied. Most bad teachers in later classes fall into the former category and most in the earlier classes (like math or physics) are more likely to fall into the latter.</p>
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<p>And that’s fine. Be an independent thinker. Question what you see around you. I can’t stop you from doing that, nor can anyone else, and nor should we. However, you have to do it with some respect. You really don’t have all the answers that you seem to think you do (nor do I, for that matter), so while you sit there and criticize, you also need to try and realize that there is more than just your side to this issue and that there are a whole host of struggles that the professors are trying to deal with while also teaching your classes. The are human beings with a lot of stresses just like you. They are, for the most part, competent engineers, however bad their teaching may be.</p>
<p>The sooner you at least learn to respect the system, the sooner you can actually think critically about how to improve it and/or work more effectively and thrive within it. Otherwise, you are just wasting your time and money getting angry about having a few bad professors instead of learning how to use the system to your advantage.</p>
<p>It’s not that they’re incompetent in their field, it’s more that they don’t know how to teach effectively. As far as I know, there’s no requirement that professors prove they are effective teachers before they’re allowed to teach.</p>
<p>The first time I heard the phrase, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” was from a college professor making fun of her profession.</p>