<p>Seems like this thread is suddenly infested with progenies of the author or people who are too sensitive about the word "moron." The internet, indeed, is serious business. I called him a "moron" because of this:</p>
<p>"people smart enough to do the math and motivated enough to at least take a bite at the engineering apple, but turned off by the overwhelming coursework, low grades, and abysmal teaching."</p>
<p>What the hell did he expect...good riddance.</p>
<p>"somehow you pulling 3.80 GPA in CC and graduating from UCLA EE makes you so proud of yourself and the right to call the author a moron? w.t.*"</p>
<p>I don't understand...are you related to the author? Why would it concern you so much if I called him a moron? And believe me, I am not "proud of myself" of getting a 3.80 in CC...CC was ridiculously easy and 3.80+ GPA was pretty common among the people I took classes with, since most of them wanted to get into Cal or UCLA Engineering.</p>
<p>Did anyone else feel that this guy was mostly complaining about pure science professors (math/physics/chemistry) and not his engineering professors? I found, in general, my engineering classes to be taught a lot better than the lower-level courses common pre-req courses (including the quality of the TAs and homework sets).</p>
<p>Perhaps this guy never actually got to give engineering a chance?</p>
<p>exactly, for some inexplicable reason this guy thinks Physics, Chemistry and Discrete Mathematics is somehow related to upper div engineering classes...</p>
<p>I just finished my first year as an engineering major and I had terrible teachers in the basic science "weed out courses". I attribute this to the fact that these courses were mostly taught by grad students. Juniors and Seniors that I have spoken to say that generally the quality of teaching increases as the courses become more specialized, as the profs in those courses actually like what they teach.</p>
<p>That narrator has a rather high opinion of himself. He manages to blame everyone but himself and has the arrogance to declare himself "smart enough" despite dropping out.</p>
<p>The problem isn't that it gets too hard all of a sudden when you get to college; the problem is that it was too easy in K-12.</p>
<p>This is a good response to Kern's article:
edspresso.com:</a> To freshman engineering school dropouts (Ken De Rosa)</p>
<p>I agree with De Rosa's article.</p>
<p>I personally knew one fellow who left my Univ - I don't know whether he resumed engineering studies elsewhere or not - who was just as good at the CS class we shared as anyone. But the science classes killed him.</p>
<p>Citan, humble yourself a tad. Getting through 2 years of CC followed by 2 years at a 4 year eng. school is easier than doing all 4 years at the 4 year school.</p>
<p>
[quote]
That narrator has a rather high opinion of himself. He manages to blame everyone but himself and has the arrogance to declare himself "smart enough" despite dropping out.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>It's a comedic piece, y'all. The author does what he set out to do, which is to amuse people with an anecdote.</p>
<p>With regard to De Rosa's article, I think it's a good article, and it accurately sums up what happens in a lot of situations. I think that mentioning calculators is a big deal. When I tutored high school kids, I would literally have to pry their calculators from their hands in order to get them to do simple math in their head (I'm talkin' 2*15, here). I made myself really solidly learn mental math and estimation just so I could show these kids what they were missing. They'd do the problem on their calculator and I'd do the problem with pencil-paper-brain, and I'd beat them solid every time. Eventually, wide-eyed, a couple of them put down the calculator... but I couldn't believe that their teachers would let them use the calculators that heavily in the first place! Scary.</p>
<p>Makes me thankful for my fantastic teachers in K-12. I had a couple of rotten ones, but in general, they were amazing.</p>
<p>I first found that comedic article when my son was taking his engineering prerequisites. He was in total agony over, you guessed it, Physics. He had gotten a D on one of the midterms, and was thinking about dropping his Engineering major. After reading that article, he got his act together and passed the class. I told him that if he could pass UCLA physics, he could pass anything. It's not the engineering classes that are the killers, it's the "weeder" prerequisite math and science classes that are taken in Freshman and Soph year. I don't think that the "moron" who wrote the Engineering Washout article even made it past his first semester of weeder classes. He sure is a good comedy writer, however. :)</p>
<p>The thing about going to CC is, you won't face classes like in 4 year university where there are numerous classes that are designed to weedout students. These are classes that made freshman engineering students doubt if they really want stay as engineering major. Sure, upper division class can be hard, you might get a bad grade but you won't get weeded out. The weedout classes not only give out bad grades. These classes made to be excruciatingly painful (etc, long lab, long difficult hw, bad teacher, difficult exams that are nothing like in the book and lecture). At my school, the first two engineering physics classes and cal 2 are pretty hard.</p>
<p>I always wonder if those non-engineering weeder classes are done that way to try and make engineers have respect for people that choose to do a major in math/physics/chemistry/biology. After all, if that's how hard their intro was, just think how difficult their higher-level ones must be.</p>
<p>"If I understood what I didn't understand about the problem, I would understand the problem, and therefore I wouldn't be asking a question." </p>
<p>haha! i laughed out loud...</p>
<p>Around 30%.</p>
<p>I wonder if the weed-out phenomenon is directed more at the masses of pre-med students than the declared engineering majors. After all, the chemE student must work side-by-side with the desperate pre-med student in the basic classes and thus is thrown into the weeding-out process.</p>
<p>The good thing is that engineering is a practical science. I don't think that letter grading really does any justice to an engineering student. I know many people who didn't do well in many of their earlier classes, the ones that tend to be more theoretical, but ended up doing very well where application was concerned.</p>
<p>But I do sympathize with the author of that article to an extent. It would be nice to enjoy many of the same privileges as other majors, like: better professors, better textbooks, less "weeding out," less work/courseload, a broader curriculum, etc. Nevertheless, the toughness of an engineering major is unique and it is something that appeals to me... makes me feel like my time in college is actually worth something. </p>
<p>However, is it really fair that engineering students end up with the lowest GPAs and a limited college experience? It would be nice if we had more time to explore other interests and hobbies... all work and no play need not be the only way. </p>
<p>The low retention rate of engineering shows that something is wrong. We may be turning away people that have a genuine interest in this field. The attitude that "if you can't handle the load, you aren't cut to be an engineer" is not healthy. While engineering is no joke, I think it could become a lot better, much more respected, even more enjoyable, and a brighter career choice if the students and professors alike weren't bent on gaining some kind of elitism from making engineering unnecessarily difficult. Sometimes I feel that engineering should be made a professional school like law and medicine... in many ways, I think it deserves to be one even moreso than the other two.</p>
<p>UCLA Band Mom, thanks for sharing that wonderful article. Straight from the heart!</p>
<p>One of my good friends is an engineer. He graduated with an engineering degree from a state U. Was not a stellar high school student, was not an outstanding college student. But he got his engineering degree. He was not a genius. He was your middle of the range State U student who wanted to be an engineer, and he did it. Now his alma mater is graduating very few "all American" type engineers. The bulk of them are foreign students, some of them much older than the traditional student, and and many of them fitting stereotypes of the nose to the grindstone. The more well rounded kids seem to be avoiding or dropping this major. Something that puzzles him to no end, since he checked out the curriculum and found it no more diffiicult than what he took, and he was not the studious sort. </p>
<p>It is sad if so many kids are washing out. There are schools such as the Maritime colleges and other tech type schools that are cranking out engineers out of kids with average (1000 Math and CR combined) SAT scores. They are taking the courses but with careful teaching, training and support they are learning the material As most kids are capable of doing. I saw the top grad school figures and those getting masters in engineer are mainly foreign students. Something is not right here. I agree with you, Electrifice.</p>
<p>Wow. Now we're calling it a "phenomenon" and deciding we need to lower the standards? Everyone profession that actually pays well does its "weeding out" at some point. Do you have any idea what a small percentage of wannabe physicians even get to medical school? So many decided against it because their GPA doesn't cut it, even more when their MCAT scores come back, and finally, more than half who decide to apply are rejected from EVERY single medical school they apply to. Engineering simply does its weeding out during the undergrad years. If you're looking for someone to blame, its 1) the admissions office for letting in students who aren't capable of getting through the curriculum 2) the students for not being able to accurately assess themselves and their limits 3) the high schools who graduate these students with mediocre math and science skills (see my link above).</p>
<p>The problem is not that too many people are unable to obtain an engineering degree - that's to be expected in any profession with any degree of prestige or high salary. There's a reason engineering is the only bachelor's degree that regularly has the potential to reach 100k and it's the same reason medicine reaches 200k and above - its unattainable for a large percentage of the population (medicine more so and thus the higher salary).</p>
<p>The problem is the results of the weeding out during college, not the weeding itself. Students who drop out of engineering have wasted 1-4 semester in college (possibly delaying graduation), lowered their cumulative GPA substantially, and probably took a hit to their self-esteem. To fix this, the weeding out needs to be "moved" to some other point in the process - namely admissions. You CANNOT remove it. It would be nice if we could get something from nothing, but the world isn't kind enough to work like that. Weeding out will simply crawl in at some point on its own. If we graduated more students in engineering, then it would take place at interview time (basically companies substitute classes as the agents for weeding out) and we would have a large number of unemployed engineering graduates. Hey at least you got that B.S., right? Too bad it counts for nothing if you can't get a job. This is even WORSE than having to switch during your freshman or sophomore year. This is exactly what happens in India, famed for graduating masses of engineering students. It simply isn't a solution.</p>
<p>looking back, i'm not sure i would have done engineering as a major. Takes too much time, academically discouraging with the types of grades we get, and at the end of the day, I chose a business career, so the actual material I learned was pretty useless, although I can learn it later on, I think it does set me back for a time period, because I don't have the business knowledge. </p>
<p>That being said, if you were unforunate enough to end up at a non top 50 school, engineering is a great option, because it opens up a lot of doors and you'll end up with a 55k job. But at elite schools, engineering jobs out of college don't have the allure of consulting/IBD.</p>
<p>Interesting, cptofthehouse.</p>
<p>One thing that you have to consider when you look at the engineering curriculum of today vs. the engineering curriculum of the past is that engineering has increased in complexity by an extraordinary amount in the past fifty years... Other people in other fields can chime in, too, but I've seen that the complexity of structural engineering has just grown exponentially since computers have become more and more involved.</p>
<p>I have a small collection of old structural engineering codes that I keep at my desk and peruse occasionally. I have the 1963 Building Code Requirements for Reinforced Concrete here... This document and its updated versions are the standards by which we design concrete structures. The 1963 code is a 6"x9" booklet with 144 pages in it.</p>
<p>I also have the 2008 design code for concrete... That's the newest one out there. It measures a full 8.5"x11" and has four hundred sixty-five pages in it.</p>
<p>The page count has been climbing at a steady rate as exceptions are found, as we account for newly-discovered phenomena, and as the market demands that engineers really "sharpen the pencil," to use an overused phrase in our little world, in order to produce a better, more efficient, cheaper-but-just-as-strong structure.</p>
<p>And this is just in concrete. We're using all sorts of materials now... it used to be just brick, concrete, steel, wood. We're getting into carbon fiber, fiber reinforced polymers, glass and glass fiber as structural elements, resins, epoxies, all sorts of weird things... I've even seen carbon nanotubes being tested to reduce crack propagation. It's getting just wild.</p>
<p>As a result, the engineering curriculum has simply been forced to expand. I'm sure this isn't just in structural engineering, too, and I'm sure that others can chime in with how their fields have changed in the past fifty years. But the fact remains that engineering's just flat-out gotten more complex. It's demanding better engineers to deal with the complexities, and it's demanding that we be better educated. That's where a lot of the change is coming from... It's just harder to get through that much more material in the same amount of time, and since it's harder, the population of students is that much more nose-to-the-grindstone.</p>
<p>At some point, engineering education's going to change. I think we're starting to see that with the increase in Harvey Mudd and Olin sorts of places in the past fifty years. It's just a matter of time until someone finds the best way of building a graduate engineer, and how long it'll take for everyone else to adopt that strategy.</p>
<p>GShine, I do realize how few wannabe premeds actually make it into med school. Furthermore, I agree with you that more weeding-out for engineering students should be done at the admissions level. However, I think you miss my point: </p>
<p>When premed students are in basic classes (chem/calc/physics/bio), they are trying to get somewhere else - namely medical school. The name of the game for them is "get good grades" at any cost. This differs from engineering students who are already where they plan to be - namely engineering school. The atmosphere in these majors and the demeanor of the students is very different, imo. I know, because I attended basic classes with many premed students, even though I had no intention of applying to med school. I remember seeing cheating, stealing tests, stealing notes of fellow students, sabotaging of lab experiments, etc. - not pretty. </p>
<p>Perhaps engineering schools should have their own basic science classes dedicated to the preparation and success of their engineering students rather than throw them into classes with desperate students trying to get somewhere else.</p>