<p>bschoolwiz, I feel for you. You have a very long, hard road ahead of you.</p>
<p>Of course I am in Industrial Engineering because I want to be a manager. I would say 99% of the people in my program are doing it because they want to be managers, who wants to work on a factory floor for 30 years?</p>
<p>In all honesty, some of the best skills I have acquired while working in corporate America have nothing to do with technology or knowledge of any subject.</p>
<p>The ability to pitch bull**** with good Powerpoint presentations and the proper use of buzzwords like ROI, exit strategy and value-added is probability one of the most important skills any professional can have.</p>
<p>You have to be disliked or sometimes even hated in order to be a successful manager especially in a manufacturing/industrial environment and I can see myself being disliked by a lot of people.</p>
<p>@bschoolwiz, </p>
<p>Are you saying that by having an industrial engineering degree, you will be automatically vaulted into management?</p>
<p>Why do you think that throwing around buzzwords is the most important skill ? </p>
<p>No. I never said that a degree in anything will vault anybody in management but many Engineers do not make good managers, especially if they are introverts and don’t like dealing with people, generally speaking.</p>
<p>The bit about Powerpoint skills sounds funny but it is so true. We had a assignment for a class where we had to do a business presentation.</p>
<p>People in my class were more introverted and more tech oriented usually had some very boring presentations because they focused on all the technical aspects and minor details of the project and that put most people to sleep.</p>
<p>I made my presentation more “personal” and made it more interactive, added buzzwords like “win-win proposal” and constantly used the term “at the end of the day” which I personally think sounds really dumb. Nonetheless, it got the job done.</p>
<p>Then why are you getting an industrial engineering degree to get into management ?</p>
<p>How do you know your presentation was better ? Was that just your perception or did everyone (include the professor) think so too ?</p>
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<p>I’m not dismissing good advice; I’m saying that the advice is not very specific. My primary and secondary school courses always stressed learning fundamental concepts by first giving an problem and then teaching us the concepts needed to solve it. This method sparked interest in the subject and gave students a practical reason to learn it. Of course, this does not relate with how some of my professors organize their courses or with how they teach where they just spend most of the class period talking about concepts and maybe going over an example if they have time. And of course, I know that it is the student that must adjust to the instructor’s way of teaching, not the other way around. </p>
<p>What I’m looking for is advice on how to adjust to these professors’ teaching styles and something more than just telling me to be strong in the underlying concepts (how?) would be very helpful.</p>
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<p>Well that’s the million dollar question. There really is no hard and fast rule, as everyone is different. Most of the time you sort of have to just find what works for you. For me, I found working in groups so we could help each other out to be the most helpful. Later on, in graduate school, I found that doing that and reading the book a lot more closely than I had as an undergraduate turned out to work really well for me. That doesn’t work for everyone though.</p>
<p>I do think the one universal rule is that, while you don’t have to be a math genius, you do need to be on a solid mathematical footing and comfortable with it.</p>
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I am going to suggest that you go straight into the business side when you graduate, because I do not think you will interface well with technical professionals. I suggest sales, or “consulting”. In my company, getting into management on the technical side first requires a number of years experience actually working as an engineer, and with this attitude I do not see you surviving long. We get guys who think that they should be in charge. It doesn’t generally work out well for them.</p>
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That used to be true, but one of the things that companies have figured out is that one of the top reasons people leave is because of a bad or abusive manager, and it is cheaper and better for the companies to just hire managers who can get things done without being hated or disliked. I can see you being disliked by a lot of people too, and unless you are truly brilliant in some relevant way (something you have NOT demonstrated on here!) then you will have a poor career, be it on the technical OR management side.</p>
<p>A good manager sometimes has to make unpopular decisions, but they stick because he/she has the respect of their subordinates. A bad manager makes unpopular decisions, and the subordinates know or think that they are happening because the manager is an idiot or a jerk, and they leave, and soon the manager has nothing to manage.</p>
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This is one of the core differences between secondary school and college. High school may have taught you how to execute a series of steps, but college is trying to teach you to work without a list, to take a set of tools and figure out how to use them on your own.</p>
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Then here is my advice:</p>
<p>Review the math. A lot. Perhaps take a couple of extra math courses. A lot of the challenge in engineering is really understanding how to make the math work for you.</p>
<p>After that, try looking back at your core material and seeing what it means. At the undergrad level, there are not usually too many steps between the question and answer, and the methods are generally either shown or at least hinted at in the course material even if the instructor does not mention it.</p>
<p>Do not go to office hours without having tried the problems. If you go in saying “I tried methods A, B, and C” you will get a better response than if you say “I can’t figure this out!”.</p>
<p>It is hard to be more specific than that without knowing more about your problem - the courses you are struggling with, the kinds of problems being presented, etc.</p>
<p>When I went to presentations, I went to see the technical details. I wasn’t bored by them. It is those details that will make or break a project. When I started hearing the words “win-win”, etc is when I left knowing that all that was being presented was BS. </p>
<p>I guess I agree that bschoolwiz should just go straight to the business side of things and skip engineering all together. He (assuming it is a “he”) could save a lot of time and aggravation by just transferring out of engineering ASAP. </p>
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<p>Thank you for your advice! I’m currently taking a thermodynamics course right now that is slightly overwhelming me. The math is just basic algebra and calculus so I don’t have problems with that. It’s just that there are so many concepts to learn about and master and they all interconnect in one way or another and my main problem is that I always get stuck on finding 2 or 3 unknowns when I should only be getting one, and it’s usually because I usually forget to make an assumption or forget a method to solve for other variables.</p>
<p>This has been a fascinating discussion on so many levels and raises a larger question: Which undergraduate engineering programs are well regarded for their strong TEACHING? </p>
<p>Ah, thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is a unique blend of difficult for students. It is usually one of, if not the very first engineering class students take, is often taught by less-experienced faculty, and has a bunch of seemingly disparate topics.</p>
<p>Your best bet is to make sure you internalize the concept of conservation of energy, as it is the one overarching concept that applies to everything in the class, and work with a group when you get stuck.</p>
<p>To Koalass - A good way “in” to thermodynamics is to trace the historical progression - related to the maximization and routing of process energy produced from primitive combustion engines, applied to steam technologies in the nineteenth century.</p>
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That is hard to say because honestly it is not something that rankings, reviewers, or even the universities themselves really try to measure. The only relevant comments I have ever heard is that, on average, schools without doctoral programs do a better job of teaching the fundamentals, while schools with doctoral programs do a better job of teaching the more advanced material.</p>
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<p>That’s a bit like asking “What’s the best pizza place in the US?”. You will get many differing opinions on which programs are strongest in teaching, but since no single person has physically attended all of the engineering schools in the US to make a comparison, you must then account for the fact that every person has different needs and standards.</p>
<p>Generally speaking though (and this is a big general), schools that are not research dominant often have faculty who are more focused on, and better at undergraduate teaching. Also, smaller schools/programs, programs with smaller class sizes, and schools with higher student-faculty ratios tend to have better undergraduate focus and teaching.</p>
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Anecdote time:</p>
<p>I was working on a $70 million proposal, and when we finished the content the company sent down a graphic designer to pretty it up. He started to make changes to some of the plots and we ALL sort of lunged towards him yelling “STOP”!!! He looked confused, until one of the guys running the proposal (with long years in industry) told him that this proposal would go through a technical review, and if the reviewers saw graphics and language that looked like the product of marketing people they would immediately discount them. Engineers and scientists do not use and do not trust buzz words and pretty pictures, they want the real math and the real results… SO DON’T CHANGE ANY OF THE PLOTS. The plain lines created by MATLAB may not be pretty, but giving them color gradation and shadow effects just make them look like an infomercial.</p>
<p>If you want your plots to look pretty, just learn to process the data you get from Matlab in GNUplot or TecPlot or something similar. There’s still something to be said about having crisp, clear figures that are easy to read and easy on the eyes. There’s just no reason to spruce it up beyond that. Brevity is the name of the game, after all.</p>
<p>I know it was a vague question I posed, but believe it or not, your responses were very helpful, so thanks!</p>
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<p>Of national chains? Jet’s is clearly the best. </p>