<p>Hello all. I've been pondering this question for quite a while, and I'm wondering what everyone else here thinks...why is engineering as tough as it purportedly is?</p>
<p>Right now, math and science can be quite challenging for me mainly because I have to balance a good number of AP-level humanities courses and many other courses that require me to do "projects" and the like...all of which takes up time. I've also got a lot of extracurricular requirements, most of which I participate in for transcript stuff.</p>
<p>But I don't see how math and physics and the other engy courses could become very overwhelming when you've got tons of time on your hands and just a few other courses to balance (usually two or three). You also don't have as many required extracurriculars in college. So what is it that's so difficult about engineering? What about the courseload is heavier/more difficult? Are there MORE problems assigned? Does each individual problem have a greater number of elements and factors in it, requiring more time to solve? Are the concepts more abstract and difficult to follow? </p>
<p>I'd love to know what your opinion is on this subject.</p>
<p>Generally, it is the nature of the work. Engineering comes naturally to some people. I've known students who breeze through engineering with 3.8-4.0 GPAs. But for many it is struggle because you have to learn how to apply fundamental skills to complex problems. And the difficulty depends on the school and the profs. The first school I went to was an "elite" program but the teaching was terrible. They went through the material very fast and did very little quality teaching. Most students were able to teach themselves the material quickly and keep up with the pace. I wasn't one of them. I transfered to a non-elite program where the profs were more teachers than researchers. The pace was slower and the material was presented in much greater detail. Also, there is not a lot of exam pressure because many of our exams are not more difficult than the homework. One prof said it would be stupid to give an exam that was more difficult than the homework. We are not graded on a curve. But at the elite program the exams are much more difficult and are made to show who is the best of the best. The philosophy is to give easy problem sets but difficult exams under time pressure. At other schools the philosophy is to give problem sets and to give exams of the same difficulty.</p>
<p>In conclusion, the fundamentals of engineering are easy to understand. The difficulty of the work depends on how complex the prof wants to make it.</p>
<p>justinmeche is right, as a sophomore engineering student, i agree with everything he said. Sometimes it may be better to goto the smaller schools, with less name recogntion for engineering. A lot of my classes here at umich are pretty much self-taught. I was in high school once too, I thought to myself, hey I had a near perfect GPA and breezed through all my AP classes, how hard can engineering be? trust me, its damn hard, engineering is about analysis and breaking down huge problems into smaller pieces. It takes a lot of practice and definitely brain power. The professors will not teach you everything you need to know, they will summarize your textbook and point out the important stuff, the details u have to learn on your own through office hours and the textbook. Usually the problems sets are pretty hard, but the exams are much harder, you never know what you can expect. What i am starting to do, which is a good way to study in engineering, is do every problem in the book and find more problems. this is the only way to do well in engineering.</p>
<p>I think each engineering discipline has its own evils. In most engineering disciplines, I would say making sense of the word problems is probably a major difficult. But electrical engineers and computer engineers tell me that programming is second nature to them, but yet circuits is EVIL. However, I find programming to be almost impossible (I'm ChE). Most people in engineering disciplines other than ChE seem to have trouble with chemistry, while some engineers, although we all should LOVE this, struggle massively with physics. I know I struggle with my quantum physics/statistical mechanics class. So, yeah...point is...everyone has their own pet peeves within engineering.</p>
<p>Damn hard is right. There are natural eng that can look at a problem and go oh yeah those units cancel and it all fits. And Charman is totally right. Almost everyone thinks engineers are crazy but all engineers think ChemE's are nuts. Eng and phys people are afraid of chem. It's kind of funny. Most people aren't natural engineers and that is why it is hard. I am not. I am more naturally artistic. I make problems harder. It is a strange thing. So what makes it hard is that some people get and others don't but all try equally as hard. I have heard of a fear of circuits too haha.</p>
<p>Engineering is not hard the first two years if you have a strong inclination to math and such. Some people have a hard time in calculus, but engineers go through differential equations and even fourier series etc (like the 4th class after calculus). as with my school.
The upper division (junior and senior years) is what starts to bear down on you. What until your in an advanced thermal dynamics, or fluids course, heat transfer, vibrations, and on and on......</p>
<p>Engineering is hard, IMO, for a few reasons:</p>
<p>*sheer volume of courses - you have to take more courses than other students, and they tell you exactly what you have to take. Most people won't get good at all of it.
*Inductive thinking. You learn to think differently, and it takes some time.
*Sheer amount of information to process
*Cumulative effect. By the time you take a course, in, say, reactor design, you'll need to know, and know well: chemistry, calculus, differential equations, MathCAD, thermo, and fluid dynamics. Also, the material at the end of the course builds on the stuff done previously, so you can't study for a test and then forget it. Contrast your English major friends: their Shakespeare course won't have much to do with their Women's Lit course (sure, a few references here and there, but that's it), and, when they are done reading My Antonia, they can forget about it and move onto Sense and Sensibility.<br>
*smart, motivated people, and a mandatory curve.</p>
<p>The way the OP phrased the question made it sound like he/she thought most of it was a time issue (balancing humanities classes, AP load, ECs, etc.) The thing that makes engineering difficult for many people isn't a function of time. Their brains cannot process the abstract concepts involved. It just doesn't make sense to them. Many kids come from a HS science program which was more about memorization and recall. The more time you put in, the more you could recall. They have little experience with an application level of understanding. This is not based on time spent memorizing. This is based on abstract thinking skills, problem-solving ability, analytical reasoning skills, spatial reasoning, logic, inductive and deductive thinking skills. Either your brain works this way or it doesn't. Conversely, many engineering majors find writing or humanities classes difficult for THEM because their brains don't work THAT way!</p>
<p>i agree, engineering is tough, but anything is possible. as far as the payoff, well they are the highest paid starting with a bachelors, of course no where near doctors, lawyers, but among proffessional degrees, they are very rewarding. classes are hard, but do-able, for example, the highest grade on my thermo midterm was a 12%, but they curved!!</p>
<p>I struggled with engineering courses for two years before it all made sense to me. I was too stubborn to change to a non-engineering program because I felt that in time something would click. I transfered to a school where the atmosphere is more relaxed and for the most part, the teaching is great. The exams are not graded on a curve. There are only about 30 students in my MechE class. Since we are graded on the standard scale (90-100 = A, 80-89 = B, etc.) and not competing against each other on a curve, the exams are not as difficult as a curve exam. What I mean is that if you take the time to study the concepts and how to do the problems, you will do well. But stupid mistakes will kill you. My exam grades in one class were 92, 72, 66. And that was material that I understood well, but errors in judgement happened at the wrong time and cost me a lot of points. I ended up getting a B in the course because my homework grades were good and I wrote excellent design reports.</p>
<p>I agree that anyone can do anything that they put their mind's to. I am just trying to answer the the question about why people think engineering is so hard. When you work hard and try hard and still get low grades, people tend to get frustrated and the one's who don't have the necessary degree of determination end up wimping out. </p>
<p>On top of the conceptual difficulty of engineering there is actually a time factor as well. At many schools, engineering classes may require more hours of lecture, a discussion section and a lab and get the same credit hours as a humanities course. The credits for engineering courses are notoriously low for the number of hours of work required. Pretty much it has to be this way otherwise you would never be able to fit in all the courses required to complete the major and still stay within the credit limit allowed per quarter/semester. The additional downside is that there are so many required courses for an engineering major that it leaves little time in your schedule to explore other non-science courses and discover new interests.</p>
<p>Oops, one more thing to add. Another factor that make engineering classes hard is the pace of the classes. It's scary when they review your entire year of high school physics in the first 2 lectures...or the first 2 hours! A lot of information is crammed into a short amount of time. You have to be able to process the info quickly, retain a lot, and in some cases, teach yourself alot. This is not intended to scare anyone off. It is just answering the OP's question about why it seems so much harder even to someone who is used to a rigorous HS load.</p>
<p>Yes, the pace is one of the hardest things to deal with. I needed a slow pace in engineering to be successful. In some of my classes it can take 2 or 3 weeks to go through a chapter because we spend a lot of time discussing the concepts and doing lots of problems. The amount of material may be covered in a week at a more rigorous program. The difference is that teaching of the material is not good. The student is left to learn most of it on his or her own. As a result of the slower pace, some traditional courses like Thermo and Heat Transfer are offered over two semesters instead of one.</p>
<p>"I agree that anyone can do anything that they put their mind's to."</p>
<p>I don't agree with this statement. In my experience, that is more fanciful thinking than reality. I don't think it is all a matter of determination. Sometimes it is. There are people who are capable of certain things but are too lazy to really do them. But others, I believe, are incapable no matter what. Everyone goes through a different physical and mental development that allows them to be good at certain things and not good at others.</p>
<p>I know this one kid that slept through EVERY SINGLE LECTURE! He would just show up and sleep. The prof. would always wonder why he would take the time to even show up. Anyways, he got between 95 and 100 on EVERY exam and easily got an A in the class. Pretty crazy, thats what I think.</p>