<p>Hi Ikf725,</p>
<p>I think many canadian schools already do this. Most engineering students take classes like "physics for engineers" or "chemistry for engineers"</p>
<p>I wonder if such engineering schools have better retention rates? It has to be a more nurturing learning environment.</p>
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I wonder if such engineering schools have better retention rates? It has to be a more nurturing learning environment.
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<p>I dunno... I think it's probably more out of the fire, back into the frying pan. ABET has stripped a lot of required courses from a lot of curricula in an attempt to reduce stress on students. My guess is that Canadian schools probably put some of those courses back in.</p>
<p>There's just so much to learn as an engineer.</p>
<p>I support extremely rigorous standards. If you want "all American" kids to wade through it the appropriate incentives should be there - not diluting the course work.</p>
<p>Appropriate incentive - free tuition, etc.</p>
<p>My school had a Physics for Engineers, and it was actually considered a much better course than the Physics for Science students (there was also a Physics for Humanities which was considered a joke). Better homeworks, better professors, and marginally better TAs (most of the TAs were graduate engineering students, not physics). I don't know anyone that washed out due to Physics 1/2, though a few of my friends did get their first (and last) Cs in them.</p>
<p>Math was taken with everyone else in the school, and, in general, the professors were pretty poor, the TAs foreign and unintelligible, and the homeworks almost nonsensical at times.</p>
<p>I'd say if the math course was also taught as a "for engineers" class, it would have made the course a lot more useful and interesting.</p>
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Most engineering students take classes like "physics for engineers" or "chemistry for engineers"
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<p>UIUC does this, and I imagine many large engineering schools do this as well. The engineering major courses are harder than those for LAS majors.</p>
<p>I'd prefer to see support for engineering students, rather than more stringent admission standards.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>I think it's important to remember that historically speaking, engineers typically come from middle and low socioeconomic backgrounds. Connections won't get you an engineering job; you need the educational background. Some of these kids may need time at college to make up for shortcomings in their HS backgrounds. Many also have the strong work ethic that is required to succeed at engineering.</p></li>
<li><p>I also think that we must accommodate late bloomers. Many late bloomers would never get admitted if all engineering students had to have stellar records going into college. Yet many of these kids are creative types that can make strong and unique contributions.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>By support I suggest more efforts to give engineering students a place to live away from the students with far less to do. It's discouraging to see your fellow students do little while you are swamped with work.</p>
<p>I'm surprised that math isn't taught seperately for engineers. Here at my not so big name school in Canada its taught seperately.</p>
<p>I think teaching math seperately makes it easier for engineering students. I read a thread a while ago where someone was complaining about how he was tutoring a grad student who didn't know how to do proofs. We don't learn proofs in our math classes while I imagine you might if you had to do math with math majors.</p>
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I think teaching math seperately makes it easier for engineering students. I read a thread a while ago where someone was complaining about how he was tutoring a grad student who didn't know how to do proofs.
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<p>The implications of this are what make me nervous about teaching courses separately for engineers... the watering-down of the theory. It wasn't until I got into graduate school and the work force that I really started to appreciate how rigorous my science and math backgrounds were. If I hadn't really learned the mechanics of how to mathematically prove something, I'm certain that I wouldn't be as good an engineer as I currently am. It didn't all seem applicable at the time, but that sort of proof-based understanding was very much so what I needed to understand higher-level engineering proofs.</p>
<p>The knowledge that this sort of rigor is really helpful is something that isn't immediately apparent to those who're putting together curricula.</p>
<p>I don't think it's possible to simplify or reduce what an engineer has to know. I just compiled all the chapters of the new NYC Building Code and it's 1700+ pages, excluding the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing codes. And this is after we tried to simplify the code to make it more understandable. Everything gets more complicated every year. </p>
<p>What we could do though is to spread the workload out over 5 years instead of 4 years because I don't think it's the difficulty of the material that makes this major hard, but rather the amount of material. Instead of having a 4 year BS in engineering, we should have a 5 year Bachelor of Engineering. There should also be the option of "pre-engineering" students who have a BS in any other major, as long as prereqs are satisfied, to take a 2 year Master of Engineering program. This would encourage those late-bloomers that treetopleaf talks about to get into engineering. </p>
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I support extremely rigorous standards. If you want "all American" kids to wade through it the appropriate incentives should be there - not diluting the course work.</p>
<p>Appropriate incentive - free tuition, etc.
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<p>Some schools already do this, namely The Cooper Union, Olin, and the Webb Institute. I've seen from some threads on this board that people will go elsewhere to do engineering in lieu of the free tuition because of the rigor at the Cooper Union (I haven't seen such threads regarding the other schools yet), so I'm not so sure it will work. Will students just choose to study other subjects? I can't think of a better incentive though, so are we hopeless? People just don't want to do the work that's required.</p>
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Some schools already do this, namely The Cooper Union, Olin, and the Webb Institute. I've seen from some threads on this board that people will go elsewhere to do engineering in lieu of the free tuition because of the rigor at the Cooper Union (I haven't seen such threads regarding the other schools yet), so I'm not so sure it will work. Will students just choose to study other subjects? I can't think of a better incentive though, so are we hopeless? People just don't want to do the work that's required.
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Your point makes no sense. I'm advocating making engineering a free degree. Take all the money that currently funds liberal arts degrees and other subjects which do not enhance the US economy in a meaningful way and put it towards engineering and sciences. Yeah, I'm sure we'd get some more people into engineering.</p>
<p>i agree haha. imagine how fast we could find alt. energy with more engineers and funding in the r&d industry</p>
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Your point makes no sense. I'm advocating making engineering a free degree. Take all the money that currently funds liberal arts degrees and other subjects which do not enhance the US economy in a meaningful way and put it towards engineering and sciences. Yeah, I'm sure we'd get some more people into engineering.
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haha, yea I can see how that paragraph is phrased awkwardly. My point was that I'm not sure that even free tuition is enough to generate significantly more engineers. I can see more people going to engineering school though, and then going on to med school or law school. Those that don't make it will end up becoming engineers.</p>
<p>I like your idea, but it sounds almost impossible to make it a reality.</p>
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The implications of this are what make me nervous about teaching courses separately for engineers... the watering-down of the theory. It wasn't until I got into graduate school and the work force that I really started to appreciate how rigorous my science and math backgrounds were. If I hadn't really learned the mechanics of how to mathematically prove something, I'm certain that I wouldn't be as good an engineer as I currently am. It didn't all seem applicable at the time, but that sort of proof-based understanding was very much so what I needed to understand higher-level engineering proofs.</p>
<p>The knowledge that this sort of rigor is really helpful is something that isn't immediately apparent to those who're putting together curricula
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<p>What you just said actually speaks to a point that I have made in previous threads - how much theory do engineers really need to know in order to be productive, or, more generally, how much of an engineering curriculum is actually useful?</p>
<p>To that, I would point to the realm of computer science and computer engineering as some of the most innovative arenas in the world, yet also one where numerous important contributions have been made and continue to be made by people who don't have formal CS or engineering degrees, or sometimes not any college degree at all (and in some cases, by people who didn't even graduate from high school). Many of the superstar software developers that I know don't actually have CS degrees, but instead are guys (and they are mostly guys) who picked up software development as kids, and then just practiced, practiced, practiced, writing ever-more-intricate code. In fact, my former roommate knows one guy who wrote a certain block-matching algorithm that was so elegant that he was being offered jobs paying easily 6 figures to work for certain specialized software firms who need that sort of algorithm expertise, with one offer paying nearly $200k. The guy had not only never studied any formal CS theory when he wrote that algorithm, he hadn't even graduated from high school when he wrote it. </p>
<p>The same can be said of EE. For example, Steve Wozniak, as a college dropout, famously designed and built what became the Apple I, one of the first complete and fully assembled personal computers on a single circuit board. Heck, at age 11, he had already designed and built his own calculators, and at age 13, he had built one of the world's first personal gaming machines (it played tic-tac-toe). More recently, the Wiimote, which is the innovative motion-sensing controller for the wildly popular Nintendo Wii, was designed and built by a guy who doesn't have an engineering degree. Shigeru Miyamoto's degree is in industrial design. </p>
<p>Now, to be sure, many innovations in CS and EE are in fact made by people with extensive theoretical backgrounds and degrees in the subject. But the point is, you don't need to have formally studied the theory in order to make important contributions, at least in those fields. A significant amount of important work continues to be performed by people who never studied the theory. Hence, it does open the question of exactly how much theory do engineers really need to know in order to be productive?</p>
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I can see more people going to engineering school though, and then going on to med school or law school.
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<p>Or becoming bankers or consultants. Like I have said in previous threads, many of the engineering students at the top schools such as MIT or Stanford don't actually take jobs as engineers, instead going for banking or consulting. Hence, if you make engineering a free degree, sure, you would get even more people to actually major in engineering, but many of them will still just use it as a platform to leapfrog their way into banking or consulting. </p>
<p>The real problem is something that you (ken285) have alluded to, which is that an engineering career, sadly, just doesn't pay that well and doesn't offer that many opportunities for advancement, relative to other careers. </p>
<p>Consider the painfully poignant words of former MIT engineering student Nicholas Pearce:</p>
<p>*"Even at M.I.T., the U.S.'s premier engineering school, the traditional career path has lost its appeal for some students. Says junior Nicholas Pearce, a chemical-engineering major from Chicago: "It's marketed as--I don't want to say dead end but sort of 'O.K., here's your role, here's your lab, here's what you're going to be working on.' Even if it's a really cool product, you're locked into it." Like Gao, Pearce is leaning toward consulting. "If you're an M.I.T. grad and you're going to get paid $50,000 to work in a cubicle all day--as opposed to $60,000 in a team setting, plus a bonus, plus this, plus that--it seems like a no-brainer." *</p>
<p>Are</a> We Losing Our Edge? -- Printout -- TIME</p>
<p>The real problem is not a lack of Americans who are willing to study engineering, but really a lack of willingness within companies to pay for engineers. Let's be honest: if companies were paying $200k for all engineers as starting salaries, Americans would be coming out of the woodwork to major in engineering.</p>
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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.
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By support I suggest more efforts to give engineering students a place to live away from the students with far less to do. It's discouraging to see your fellow students do little while you are swamped with work.
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<p>Building on the notion of support, I have always wondered why schools don't just wipe out the weeder grades of those former engineering students who decide to switch out of engineering. Seriously, why not? Those guys aren't going to be majoring in engineering anyway, so what does it matter what their engineering weeder grades are? Let them go to another major with a clean slate.</p>
<p>The analogy that I use is that you own a nightclub and you hire bouncers to legitimately expel patrons who you don't want in your club. That's fine, as you have the legitimate right to decide who gets to be in your club. But what you don't have the right to do is have your bouncers chase somebody all the way across town and beat him to a pulp. Once the guy is out of your club, that's the extent of your jurisdiction. Let that guy live the rest of his life unmolested. </p>
<p>So for those guys who tried out engineering and did poorly in the weeders such that they ended up switching to other majors, just eliminate those poor weeder grades from their academic records. That would reduce the risk of trying out engineering.</p>
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To that, I would point to the realm of computer science and computer engineering as some of the most innovative arenas in the world, yet also one where numerous important contributions have been made and continue to be made by people who don't have formal CS or engineering degrees
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<p>I think CS is different. There are a lot of self-taught computer scientists. It would seem, to that end, that CS theory is something that you can teach yourself. I kind of watched my brother do this, so I can see how it could easily happen. I think a CS degree just provides an obstacle course for programmers to complete, exposes them to a breadth of situations and background information, and allows them a university stamp-of-approval, if you will.</p>
<p>I really have never seen that happen for electrical, mechanical, chemical, bio, biochem, civil, or structural engineering. Jack Kilby almost certainly wouldn't have conjured the integrated circuit without his two electrical engineering degrees. Leslie Robertson wouldn't have won the IStructE gold medal without his Berkeley degree. I seriously doubt that Richard Smalley et al would've run across a Buckyball without a heavy theoretical background.</p>
<p>I don't think the rest of engineering works that way.</p>
<p>I do agree with you, in the problem that engineering faces is that we work for too little money. Gosh, we should be exalted as minor deities. ;)</p>
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Or becoming bankers or consultants. Like I have said in previous threads, many of the engineering students at the top schools such as MIT or Stanford don't actually take jobs as engineers, instead going for banking or consulting.
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True, but I don't think the number of people take that route would be significantly different from what the case is right now. The reason I mention law school and med school specifically is the cost of the additional years of schooling. Some people don't even consider taking the law or med route because it would place too much of a financial burden on them (even though they can repay it afterwards). However, if you tell them you can get a bachelor's degree for free if you study a certain subject (in this case, engineering), that's going to drive up the number of people who going into med/law via engineering. People that go into finance/consulting definitely still have an incentive to do engineering (4 years of tuition), but it's still not as much as future med/law students (the ability to go into their desired field of study). </p>
<p>I think the reason CS doesn't follow engineering is that a lot of CS information is freely available on the internet. I was able to learn HTML (ok, don't flame me, I know this isn't CS, but I'm just using it as an example because it's similar) when I was younger by just reading a few websites. Not a dime spent. You can't find all the information you need about material science or reinforced concrete design for free. And you certainly aren't going to go out and spend $100 on a book as a kid.</p>
<p>As a kid, my brother slowly amassed the O'Reilly books from Half-Price Books, read and re-read them all, yadda yadda yadda, he graduated with computer science departmental honors from Harvey Mudd. He did not major in computer science, he majored in engineering. I believe he's actually taught more computer science courses than he's taken.</p>
<p>So, Ken, I think your HTML point still stands. The only structural engineering books I can find at Half-Price Books are from the mid-sixties, and they're hysterical. As it were, the act of learning anything useful in an engineering profession has such a long academic lead time that it's hard to proficiently 'dabble' in engineering, as a kid would 'dabble' in computer science... You can't just pick up a book and start designing nuclear reactors, and there's a lot of boring crud to wade through in order to really understand the implications of what you're designing.</p>
<p>Personally, I'd really, really, really like for the people designing nuclear reactors to understand the implications of what they're designing...!!!!</p>
<p>Yea, I think most students drop out first year due to weeding courses, and from then on when they actually get to the classes that they'd like to major in(chemE, MSE, ME, EE, etc) the drop out rate becomes very small.</p>
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I think CS is different. There are a lot of self-taught computer scientists. It would seem, to that end, that CS theory is something that you can teach yourself.
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<p>But see, whether you need to know the theory is precisely where we differ. I mentioned guys that I know who are cracker-jack developers but don't have CS degrees. They don't know the theory, and they don't care. You ask them what a halting problem is, and they don't know. You ask them what Turing computability is and they don't know. Ask them to do something related to graph theory, and they don't know. They just don't know.</p>
<p>On the other hand, ask them to develop, say, an extremely beautiful and exciting video game in a short period of time, and they can do it very well. Heck, they better know how to do that, because that is actually their job (those guys work for video game houses). </p>
<p>That illustrates the point I'm making - that you don't actually need to know the theory in order to become a highly competent developer. </p>
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I really have never seen that happen for electrical, mechanical, chemical, bio, biochem, civil, or structural engineering. Jack Kilby almost certainly wouldn't have conjured the integrated circuit without his two electrical engineering degrees. Leslie Robertson wouldn't have won the IStructE gold medal without his Berkeley degree. I seriously doubt that Richard Smalley et al would've run across a Buckyball without a heavy theoretical background.</p>
<p>I don't think the rest of engineering works that way.
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<p>Again, I would have to disagree. Take the world of electronics and EE. Miyamoto is not an engineer, yet he still managed to develop the Wiimote. Seamus Blackley is also not an engineer, yet he successfully designed the first Xbox prototype. Jonathan Ive is not an engineer, yet he was the principal designer of the Apple Ipod and Iphone. Ask any of these guys what, say, the Z-transform is, and they don't know. Ask them what H-infinity is, and they don't know. In fact, they've probably never even heard of these concepts. But ask them to invent a really cool piece of consumer electronics, and they clearly can do it really well.</p>
<p>{Now, granted, some of you might now object that these guys are actually inventors and designers, and not truly "engineers" per se. But then that just gets to my point which calls into the question the very value of an engineering education, and especially the engineering theory, if you don't really need it in order to successfully invent and design.} </p>
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True, but I don't think the number of people take that route would be significantly different from what the case is right now.
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<p>I'm simply using the example of banking and consulting to reinforce what I think is one of your points, which is that the problem is not so much that people don't want to major in engineering, but rather that they don't want to work in engineering. The reason for that is what I said - the engineering career is not that great, relative to other available careers. That is why so many of the engineering students at the nation's top engineering schools, ironically, don't actually want to work as engineers. </p>
<p>If you want to get more people to actually work as engineers, then the REAL key is to make the engineering career track more attractive. You have to pay them more and you have to offer them better career opportunities. If that doesn't happen (and I'm not holding my breath), then you're going to continue to see people being unenthusiastic about the notion of working as engineers. </p>
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I think the reason CS doesn't follow engineering is that a lot of CS information is freely available on the internet
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<p>Well, I don't know about that. Seems to me what I'm talking about predates the rise of the Internet. As a case in point, college dropouts like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Larry Ellison had all become computer billionaires years before anybody outside of academia had even heard of the Internet. Heck, Bill Gates wrote a famous memo (the so-called "Tidal Wave" memo) to his employees that detailed the very first time he had actually used the Internet in 1995 and realized that Microsoft needed to reorient itself to compete on the Internet, yet by that time, he was already the richest man in the world. </p>
<p>Besides, I think you vastly discount the potential for amateur, low-cost innovation within numerous engineering fields. For example, the Wiimote has been widely praised as arguably the most innovative video game controller today, yet some newspaper recently analyzed the cost of the actual parts that go into the Wiimote and found that not only does it cost less than $5 dollars in parts, but that all of the parts are available quite cheaply through either regular electronics stores like Radio Shack or can be cheaply ordered through parts catalogs from third-party vendors. For example, the Wii's accelerometer is built by the company Analog Devices Inc. (ADI). In fact, a large enthusiast community of "Wiimote hackers" has now sprung up who have modified their Wiimotes to do numerous cool things. While I don't know for sure, I doubt that a lot of these 'Wiimote hackers' are rich. What they're doing doesn't require a lot of money. </p>
<p>Wiimote</a> Hack - Hack a Wii - Wiimote Hacks, Mod Chips, DIY Nintendo Wii projects and more</p>
<p>Heck, I can think of my former roommate, who is a hobbyist musician and electronics enthusiast. He doesn't have an engineering degree, but that didn't stop him from basically 'hacking together' his own recording studio at home, by buying cheap used (but still high quality) audio equipment from eBay and other sources and then experimenting and tinkering with it until he had a setup that provided extremely high-fidelity recording. His total system costs is probably only a couple of thousand dollars, yet is comparable to that of a professional recording studio. He doesn't know any electrical engineering theory, and he doesn't need to know it. </p>
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And you certainly aren't going to go out and spend $100 on a book as a kid.
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<p>Uh, actually, why wouldn't they? By "kids", I think you also mean teenagers. If the kid was highly interested in the subject, why not?</p>
<p>Heck, I'll use a somewhat embarrassing example from my own personal life. One time when I was a kid, I spent easily several hundred dollars on books and tapes to teach me how to speak Russian. Why? Simple. There was a really beautiful girl who moved into town whose family had come from Russia, and I thought that I would be able to impress her if I could speak to her in her native language. So I basically blew my entire allowance for a whole year on learning how to speak Russian. {But before I could work up my courage to even talk to her, she moved away, and so I had my heart broken. And of course now I can't remember a single word of Russian. Oh well. The things us guys will do for women.} </p>
<p>But if you want another example, see below. </p>
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You can't just pick up a book and start designing nuclear reactors
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<p>Really? You can't?</p>
<p>YouTube</a> - Homemade Nuclear Reactor
Fusion</a> is Easy-a homemade tabletop nuclear fusion reactor (Fusor) for science projects and research
What</a> it Takes-making a homemade nuclear reactor:the ultimate science project
Radioactive</a> Boy Scout | Weapons & Security | DISCOVER Magazine</p>
<p>See, I think y'all are severely underestimating the ingenuity of the amateur tinkerer/hobbyist community. These guys are very savvy, and they are living proof that you really can do a lot of interesting engineering work without having a formal engineering background and without a lot of money. You got guys who haven't even graduated from high school who have in fact built their own homemade nuclear reactors. </p>
<p>Now, obviously that's an extreme case. But the point still stands that significant potential exists to create important engineering advances without much money and without a formal engineering background.</p>
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Uh, actually, why wouldn't they? By "kids", I think you also mean teenagers. If the kid was highly interested in the subject, why not?
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<p>By kids, I meant kids. I was thinking of my little sister who has been doing web design stuff in middle school. If a teenager (I'm thinking juniors in high school) buys a $100 book, I wouldn't be that surprised. But a 13 year old? Sure there are probably some, but they're probably extremely rare. You'd have to have a very strong interest in that one subject and that's rare at such a young age.</p>