why is engineering so hard?

College Majors Engineering Majors
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I am one of those guys who might say what you mentioned isn't 'real engineering' (it could be argued but that's another point)

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<p>I knew somebody was going to say that, which is why I then presented the example of electrical engineering, of which I can give you more instances. For example, as a new EE today, you probably don't really care about how a CRT works, because the entire TV industry is clearly moving to flat-panels. Only a tiny percentage of EE's will ever need to care about how vacuum tube diodes work, because with the exception of extremely-high-fidelity audio, nobody uses that stuff anymore; it's all been replaced by integrated circuits. Similarly, fewer and fewer EE's will ever need to care about analog electronic media storage devices such as audio tape decks, VCR's, and so forth, because it's all being replaced with digital storage. Take broadcast TV transmission: after next year, EE's in the United States will never have to care about the current broadcast analog TV transmission modulation standards because by law the entire country is being moved to broadcast HDTV. Or how about phone switching technology? Fewer and fewer EE's will have to care about how the venerable Class-5 central office phone switches work because phone services are all inevitably moving to Voice over IP. </p>

<p>Now, I would argue that all of these technologies are 'real engineering' by anybody's standards. But that just demonstrates that much of EE is extremely innovative. {Now, granted, other subdisciplines of EE, such as power generation, are not highly innovative.} </p>

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Regardless of whether or not the older body of knowledge is not necessary, the fact is that we engineering majors still have to take those courses

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<p>Yeah, but that begs the question of why? Specifically, why exactly do they have to take so many courses? Like I said, to use CS as an example once again, you can become a competent software developer even if you've never taken a single college class - heck, even (like some people I know) if you haven't even graduated from high school. So why exactly do CS programs force students to take all these courses that they don't really need to know in order to do the job? </p>

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I will say that as a chemical engineer major, I realize that it is essential to understand the foundations of it. We are chemists, but we know enough chemistry to understand to some degree what is happening so that we can communicate to chemists who may work with us. We have to know heat transfer and about mass/material/energy balancing because these form the core- without it we will be loss as technology advances

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<p>The question is not so much whether you will need to know these topics at some basic level. The question really is about how deeply do you really need to know them. </p>

<p>I'll give you a case in point. To this day, I still don't really understand what the heck the Maxwell Relations really mean. Or, on a similar note, what exactly is the difference between, say, the Helmholtz free energy and the Gibbs free energy. Now, granted, I can tell you the formulas, I can do the math, but I still don't know what it really means.</p>

<p>Nor was I the only one. For example, I know one girl who graduated with high honors, stayed to get her PhD, and then was offered a TA position for that very same chemical engineering thermo class that she took as an undergrad But she felt she had to turn it down because she said, frankly, that before she could take that position, she would first have to actually know that stuff. So here's a person who actually did extremely well in the program - enough to get admitted to the PhD program and complete it in just 3 years - yet even she admits that she doesn't really understand ChemE thermo. </p>

<p>That's why I'm convinced that chemical engineering thermodynamics is just an unnecessarily obscure and obtuse topic. Even the very best students don't really know what the heck is going on.</p>

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Not in civil engineering. It compounds. We have to learn the old because old buildings are still standing, not to mention it's pretty fundamental knowledge. The code books keep getting thicker and more complex as we discover new thing

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<p>To that, I would argue that civil engineering isn't really innovative for precisely the reasons you stated: the old buildings are still standing. Hence, you don't have quick turnover of product. Contrast that with the computer industry where, clearly, the old computers are not still standing. To even find anybody who is still using a computer that was built in even the 90's is a bit of a challenge. </p>

<p>Don't get me wrong. I don't say that to insult civil engineering, as I am not saying that a high pace of innovation is necessarily good. I'm simply saying that the pace of innovation in civil engineering is not equal to that in computers (for, frankly, nothing is as fast-paced as computers). In fact, I could argue that the slower pace in civil engineering is actually good, in the sense that it doesn't quickly dilute the value of experience, which means that older civil engineers don't have to constantly fear obsolescence the way that older software developers do. </p>

<p>Innovation is great when you're young and can afford to take risks, but is perhaps not so great when you're old and you can't take risks.</p>

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To that, I would argue that civil engineering isn't really innovative for precisely the reasons you stated: the old buildings are still standing.

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<p>I agree with you about the slower pace of engineering development in civil engineering in comparison with computer engineering being good, but I disagree with you that civil engineering isn't really innovative.</p>

<p>There's a lot of "build it and forget about it" in structural engineering. In this industry, you CAN'T obsess over what you did wrong in the past... You have to learn from it and move on. If we <em>thought</em> about obsolescence, we'd probably worry about it. Luckily, we build in failsafes. We design structural elements so that when the system is overloaded, they'll fail in a yielding (slow) manner rather than a brittle (out-of-nowhere fast) manner. A few get away from us, and we end up with massive structural collapses that kill people and make the news. Engineers then lose their jobs, their livelihoods, their family's futures. The omnipresent failures are benign-looking cracks that aren't even on the public's radar, that close off a section of parking garage for a few months or that cause irritating leaking in office buildings, etc... But we're constantly innovating and learning from those failures. That's what the public doesn't see.</p>

<p>Contrary to popular opinion, we do actually get some immediate feedback on our work-- we can watch our buildings crack within days after removing the shoring, if we've done something wrong in our new methods. We watch other engineering failures, and we learn from those. Earthquakes happen all the time in foreign countries, and we pick up lessons learned from that. We learn from each other, and we're a ridiculously collaborative field when it comes to sharing lessons learned. We're developing new methods all the time to make buildings safer, to incorporate new materials, to bring in immediate feedback and make structures lighter and cheaper and more efficient and sturdier, all at the same time. There are ALL SORTS of innovations going on, but anybody who's not in the field doesn't really see that.</p>

<p>You make a good theoretical argument for someone who's not in the industry, but I see something very different from within the industry, and I'm really going to have to disagree with your opinion that civil engineering isn't that innovative. It's not as fast or as obvious of a turnover as electrical and computer engineering (as you mentioned, NOTHING is) but just because we're not tearing buildings down right and left doesn't mean that we're not gathering data from old buildings and creating new and better methods all the time.</p>

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So naturally, people are in awe of engineering because it uses math, and also kids are convinced that they are no good at math and fear it as a result. And since we teach math so slowly in grade school because of this pedestal, kids enter college poorly prepared for the use that engineering makes of math. Many engineers completely buy into and encourage this viewpoint (it's a great boost to the ego, after all), as one can see in this thread

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<p>Ha! I wish people were in awe of us. </p>

<p>Let's face it. They're not in awe of us. They don't envy us. They don't really care. What other kids feel about math isn't so much 'fear' as it is pity. It's not so much that the kids don't know math or that they're not good at it; it's that they don't want to know math, and not only are they not envious of those that do know math, they actually scorn those that do. </p>

<p>Just think about it - where exactly does the geek/nerd stereotype come from? I don't know too many high schools where the Math Club was considered to be the place where the 'cool' kids hung out - in fact, the exact opposite is true. To be brutally honest, a lot of engineers are the guys who couldn't get a date in high school. Kids (at least in the US) don't want to learn math simply because it's not cool to know math. </p>

<p>Consider the painfully poignant words of Paul Graham, who got his PhD in CS from Harvard and became a highly successful tech entrepreneur. He's talking about general 'smartness', but you can simply substitute 'knowledge of mathematics' and it would be the same idea.</p>

<p>*When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the kids with mild cases of Down's Syndrome, what in the language of the time we called "retards."</p>

<p>We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking physically different. We were not being especially candid to grade ourselves as D. It would have taken a deliberate lie to say otherwise. Everyone in the school knew exactly how popular everyone else was, including us.</p>

<p>My stock gradually rose during high school. Puberty finally arrived; I became a decent soccer player; I started a scandalous underground newspaper. So I've seen a good part of the popularity landscape.</p>

<p>I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.</p>

<p>Why? To someone in school now, that may seem an odd question to ask. The mere fact is so overwhelming that it may seem strange to imagine that it could be any other way. But it could. Being smart doesn't make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it harm you in the real world. Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem so bad in most other countries. But in a typical American secondary school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult...</p>

<p>...Being unpopular in school makes kids miserable, some of them so miserable that they commit suicide. Telling me that I didn't want to be popular would have seemed like telling someone dying of thirst in a desert that he didn't want a glass of water. Of course I wanted to be popular...</p>

<p>...As well as gaining points by distancing oneself from unpopular kids, one loses points by being close to them. A woman I know says that in high school she liked nerds, but was afraid to be seen talking to them because the other girls would make fun of her. Unpopularity is a communicable disease; kids too nice to pick on nerds will still ostracize them in self-defense....</p>

<p>When I was in school, suicide was a constant topic among the smarter kids. No one I knew did it, but several planned to, and some may have tried. Mostly this was just a pose. Like other teenagers, we loved the dramatic, and suicide seemed very dramatic. But partly it was because our lives were at times genuinely miserable..." *</p>

<p>Why</a> Nerds are Unpopular</p>

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Yeah, but that begs the question of why? Specifically, why exactly do they have to take so many courses?

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<p>Because I actually use them all in practice.</p>

<p>Even the ones that seem unrelated, I need because I interact with a lot of other systems. I'd be lost if I didn't understand about those systems.</p>

<p>On the project I'm working on right now:
I used dynamics (2 courses) to design a pedestrian bridge and keep it from vibrating (I've been asked to write a paper on this, actually)
I used steel design (3 courses) to design the steel frame of the pedestrian bridge
I used concrete design (2 courses) to design the concrete frame of the main building
I used geotechnical engineering and foundation design (2 courses) to design the foundation and spandrel beams along the basement perimeter
I used my welding course to design bridge connections (1 course)
Due to the complex nature of the design, I used elements from all of my structural analysis (4+ courses), mechanics (3+ courses), and materials (2+ courses) knowledge.</p>

<p>In the past, I've used finite element analysis to do blast analyses on various confidential items. (2 courses)</p>

<p>When I was in California, I used a ton of seismic design knowledge (2 courses). Not so much now, but that seismic knowledge helped me land my new job here.</p>

<p>When I designed smaller buildings, I used my masonry design course and my wood design course. I wish I'd taken PT design because it was really confusing trying to learn that on my own.</p>

<p>My engineering economics and management courses gave me a leg up on my colleagues, in terms of learning about project management.</p>

<p>I probably didn't need E&M. I probably didn't need environmental engineering (though I did need it when doing environmental site assessments as an intern). I don't really use my fluids courses as much, but that's just because of the field that I went into.</p>

<p>I use chemistry all the time, particularly in the context of metallurgy and oxidation and chemical attack of various building components.</p>

<p>All the lower-level courses provided a framework for me to learn everything else.</p>

<p>It's all necessary, unfortunately. There's very little extra in my education that I don't find useful in everyday life.</p>

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You make a good theoretical argument for someone who's not in the industry, but I see something very different from within the industry, and I'm really going to have to disagree with your opinion that civil engineering isn't that innovative. It's not as fast or as obvious of a turnover as electrical and computer engineering (as you mentioned, NOTHING is) but just because we're not tearing buildings down right and left doesn't mean that we're not gathering data from old buildings and creating new and better methods all the time

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<p>I never said that civil engineering didn't have innovation at all, I simply said that it didn't have THAT much innovation (which would be relative to my benchmark of the computer industry). On a similar note, that's why you never see college dropouts enter the civil engineering industry and become self-made billionaires by the age of 23 (like Mark Zuckerberg).</p>

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On a similar note, that's why you never see college dropouts enter the civil engineering industry and become self-made billionaires by the age of 23 (like Mark Zuckerberg).

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<p>I think it's far more because good ideas in computer science are much easier to implement with little formal training.</p>

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<p>IQ sort? More like work ethic sort. I got a 1350 on my SATs and a D- in precalculus because all I do is get drunk, snort lines, bang chicks, jerk off, play Mario Kart, eat steak, and work out. Once you're done patting yourself on the back, try to find that one survey that said the average teacher has an IQ ~10pts higher than that of an engineer...... :O</p>

<p>For the most part, school is like school. Engineering, though, is like real life. Analogy: If you've ever worked a low-end semiskilled job, you'll know that the time allotted for training is not sufficient to actually learn all the job skills that are required, for most employees. Burger King fires most people after like 3 weeks if they don't quit in that time because they all suck at their jobs, forget to put napkins in the bag, etc., because they aren't really trained. Why bother with training when you have a whole stack of applications that were filled out in the last week? Hell, one of them will have a knack for the job, **** training.</p>

<p>Unless they are part of a union, most n00b construction workers get fired for gross incompetence after a few months. No time is allotted for training. It is simply, "do this, do that". They just bounce around for a little while 'til they get a hang of it. RL at its finest.</p>

<p>Such is also the way of teh podunk U engineering school. You are allotted 3 months to master Physics; the same 3 months that I, a Communications Majour, am allotted to write a single 7-12-page paper on the history of cinema, with no citations required, all internet sources, and I get an extra 20 points if I hand it in early. The time given for physucks isn't really sufficient for most students to grasp it unless they have a knack for it. So ultimately 70% of them drop out or change majors, an attrition rate similar to that of Burger King. And like Burger King, the engineering school is paradoxically better off for it. Just as the Burger King benefits from running a tight ship, the engineering school looks GREAT on paper from filtering out the unlucky, the lazy, and the un-nerdy. Neither has anything to gain from investing in training/teaching. All it would do is hurt their bottom line and reputations, respectively. Both institutions exist to get results, and thus while no BS is tolerated, much BS is allocated. This is how RL works. welcome to the real world...</p>

<p>apsara, if you fail like crazy, don't get discouraged. If you flunk out don't get discouraged. Don't do what makes you happy--you'll just end up like me getting drunk 2x a day. Do what you feel you must do, whatever that may be, and do it to the best of your ability. Since you are a girl, you probably look in the mirror a lot. If looking in the mirror and saying, "I am apsara and I am an expert in HVAC systems and calculus" pleases you more than saying "I look hot today", then so be it.</p>

<p>Regards,</p>

<p>Football</p>

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Let's face it. They're not in awe of us. They don't envy us. They don't really care. What other kids feel about math isn't so much 'fear' as it is pity. It's not so much that the kids don't know math or that they're not good at it; it's that they don't want to know math, and not only are they not envious of those that do know math, they actually scorn those that do.

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<p>They can scorn us and be in awe of us at the same time. It's weird, but it happens. It happened to me often enough as a kid. My impression was that some (though far from all) of the scorn was motivated by envy.</p>

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What other kids feel about math isn't so much 'fear' as it is pity.

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<p>No, from what I remember in grade school, they very much felt fear when math was involved. That was one reason they hated the math kids. If you were good at math and not afraid of it, it meant you were a freak, you weren't like them.</p>

<p>I maintain that in this society, we put quantitative anything on a special pedestal in terms of how difficult we think it is. As a kid, I got a very different reaction from curious adults if I told them about my success in math or science in school vs my success in non-quantitative subjects. That doesn't extend to personal admiration of the people who do quantitative things, unfortunately. :)</p>

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What other kids feel about math isn't so much 'fear' as it is pity.

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<p>You haven't ever tutored one of the "in" crowd in math, have you?</p>

<p>I was one of the less-threatening 'geeks' in high school, mainly because I just never said anything and kept my opinions to myself (this is no longer a problem). I kept my distance from the cool kids, but I was sociable and funny enough that I wasn't considered a total outsider. Consequently, I'd be asked to help out the kids who were cooler than I was, and what they felt towards math was a varyingly-degreed cross between fear and panic. My pre-cal teacher would keep candy on her desk that she called "math courage", and many would go and snag a piece in the middle of class just to stall for time when they were called on. They would act as though they pitied us, but one-on-one, you learned quickly that the pity was just a mask for fear.</p>

<p>Tutoring the cool kids in math was the only time that I was casually-confident of myself in front of them, and they were terrifyingly intimidated by me and who I was. I tried to never exploit that.</p>

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<p>this has been a very interesting discussion</p>

<p>another question: for those of you in the field of engineering, i assume you enjoy/are good at science and math. what made you decide to go into say, chemical engineering instead of chemistry? why choose engineering over a science field?</p>

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<p>I went into Materials Science & Engineering of physics because I liked the problems it dealt with a lot more. I felt it took a lot of knowledge and theories which had been developed, and formed them into tangible progress, which I can get very enthusiastic about.</p>

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<p>I agree. Foreign language majors aren't vocational majors. They're not designed to prepare you for anything specific after college, so they don't need to make it hard. </p>

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<p>I kind of agree, but that would be an entirely different topic. To this day, I still don't understand why I had to take physical chemistry or modern physics as a civil engineering major. </p>

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I probably didn't need environmental engineering (though I did need it when doing environmental site assessments as an intern). I don't really use my fluids courses as much, but that's just because of the field that I went into.

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You'd have a point if you majored in structural engineering, but you majored in civil engineering. Others in your class may have pursued environmental engineering or water resources, so those would've been useful to them. I sense that you want to split civil engineering into a few majors though, similar to what oleelecdude suggested earlier. </p>

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another question: for those of you in the field of engineering, i assume you enjoy/are good at science and math. what made you decide to go into say, chemical engineering instead of chemistry? why choose engineering over a science field?

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<p>For me, I was never interested in engineering for the science. I was interested in making real-life objects through real-world applications. IMO, the best part of engineering is being able to point to something that everybody uses and say that I built that. Science and math just came with the package.</p>

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You'd have a point if you majored in structural engineering, but you majored in civil engineering. Others in your class may have pursued environmental engineering or water resources, so those would've been useful to them.

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<p>Re-reading my post, I suppose it seemed as though I was advocating leaving those courses out... I didn't intend to imply that. Like you said, the civil engineering major trains people for a number of civ subfields, and the courses that I might not have found <em>as</em> useful to me, are definitely useful to my colleagues who pursued more pure-civ careers. I'm actually kind of surprised that the more civ-related and less structures-related courses are as applicable to me as they are!</p>

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another question: for those of you in the field of engineering, i assume you enjoy/are good at science and math. what made you decide to go into say, chemical engineering instead of chemistry? why choose engineering over a science field?

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<p>At first, I wasn't going to answer this because I thought it was kind of apparent that I liked buildings and that structural engineering is the logical means to my desired result, but I think it kind of shows the motivation for maybe a lot of engineers. We like the practical application of sciences, and furthering those sciences so that they benefit society in practical, everyday ways.</p>

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<p>"another question: for those of you in the field of engineering, i assume you enjoy/are good at science and math. what made you decide to go into say, chemical engineering instead of chemistry? why choose engineering over a science field?"</p>

<p>I liked math/science but I didn't want to go into academia. I feel that the career opportunities for an engineer are much broader than say a chem or a physics major. Usually, a chem/physics major goes into academia. An engineer can go into academia or work in engineering, or go into another quantitative field such as finance, programming etc. The possibilities are endless. </p>

<p>That being said, I feel like engineering is very different from pure science. I feel like in my engineering science classes, I learn only things that are useful. My friends in theoretical physics classes learn much more, such as Einstein's theories of relativity, and other concepts in physics that may not have a great practical application, but are absolutely fascinating. As an engineer, I really feel like I miss out on this aspect of science.</p>

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<p>All the problems mentioned above are real problems, but I think they are being generalized a little too much here.
For instance, the whole thing about geeks/nerds being the "unpopular" crowd is just not true. Of course, that depends on your definition of geek. If "geek" for you is the socially incompetent kid that speaks like a retard (sorry, no offense to anyone) but just happens to be "good" at math... then your argument isn't valid. In fact, many of these "geeks" are not as good at math as one would like to believe.
Today's geek, for instance, is much more the "techno" guy... the one that likes to talk about computers and cool gadgets as though he knows all about them. If your level of knowledge in either electronics or mathematics is any measure of your geekiness then I should have been a god to all the geeks at both the high schools I went to. At the schools I have attended, the smartest kids in mathematics and other geeky things were actually fairly normal. They included dancers, cheer-leaders, football-players, and otherwise popular kids.
They weren't all like this.... I wasn't, but I was never a geek either. All of these students were respected and NOT scorned for taking AP Calc or whatever else.
The kind of things that most of you are describing here are MUCH more reminiscent of middle school... where everyone is too confused to begin with. I hated middle school for this reason. In high school, I found that people respected much more for how you behaved than they did for what you could do, or what you knew. If I chose to, I could easily have been part of the "in" crowd.
Now I think I should mention one major racial difference in attitudes, that I have noticed. The first school that I attended featured a largely white and hispanic population. The second HS was mostly Asian. Needless to say, an interest in math was not by any type of aversion or negativity at the second high school. Nevertheless, being smart != nerdy at the other HS either... being socially incapable did, at both places.
I think it is more correct to say that all geeks/nerds are seemingly good at math/science, but not that all smart and mathematically inclined kids are nerds. Being a nerd has much more to do with how you behave. If you find a way to sneak in a lame math joke to all the girls that you meet, and then manage to snort at it from under your thick glasses... then I'm sorry, you're a nerd.</p>

<p>As for "why do we have to take physics?" Here's my two-cents. I actually advocate taking out some of the stupid design courses and augmenting the curriculum with MORE physics courses... but I like physics. As aibarr has said that she actually uses those obscure courses in her work, I think it just needs a little bit more imagination... which, I agree, engineers tend not to have very much of. Not the artsy creative kind, at least. So much more of physics and chemistry has stayed with me than of design. No matter what way you slice it I don't think that real engineering courses (ie: design) offer the same level of intellectual stimulation. And its really sad how most people LIKE that.
Engineers I have met are much happier learning annoying acronyms, standards, "techniques," methods, steps, software procedures, operating machines, and crap like that than about... well, LEARNING. People automatically find learning the basics that have evolved into the complex technologies of today to be a burden. They don't want to know the actual THOUGHT PROCESS behind what developed into these acronyms, techniques, methods, and other nonsense. They would rather be shown "how" to do something than learn to be the one who finds out that "how."
To give some quarter to engineering, design courses ARE intensive on thinking innovative ways to do things... create new devices, for instance. Nevertheless, they lack the intellectual stimulation that the elusive nature of the physical world provide.
Doing something like physics or chemistry feels much more like exploring something much larger than you can even imagine. OTOH, engineering work sometimes just feels like a bunch of ****work. I'm just saying that its nice to dream every once in a while. There's no better way than engineering to make the realities of today into a dream for tomorrow.
Therefore, I believe that we do not have the best possible system developed yet, but that including these physics and chemistry and math courses is somehow more "right" than simply giving us all the tools and no imagination to go with it.</p>

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Today's geek, for instance, is much more the "techno" guy... the one that likes to talk about computers and cool gadgets as though he knows all about them. If your level of knowledge in either electronics or mathematics is any measure of your geekiness then I should have been a god to all the geeks at both the high schools I went to. At the schools I have attended, the smartest kids in mathematics and other geeky things were actually fairly normal. They included dancers, cheer-leaders, football-players, and otherwise popular kids.

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<p>Then I think perhaps you should read the entire Graham piece, including the footnotes, and not just the parts that I pulled out. Graham freely admits that not all smart kids are unpopular - in fact, he states upfront that those smart kids that also happened to be good looking or athletic were quite popular in high school. His point was that intelligence was not by itself going to make you popular. In high school, frankly, nobody really cares how good you are at math. What they really seem to care about, if you're a guy, is whether you can play ball well, and if you're a girl, whether you're beautiful, thin, and well-dressed. If you can do all that and still be smart, then you're golden. But if all you are is smart, high school ain't going to be that much fun. For example, let's just say that you're smart, but also fat and unathletic. How much fun do you think high school would be? </p>

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I think it is more correct to say that all geeks/nerds are seemingly good at math/science, but not that all smart and mathematically inclined kids are nerds. Being a nerd has much more to do with how you behave. If you find a way to sneak in a lame math joke to all the girls that you meet, and then manage to snort at it from under your thick glasses... then I'm sorry, you're a nerd.

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<p>This point is addressed above. Neither me nor Graham has ever contended that all people who know math are geeks. We are simply saying that knowing math, by itself, is worth little social capital in high school. </p>

<p>Besides, you mention the problem of people telling lame math jokes to the girls. Well, that's simply a matter of social inexperience. If you don't really get the chance to talk to girls, then obviously you won't know how to talk to them, which then makes you even less capable of talking to girls, etc. Hence, it's all a social cascade which turns him into an outcast. On the other hand, a star high school football player will always have girls flocking to him, meaning that he will have plenty of opportunity to talk to them and hence quickly develop the experience necessary to know what to say to them.</p>

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Because I actually use them all in practice.</p>

<p>Even the ones that seem unrelated, I need because I interact with a lot of other systems. I'd be lost if I didn't understand about those systems.

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<p>Which gets back to what I said before about civil engineering not being that innovative (relative to, say, computers). </p>

<p>If you really need all that knowledge, then that simply means that there are a lot of old buildings lying around (which we already agreed is the case). On the other hand, CS and CompE profs will readily acknowledge that anything you are learning in class is not only going to be obsolete by the time you graduate, it may already be obsolete as you are learning it. In other words, any computer education is basically a race against time. Incidentally, this is why I think CS education is not highly effective and ought to be reformed, and on a corollary level, why many successful developers don't actually have CS degrees.</p>

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They can scorn us and be in awe of us at the same time. It's weird, but it happens. It happened to me often enough as a kid. My impression was that some (though far from all) of the scorn was motivated by envy

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<p>I maintain: nobody is in awe of us. Nobody is going to get a date just because they happens to know a lot of math, and that's precisely what you would expect to happen if people were in "awe" of math. Nobody is going to be invited to all of the cool parties just because they know a lot of math. Bouncers at the clubs aren't going to just let you cut in line just because you know a lot of math. There are no paparazzi trying to photograph top math people, People Magazine doesn't run a yearly issue of the "50 Most Mathematical People", you don't have entire TV channels following the story of whether a 38-year old mathematician who said he was going to retire but now apparently wants to go back to his old job. </p>

<p>Come on, jessiehl, we both know what people in this society are truly in awe of. They are in awe of guys who can play ball; they are in awe of women who are tall, thin, and beautiful; and they are in awe of good-looking men and women who can also sing/dance/act. Most Americans probably couldn't even name even a single mathematician, but they all know who Brad Pitt is. That's what they're in awe of. </p>

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No, from what I remember in grade school, they very much felt fear when math was involved. That was one reason they hated the math kids. If you were good at math and not afraid of it, it meant you were a freak, you weren't like them.

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<p>Uh, no, that's not fear that they're feeling. I know you might like to believe that it is, but trust me, it ain't. Just because you know something that others don't know doesn't mean that they are in fear of what you know. </p>

<p>I'll give you an example, from 'true' geekdom. I know a guy who knows every single original Star Trek episode. Do I know that? No. Do I want to know that? Heck no. What goes through my head is: "Why would anybody want to know that?" I certainly don't feel fear that I don't know Star Trek like that guy does. </p>

<p>That's what other Americans think about people who know math. Let's be perfect honest. Far far far more Americans are more interested in becoming the next LeBron James or the next Madonna than in becoming the next great mathematician or engineer.</p>

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I agree. Foreign language majors aren't vocational majors. They're not designed to prepare you for anything specific after college, so they don't need to make it hard.

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<p>But I'm asking - why? Why does it have to be that way? The question actually has two parts.</p>

<p>For the first part, I'll illustrate by example. The physics undergrad major also isn't really designed to prepare you to do anything after college. After all, you can't really become a physicist with just a physics bachelor's (most physicist jobs require PhD's) But I defy anybody to say that a physics undergrad major is easy. Far from it, in fact. It's pretty darn hard. That just shows that just because something doesn't prepare you for anything specific about college doesn't mean that it can't be made hard. Physics is like that, so why can't the foreign languages? </p>

<p>Secondly, even if what you are saying is true, then that just begs the question of why can't the foreign languages be made to be a vocation? For example, we could institute a rule that every single foreign language bachelor's recipient needs to know enough to work as an entry-level translator. Why not? Such a rule would clearly vastly raise the rigor level of all language undergrad majors.</p>