<p>You know, it’s funny that you should mention the “time investment” aspect of it. I’ve heard so my people say that they “actually want to have a life”, or “want to get their degree as soon as possible”. In other words, many people don’t want to (possibly) invest the extra time. But at the same time they don’t hesitate to invest tens of thousands of dollars or even $100K+. I don’t get it. Maybe my education is “too specific”. I guess my mind simply isn’t “diverse” enough or “multidisciplinary” enough to understand.</p>
<p>I would also like to add that when I started my upper division engineering in earnest I was intimidated looking though the textbooks because there was tons of calculus and my calc was beyond rusty. In fact, I started a thread about it here.</p>
<p>At least in my program, the really tough math was only used mostly for derivations of theory and equations, and you’re typically not expected to understand derivation in depth, mostly just application. So, in a sense that is why engineering is more intimidating.</p>
<p>There’s still time to have fun! I had a blast. When I think back on college, the first things that come to mind are the parties, football games, road trips, etc. Oh, yeah, and I guess I did get a master’s degree along the way somehow.</p>
<p>The divide in maturity between 21 year olds is huge. </p>
<p>Some of the students in my engineering classes would get 15s and 20s on the assignments and the truth is, they could have gotten a 100 on the assignment if they cared enough to spend a half an hour to copy it from the solutions manual.</p>
<p>That level of apathy/immaturity may be something you will never understand if you have always been ‘on the ball’. But it will be something that most of those kids will grow out of.</p>
<p>Oh, believe me, I know all about it. I was the worst high school student / teenager that you could imagine. Dumb decisions and bad attitude all around. I didn’t start college until 5 years after high school. I needed a few slaps from reality to wake me from the fantasy land that existed only in my mind.</p>
<p>I wish that I had started college right after high school rather than throwing away 5+ years of career advancement opportunity, but had I started right away, I can’t even imagine all the dumb decisions I would have made. I’m sure I would have chosen the most worthless major imaginable and made horrible grades. Who knows if I ever would have even finished.</p>
<p>Fun fact: I agree with about half that statement; then I read the last statement.</p>
<p>Honestly, the idea that you have to go get a 4-year degree from somewhere to have any shot at a good life or a good job is ridiculous, and 4-year colleges are not for everyone. The economy itself can’t really support that many 4-year degrees. One of the greatest areas of shortage is of people with post-high school job training in a skilled trade or with a 2-year degree aimed at being various types of technicians. Those jobs don’t get all the hype in the news though so they get neglected, but there are a lot of people who would benefit from doing that and going straight into the workforce rather than going and trying to get an engineering degree when their heart isn’t in it and dropping out with $80k in debt.</p>
<p>Oh well. The important thing is that you don’t necessarily need to be a genius to get an engineering degree. You just have to want it and have the drive to work on areas in which you find yourself deficient. With the right attitude and an above average level of innate intelligence (if such things are innate), you can be a good engineer.</p>
<p>Perhaps my comments can be a bit misleading sometimes, especially when mixed with sarcasm.</p>
<p>First, I leave the word “good” open to the interpretation of the reader.</p>
<p>I didn’t mean to imply that one needs a 4 year degree to have a “good” job or “good” life. I agree that college, is not for everyone; college in the sense of 4 year or greater degree. And I agree that trade schools are good options for many people. And I would like to add to your comments by saying that I really don’t like the fact that grade schools these days place so much importance on getting simply “a university degree”. They teach nothing about the effect that certain majors have on your career. Or that there do exist careers that don’t involve universities.</p>
<p>I think that in 12th grade, considerable time should be spent talking about various “primary” majors as well as trade school options. The most important things to discuss should be salary statistics, unemployment statistics, and what kinds of jobs that you can realistically get that actually use those degrees/certifications. Students should also be strongly encouraged to research each field they are considering using the internet. That way they can get a feel for general consensus rather than someone’s biased or politically correct opinion. That may actually be a research topic in which the most reliable information comes from sites that don’t end in .edu.</p>
<p>It’s so easy to search for things like “best degrees” and “worst degrees”. Another good one is to watch the “i majored in debt” videos. Lot’s of cold hard reality right there.</p>
<p>I also agree that everyone having degrees would be a bad thing. If everyone suddenly decided to get the same degree as me, my career in that field would probably be over.</p>
<p>I just hate the bad, overly optimistic, politically correct information that people give that just isn’t based in reality. It’s the same kind of information that lead people with good intentions down bad paths. If you watch the “i majored in debt” videos, you will commonly hear things like “if only I had known”, “they lied to me”, “the stuff I learned is useless to employers”, “I wish I had known before…”, “my teachers told me…”, “nobody wants to hire a …”.</p>
<p>I’m just a guy that’s sick of all this nonsense coming from people that simply don’t know what they are talking about because they have not actually researched anything. They just regurgitate the same B.S. that they heard from others. That’s why I share my opinions based on statistics, videos, forum posts, and direct observation whenever possible. I never preach anything taken off of a schools website relating to this subject. It’s almost all B.S.</p>
<p>Will some people be offended by what I post? Probably. But I’m more concerned with the truth than peoples’ feelings.</p>
<p>Engineering is more difficult for some people than for others. For those for whom engineering-style problem-solving doesn’t come naturally, it could easily be scary.</p>
<p>While my daughter is generally a very good student, math and physics doesn’t come easily to her, and she preferred biology. I, on the other hand, found it much easier to help her with physics than biology, when she would ask me for help. I haven’t taken physics classes for >25 years, and don’t use mechanics in my work at all, but I could still figure out how to solve the physics mechanics problems without much difficulty. I could logically figure out: what info do I have, and what do I need to get, and how can I get from here to there? My daughter would ask how I knew to do that, and I couldn’t always explain it well, but I could just intuit the steps. OTOH, I didn’t like biology since there were so many terms and so much to just memorize, and I couldn’t logically reason anything out. </p>
<p>Because of the trouble she had with honors physics, my daughter finds engineering scary. She has no interest in studying it, but I don’t think she would do well if she did.</p>
<p>I certainly fear engineering after spending spring break with my son who will finish his junior year tomorrow. He worked his b u t t off the whole week. He did play golf almost every morning but only spent about 30 minutes a day at the beach and had maybe 2 cocktails all week. He had several projects including a 50 page lab report that he was working on. I have my undergraduate degree in a techy major and my husband and other son have their undergrad degrees in science majors so we are used to above average rigor in majors, but this kid takes it to a whole other level. Hope it pays off for him and all you other engineering students.</p>
<p>Engineering is HARD. Even when students have good aptitude, the workload (problem sets, labs, projects) is relentless. In other majors, a very bright student may have some classes where “wing it” methods work. That’s usually not true in in engineering classes.</p>
One of the reasons I found engineering easier than most humanities is was because problems often had a single answer that could be determined by a straightforward, formulatic approach. In contrast I would generally find something subjective, where one could “wing it”, far more difficult. For example, if I had to write a story, I wouldn’t know where to begin and wouldn’t have a good idea if it was quality work or not. Having an infinite number of possible answers and no good way of ranking their quality made it difficult. If anything, the closest I could come to “winging it” was in classes where answers were based almost entirely on intuitive logic, including some types of programming/engineering/math classes. I generally did need to study or memorize anything for such classes because it just made sense.</p>
<p>The way you describe yourself is the way a lot of my Chinese peers talk about themselves- they are very good with logical stuff but their culture does not encourage them to be creative and that is not a good thing!</p>
<p>I have always been driven to more intellectual pursuits but I am not a nerd, maybe the reason why Industrial Engineering is the right major for me.</p>
<p>What I see more and more is bright kids who are very good with Physics, Math and high level Engineering but have absolutely no “street smarts” and 0 social skills.</p>
<p>Don’t mean to pick on any of our fellow nerds here but if you can design and engineer an airplane but don’t know how to talk to a girl, I think you have failed somewhere LOL. </p>
<p>All kidding aside, I think we all should strive to be more well rounded individuals!</p>
<p>Writing assignments can also be challenging for many students. But… I don’t think many of them have assignments every day. (My experience is limited - I majored in MechE).</p>
<p>I have a CS degree, and found the CS, EE, and math classes I had to take to be much more painful than the non-engineering classes I took, e.g., geography, journalism, philosophy.</p>
<p>I actually enjoyed the non-engineering classes more because they didn’t require all the hours that the CS, EE and math classes did.</p>
I’d expect the majority of engineers do little calculus, and when they do need to do advanced math, they often use a computer program to obtain results. How much is needed varies tremendously depending on the specific field and job.</p>
<p>In my field of EE, the vast majority of engineers I’ve worked with use ~zero calculus including HW engineers, SW engineers, project managers, and lab/verification specialists. My focus more relates to systems/theory, which does require math on a complex plane from time to time, but still minimal manual calculus. Instead we’d use programs like Matlab to compare theoretical performance with various conditions, which does sometimes use calculus internally to obtain results. The main time I’d need to understand calculus is when reading about the theory behind certain types of designs in a textbook, which has happened from time to time, long after graduating.</p>
<p>How does one determine that a subject is avoided out of fear?</p>
<p>Assuming there’s any sense in such thinking, I can easily see how students would avoid engineering precisely due to the workload involved. If one lacks discipline, an immense interest, etc., why would they bother wasting their time in something that they’re statistically likely to fail or switch out of?</p>