why is engineering so hard?

College Majors Engineering Majors
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<p>But the question is - why? Why should it be such a difficult major? See below. </p>

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<p>The better question is why do you NEED to understand thermal fluids? {Actually, I have never even heard of “thermal fluids”, but I’ll go with it}. I would argue, and you seem to agree, that for most engineering jobs, you don’t actually need to know that. So why do they FORCE you to learn it? </p>

<p>Don’t get me wrong. Hey, if you want to learn it, you are free to do so. But why do you NEED to learn it? </p>

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<p>But has it? You said it yourself - most of the material that you have learned actually turns out to be irrelevant. In fact, if you read my examples again, you will see that much of the material isn’t even learned. Like I said, it’s hard to find ANY practicing chemical engineers who will confidently say that they truly understand what the Maxwell Relations actually mean in a real-world sense. Sure, they can solve a bunch of problem sets that have Maxwell Relations question on them. But so what? They can’t actually apply what they know. So why did they have to learn it?</p>

<p>This all gets to what a general point regarding engineering: much (probably most) of it is simply superfluous and hence actually serves to hinder the overall development of technology. It’s a broken system. </p>

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<p>I have always agreed that the premed system is a broken system also. But that doesn’t mean that engineering should be broken too. Just because some other profession does something wrongly doesn’t mean that you should do it wrongly too. </p>

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<p>Yet here you are presuming that everybody is going to finish their educations. We know that is simply false. Like I have pointed out, plenty of engineers flunk out completely. It is precisely those people that I am worried about the most. </p>

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<p>For the one guy who actually likes Maxwell’s, fine, let him do it. But why do the other students have to risk actually flunking just to satisfy that one guy, especially when practicing chemical engineers hardly ever use Maxwells anyway? </p>

<p>Look, the bottom line is that I am attempting to help those people who are currently being hurt by the current state of engineering education, of which there are many. Like I have always said, for those people who try out engineering and do poorly, why not let them leave with a clean slate? Why do they have to carry around their poor grades forever? Absolutely nothing that you have said addresses this point. All you have said is nothing more than simple quibbling that does nothing to help these people. </p>

<p>At the end of the day, what I am looking for is a system that provides a strong educational experience to as many people as possible, not one where certain students who just happen to choose their initial major poorly simply got tossed on their arses and left to rot. If you try something and don’t do well, you should be free to try something else penalty-free. The present system hurts numerous people. </p>

<p>Now, if you’re just not interested in helping these people, then just say so, and at least we will know where you stand. </p>

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<p>Of course they do. If they didn’t, they would just reduce the official number of seats. After all, it’s not only engineers who take these courses. Often times, you will find that natural science and math students will want to take these courses also, and the profs can’t stop them if there are available seats. If the profs wanted to stop this possibility, they would have simply reduced the number of total official seats in the class. </p>

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<p>Is it? Why does engineering always need to involve the comprehension of difficult topics? </p>

<p>Look, you talk to most working engineers on the job, and most of them will tell you that most of their job is quite straight-forward and common sense. They don’t actually need to know that much in order to do their jobs, and certainly not most of what they learned while in school. The harsh truth of the matter is that most engineering jobs out there are not that complicated. Maybe they should be, but they’re not. </p>

<p>Now, when you get to intensive R&D-type engineering jobs, yes, that’s when the job gets complicated. But most engineers don’t have those kinds of jobs. </p>

<p>Which gets back to the point I’ve been making before. My real goal here is to help those engineering students who are struggling to the point that they’re facing expulsion. For example, Berkeley expels numerous engineering students, and when I say ‘expel’, I mean truly expel - meaning that they are kicked out of Berkeley completely. They can’t go to another major, they can’t get another degree - they are out completely. Why? Now, I might agree that if they were truly not meeting the absolute barest minimum necessary to graduate from any major at Berkeley, then OK, they deserve to be out. But the truth of the matter is, almost all of those expelled engineers could have almost certainly graduated if they had simply chosen another (easier) major. Furthermore - and perhaps even more importantly - many of those expelled engineering students would have probably graduated in engineering if they had simply gone to an easier school. More to the point, they probably know enough to handle most regular engineering jobs (which, like I said, aren’t that complicated). Sure, they probably won’t be able to handle the higher-end R&D type roles, but they’re not interested in that anyway. Hence, these guys could have done perfectly fine in most engineering jobs, but now they’ve been kicked out school completely. Why? </p>

<p>Nor is Berkeley a singular exception. Numerous engineering schools do the same thing. Why? Why does it need to be this way? It is my stance that schools should be trying to help those students who don’t do well. After all, the school did admit them, so they are the school’s responsibility (if the school didn’t want this responsibility, then the school shouldn’t have admitted them in the first place, which is one of the subpoints I discussed previously). But given that you did admit them, I think it is your responsibility to help them out. The worst choice you can make, which is the current choice, is to admit subpar students and then not help them when they do poorly. That’s a problem.</p>

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<p>sakky for president.</p>

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<p>I originally composed a really long and detailed post but decided that since I have spent nearly an hour of my day on CC, which is sad. </p>

<p>I believe that an engineering degree/college is not a trade school and is designed to make sure that all graduates start off at the same level. Also it is my personal belief, that a good engineer should understand the overall concepts that govern a problem rather than the company motto on how to fix it. </p>

<p>Training within the industry is job specific and varies in rigor and depth. Let’s say my job is to assure flow assurance in a gas pipeline. One company might train and re-teach the fluid mechanics, thermodynamics and other factors that govern flow assurance and how the company decides what the best option is. Another company might train me to just use “so and so” valve and that is it. My point is an engineering degree covers “all the bases” no matter what you decide to do in the future and ensures everyone starts off at the same level. </p>

<p>Want to go to graduate school which is very specialized? Well, you have had exposure to a wide range of topics so you can now make a better decision. Want to work in the industry? You have all the tools and concepts to enter varying disciplines, be it the rubber factor plant to product design.</p>

<p>In short–you have ALL bases covered.</p>

<p>Sakky, I also think your ChemE-maxwell anecdote isn’t really a good point. We all learned about the Maxwell equations in Physics 2 but I highly doubt it accounted for any significant portion of the overall ChemE curriculum. </p>

<p>Speaking from personal experience and as a mechanical engineer, I can honestly tell you that I have used a great portion of the topics in my degree, especially in design engineering. </p>

<p>Also, just for reference:</p>

<p>Thermal-Fluids is simply the study of any system that involves fluid and thermal processes, be it HVAC processes or hydraulics and is a HUGE part of Mechanical engineering. </p>

<p><em>cue that shooting start and the banner “The More you know…</em></p>

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<p>Well….I guess helping people is better than my previous position, drowning puppies and kicking handicapped veterans…</p>

<p>Look, I have a feeling that all the “top” engineering” schools have high difficulties due to program coordinators and professors. I bet they use the “natural selection” techniques like investment banks because they believe if it’s so hard to survive, then their graduates must be smart. Hell, I had an old materials professor who gave everyone C’s—why, well just because he was a hard ass and thought all engineering should “work” their grades. One note, these same guys are in the industry too (from my GE/Exxon experiences). </p>

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<p>I disagree—it is ultimately your education and only you can really take responsibility for succeeding. The schools should have programs available to help you (I know UT-Austin has free tutoring for ALL basic/weeder classes) but they shouldn’t have to hold your hand. I’m not trying to sound like a hard ass but I have never failed a class BUT when I came close, I did everything humanly possible to rectify the situation.</p>

<p>The common trend on this CC board is that engineering programs vary significantly but overall the curriculum is rigorous. Some schools offer plenty of support while others might not. Ultimately, if the students feel that a program doesn’t offer them the resources they need it should be up to them (it is their education, isn’t it) to petition or force the program to accommodate their needs.</p>

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<p>But that simply doesn’t happen on an inter-school basis. Or, at least, many of the top engineering employers don’t believe that it happens. For example, highly regarded engineering firms like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. will recruit only at certain schools: the MIT’s, Stanford’s, and Berkeley’s of the world. But think about that logically: if engineering schools really ensured that all graduates were starting off at the same level, then it wouldn’t matter whether Google hired somebody from Berkeley or from, say, Arkansas State University. But the truth is, a firm like Google won’t even talk to you if you didn’t graduate from a certain set of top schools. But why is that: after all, like you said, no matter where those people got their engineering degrees, they’re all at the same level, right? </p>

<p>I think we all know that that’s not true: that engineering students who graduate from different schools are indeed starting off at different levels (or otherwise it must mean that firms like Google are just being stupid). But what that also means is that somebody who flunked out of Berkeley may well have been good enough to graduate from Arkansas State and hence have become a useful and productive engineer. {Not a useful and productive engineer at Google or other top firms, but at less desired firms.} But think about what that means. It means that those schools are eliminating people who would have made for perfectly acceptable engineers.</p>

<p>The problem also extends on an ex-ante level. Some people (and I know some personally) who actually liked engineering are nevertheless scared off from engineering programs because of the harsh grading. </p>

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<p>Yet that doesn’t square with the notion we agreed to above: that you don’t actually need an engineering degree in order to become a useful engineer, and that more particularly, some people truly can self-teach themselves or use on-the-job training. These guys don’t know the theory behind what they’re doing and, frankly, they don’t need to know. </p>

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<p>Wrong, wrong, wrong, completely and utterly wrong. I am not talking about the Maxwell equations. I am talking about the Maxwell relations. {Although, to be fair, they were both discovered by the same guy, James Clerk Maxwell.} The fact that you don’t know the difference immediately tells me that you don’t anything about chemical engineering. So why are you trying to tell me what ChemE is about? </p>

<p>Look, let me give you a short primer. The Maxwell equations are the formulas that describe how electric and magnetic fields affect each other.</p>

<p>The Maxwell relations on the other hand, are a completely different topic, having only to do with thermodynamics on a chemical level, and specifically, with the calculations of concepts such as Gibbs Free Energy, Helmholtz energy and general thermodynamic states of potential, which leads you to other concepts such as fugacity, Gibbs-Duhem relations, Euler integrals, and chemical potentials. </p>

<p>Why this is relevant to chemical engineers is that every chemical engineering student has to take a course on ChemE thermodynamics where it is all about the Maxwell relations, and the problem is that after that class, hardly any student even if they passed, actually understand what any of it actually means on a real-world level. Sure, we can manipulate the math. But what does it all actually mean? For example, to this day, I still don’t know what the heck it means for the partial derivative of temperature with respect to volume, at constant entropy, to be equal to the double partial derivative of internal energy with respect to volume and entropy. What the heck does that actually mean? </p>

<p>But look, take a gander at the Maxwell relations and assorted concepts, and you tell me whether you actually learned this in your Physics 2 class, or whether you were just confused.</p>

<p>[Maxwell</a> relations - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell_relations]Maxwell”>Maxwell relations - Wikipedia)
[Thermodynamic</a> potential - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamic_potentials]Thermodynamic”>Thermodynamic potential - Wikipedia)
[Fugacity</a> - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugacity]Fugacity”>Fugacity - Wikipedia)</p>

<p><em>cue that shooting start and the banner “The More you know…</em></p>

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<p>And I can honestly tell you that I have used basically zero of the knowledge I ever learned in chemical engineering thermodynamics. In fact, practically nobody in my class did, for the simple reason that nobody understood it. </p>

<p>Now, where I can agree with you is that the design class was useful. But again, you don’t need to know many of the other classes to do design. Like I said, nobody really understood ChemE thermodynamics, yet we were all still successfully designing chemical plants and processes. </p>

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<p>And is also a huge part of ChemE. The difference is that we never use the term ‘thermal fluids’. To us, fluids are fluids. </p>

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<p>And that seems to be rather close to the position that many engineering programs take. </p>

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<p>And this is precisely why I play the ‘Stanford card’. Everybody agrees that Stanford is one of the world’s elite engineering schools. Yet they are notable for their relatively relaxed grading environment. If Stanford can do that, why can’t others? </p>

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<p>First off, what exactly is wrong with hand-holding. Not to sound like a broken record, but that’s what Stanford does, and look how successful their engineering graduates are.</p>

<p>Secondly, I am not even asking for hand-holding. I am asking for some simple reforms. For example, like I said, if somebody decides to leave engineering, why not wipe out his engineering weeder grades? The guy isn’t going to be an engineering graduate anyway, so who cares what his weeder grades are? That seems to be an eminently reasonable first step. </p>

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<p>A bit idealistic, don’t you think? I think we both know that most schools don’t really care about their (undergrad) students. They are far more concerned about their grad students and (especially) their research. Heck, many engineering profs don’t even want to teach undergrads. Undergrads have no leverage.</p>

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<p>Ooh, I apologize for the major error with the Maxwell equations/relations. Ironically, I did take ChemE thermodynamics and learned about the Maxwell relations and I completely agree with you on that point—I have never ever used it as a ME. </p>

<p>I’m just curious if other engineers from different disciplines have used a great extent of their knowledge. </p>

<p>I think the reason we disagree with the superfluous nature of an engineering degree is due to our different disciplines—I can’t speak for ChemEs by any means but as a ME, I have used a great extent of my curriculum. It also might be the very nature of the major itself that plays a role. I took ChemE thermodynamics since I was in a time crunch to graduate in 4 year; I actually entered engineering during my Sophie summer. When I compared ChemE thermo and ME Thermo I noticed that while the concepts were fundamentally the same the two majors had obvious and deliberate focuses—we never went deep within the mathematics of thermodynamics but instead focused on systems.</p>

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<p>From an engineering education standpoint we do. Overall the core engineering curriculum is the same; a guy from Arizona State can calculate the Reynolds number just as well as the guy from MIT. Can they compete for the same job, well that is whole different story. Personally, I think that qualified is qualified and a top student at Arizona State is just as smart as a student at MIT. </p>

<p>One reason I disagree with the view of recruitment exclusivity at Stanford or MIT is that while attending UT-Austin, most of those companies (Google and Microsoft) did come to Austin to actively recruit. </p>

<p>Another huge factor that plays a role in recruitment is location and connections to an industry, not just program setup. For example, I’m sure Facebook/Google actively recruits at Stanford due to its close proximity and also the established alumni there, such as the Google founders. Similarly, most big oil companies heavily recruit in the Texas/Oklahoma area and California due to the same proximity to Houston and Bakersfield. </p>

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<p>Once again, I don’t know how ChemE designs classes work but for my class I had to make extensive use of my other classes. </p>

<p>For example, we had to design a tooling system for offshore drilling rig. We had to look at our static/dynamic classes to be able to describe the motion, thermal-fluid classes to design the hydraulic system, material science class for the material selection/coating, material processing class for manufacturing and assembly, machine element class to size the bolts/nuts and even our systems/control class for the electrical control systems.</p>

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<p>My qualms with prospect that are two fold. Engineers and natural science majors share many of the same weeder classes (Ochem, Calculus, DiffEq, Physics) and it would only be fair if we take a clean slate to students who decide they don’t want to be a mathematician or physicist. Yet that introduces another problem—what qualifies these weeder classes as harder than other classes?</p>

<p>I agree that in a holistic sense Calculus is much harder than English but if you take someone who thinks more quantitatively and throw him into an English class, he can fail out as well. If there is an English major and he thinks he wants to be an editor or scholar but fails those classes, shouldn’t we wipe his grades out as well? Just like in engineering, an English degree isn’t the official prerequisite to earn such a position but it still helps a great deal. </p>

<p>I think a better solution would be to have something similar to what Caltech has, in that numerical grades don’t count until your junior year. Instead all weeder/lower classes are graded on a Pass/Fail basis. </p>

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<p>You are right, research schools are primarily concerned with their funds and publications. However, whenever I felt overly cynical about my place on the totem pole, there was always a handful of professors who actually cared about their students. Of course, this might vary from school to school.</p>

<p>With all that said, Sakky I think you have convinced me to transfer to graduate school at Stanford.</p>

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<p>Exactly, that’s the point. Much engineering education is superfluous. For example, if you consider CS to be part of engineering (and I do), then you may be sympathetic to the fact that one of the greatest complaints about most CS degree programs is that they require far too much mathematics. You don’t really need to know that much math in order to be a productive software developer. The problem is in the old days, CS used to be a subdiscipline of math, and hence many of today’s CS professors are basically mathematicians. So because they know a lot of math and are good at it, they want their students to know a lot of math too regardless of whether they actually need to know it in the real world. </p>

<p>Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that no students should study these superfluous topics. Hey, if they want to study it, feel free. My problem is when the programs force them to learn it regardless of its real-world value. As I said before, I don’t know a single practicing chemical engineer who knows what the Maxwell Relations actually mean in any real-world setting. So why did we spend so much effort in learning them? What a waste of time. What’s worse is the waste of students: those who couldn’t get pass this class and hence couldn’t graduate with ChemE degrees despite not really needing to know it for the job. </p>

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<p>But that’s because UTAustin is a top-ranked engineering program. I think we can both agree that they’re probably not going to some 4th tier no-name engineering program.</p>

<p>But why not? After all, you said that all engineering graduates start off at the same level, right? So Google should have no problem with recruiting at, say, Arkansas State University, right? So why don’t they do that? </p>

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<p>But when proximity is not the case, then surely you agree that those firms are going to recruit at only the top schools. For example, Google has no problem with sending recruiters to MIT. Heck, Google even recently opened a new engineering center in Cambridge Mass. But they’re not sending recruiters to Arkansas State University. Why not? </p>

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<p>In the case of the Maxwell Relations, sure, I remember them, in the sense that I know what the equations are and can perform the calculations. But so what? *I still don’t know what they actually mean in a real-world setting. * Frankly, hardly any chemical engineer does. So what’s so darn great about knowing what these equations are, if you haven’t a clue what they actually mean? </p>

<p>On a more general note, a lot of the engineering theory is, frankly, worthless. The experienced engineers don’t know it and don’t want to know it because they know they don’t need to know it. </p>

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<p>And they should be wiped out as well. In short, any class that ends up not being part of your major should have the option of being wiped out. </p>

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<p>Simple. The fail rates. You take the historical statistics of the percentage of students that fail a particular course, and if that percentage is high, let’s say, 3x the average percentage of fails in the average course in your school, then that’s a weeder.</p>

<p>Now, we can sit around and argue about whether it should be 3x or 2.9x or whatever the ratio is. But the bottom line is that I think it’s fairly easy to determine that certain courses are indeed weeders and others aren’t. </p>

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<p>I highly doubt that, for the simple reason that humanities courses practically never actually fail anybody. Sure, that guy probably won’t get an A. But at least he won’t fail either, simply because nobody fails.</p>

<p>Let me give you an example. I know a guy who took a humanities class at Berkeley. He never showed up to class - not even once. Nor did he do a single reading. The course grading was mostly based on 2 papers, with a minor portion of the grading determined by class participation (for which he got a zero because he never went to class). Instead of doing the readings for the papers, all he did was go to Amazon.com, look up each reading, take the user comments of the readings, and then reformulate them in his own words into his own paper. He passed the class. He estimated that he probably spent no more than 4-5 hours of the entire semester on that course, including lecture time (which was zero for him because he never went). </p>

<p>Or consider the findings from Berkeley’s Committee on Teaching regarding a study on its own grading policies:</p>

<p>“The physical sciences and engineering had rigorous grading standards roughly in line with the recommendations from 1976,” stated Rine, "while the humanities and social sciences in many classes had all but given up on grades below a B, and in many courses below an A-,</p>

<p>[Undergraduate</a> Education Colloquium, The College of Letters and Science, UC Berkeley](<a href=“http://ls.berkeley.edu/undergrad/colloquia/04-11.html]Undergraduate”>http://ls.berkeley.edu/undergrad/colloquia/04-11.html)</p>

<p>See, that’s precisely the problem. In other majors, notably in the humanities, you can do barely any work at all and have no idea what is going on, and still get a passing grade. That’s precisely why so many humanities students put in so little effort into their studies: because they know they don’t have to. Frankly, that’s why practically none of the football players at Cal - and almost certainly at UT too - will major in engineering, but will instead major in easy humanities subjects that require very little work, hence leaving them maximum time to play ball. </p>

<p>Here’s Jim Harbaugh, former University of Michigan quarterback, candidly discussing what UM does for its players:</p>

<p>“Michigan is a good school and I got a good education there,” he said, “but the athletic department has ways to get borderline guys in and, when they’re in, they steer them to courses in sports communications. They’re adulated when they’re playing, but when they get out, the people who adulated them won’t hire them.”</p>

<p>[Dickey:</a> Harbaugh can resurrect the Cardinal - Examiner.com](<a href=“StockBot by Examiner.com - Stock Examiner bot by Examiner.com”>StockBot by Examiner.com - Stock Examiner bot by Examiner.com) </p>

<p>Notice how UM isn’t trying to ‘steer’ its borderline players into chemical engineering. Why do you think that is? </p>

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<p>Uh, no, I think you got your facts wrong. Caltech allows such a policy only for freshmen, and in fact, only for the first 2 terms of the freshman trimester. Every course after that, if in your major, is fully graded. </p>

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<p>Ha! My comments are restricted only to Stanford undergrad, for the fact is, all engineering grad schools are relatively relaxed. For example, Berkeley engineering grad school is significantly more relaxed than is Berkeley undergrad engineering, a point that has been made repeatedly to me by former Berkeley undergrads who then stayed at Berkeley for their grad degrees. After all, you don’t see half the students getting weeded out of engineering graduate school. Undergrad, yes, but not graduate school. Hence, Stanford has no ‘relaxation advantage’ when it comes to graduate school. </p>

<p>The problem is, as I have always said, in the undergrad programs. But my rejoinder is simple: if Stanford undergrad doesn’t have to weed its students, then why do other schools need to? If the issue is a matter of admissions - that Stanford simply admits a higher quality group of students in the first place - then that just begs the question of why don’t those other schools do that too?</p>

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<p>Perhaps Stanford does a better job of supporting its engineering students once they’re accepted into the program? I had very few friends that transferred out of engineering (all the ones I know that did either stuck with a technical field which was no easier or they realized that the financial incentives for becoming an engineer didn’t come close to compensating for their lack of interest in the subject), and my school offered tons of support for students having difficulties in common classes. While lectures were large, recitations were always broken up in to 20 students or less groups (often much less, as many people never showed up). There were Supplementary Instruction sessions, where sessions focused on what the material actually meant and how to do problems was stressed instead of pure theory and derivations. The school also offered free peer tutoring to all students for all classes offered by the school. They were one on one (occasionally two) sessions where a student could receive individual attention for I think up to two hours per class per week.</p>

<p>Nobody’s arguing against making support systems for engineering students to help them through those weeder classes (heck, I imagine most people want to make the physics/chem/math weeders a lot more directed towards an engineering education); people are arguing against simplifying the engineering education to becoming a technician’s degree. As I’ve always been told by professors, they’re not teaching us the material in the class as they’re teaching us a way to solve diverse problems that most people never see. I’ve been taking classes here at Caltech for a year, and I feel that I’ve learned hardly anything from them (which may be a problem in nine months during candidacy…), but I know I’ve learned new ways to approach problems I don’t understand and that will let me learn more during my career than just learning which knobs to turn when they need to be turned for the systems that are in use today (and will be gone tomorrow).</p>

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<p>Hey sakky, you’ve talked about wiping out bad engineering grades from a transcript, but wouldn’t it suffice for a student to just simply drop a class whenever he or she is failing?</p>

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<p>Here is a pretty good link of what an engineer is, versus a technician (that may be deemed an engineer, though having no engineer degree).</p>

<p>[Technician</a> vs. Engineer](<a href=“http://www.ndt-ed.org/Careers/TechvsEng/techvseng.htm]Technician”>http://www.ndt-ed.org/Careers/TechvsEng/techvseng.htm)</p>

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<p>I dont think engineering is hard. I think most engineering students love to complain and boost their own ego’s so they make there major sound as if it were the hardest.</p>

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<p>Being a Engineer depends 100% on the title given to you by your employer or state. </p>

<p>Being a Engineer does not depend at all on the degree you have. getting a degree in engineering does not make you a engineer. Ity makes you a person with a engineering degree. if you choose to become a lawyer, you are not going to be a engineer. if you get a job where your title says you are a engineer or you get your proper license, then you are infact a engineer.</p>

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<p>Aerialblue, some schools have a limit to the amount of courses you can drop. At the University of Florida you are allowed only 2 drops.</p>

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<p>The reason I disagree with gutting the engineering curriculum is as of right now I can’t agree that the bulk of my education has been wasted. Of course this might very well be due to the fact that I have not been in the industry for 10+ years or a ME program might have different focus than ChemE. The point is, I have used a significant amount of my coursework whether I have like it or not.</p>

<p>For example, a lot of the work I do is related to engineering design. Just yesterday I was working with a team member and brainstorming on configurations for a conceptual technology. Since we wanted to find how it reacted in a dynamic system, we decided to model it—lo and behold I had to whip out my old graphic design/CAD books and create full fledged engineering drawings. After that we wanted to design a pump system so I had to calculate pressure/heads and size a pump accordingly. Of course we might argue that in most companies they contract drafting out to another person and you are right this is the case but in the situations where that isn’t an option, I’m still responsible. </p>

<p>Other people can chime in on their experiences. </p>

<p>Also one thing to contemplate is what is the focus or mission statement of each engineering program?</p>

<p>My UG was

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<p>Other schools will surely have different focuses but I bet they are all summarized as providing a top-notch engineering education, whether it be in graduate school, industry or just for the hell of it. I say that because while engineering shares the same core classes each school and professor, specifically has their own focus. For example, my thermo professor was an academic all his life and it showed—he used a superfluous amount of math and derivations. My Thermal-fluids professor worked in the industry for many years and instead he would provide “real world examples” and projects that were common in the industry. True, you are probably right about the Maxwell Relations and their little pertinence to the industry but I bet they might be of importance in graduate school and that somewhere in that class you did learn something that was helpful in the industry. </p>

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<p>I agree with that policy and it should apply across the gamut. Students change their minds and career aspirations and therefore should not be punished accordingly. If I was English major and one day woke up and said Finnigan’s Wake is utter garbage and I want to become a mechanical engineer so I can design an incinerator to efficiently destroy James Joyce’s spawn of Satan, my English classes should be irrelevant. Perhaps an increasing emphasis on the major GPA should take place rather than cumulative GPA.</p>

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<p>I go to a small private engineering school very well known in the Midwest but not known outside of that. Google and other big companies like Motorola and NVidia recruit here. This has to do with those companies being located in this region. Do I feel engineers at MIT are smarter or getting a better education than engineers at my school? Not really. I feel any engineer who graduates here could do the same at MIT or other more prestigious schools.</p>

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<p>Engineering is hard because you actually have to think and not memorize (i.e liberal arts)</p>

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I disagree. There is one single reason why people hire out of MIT. Intelligence, MIT students have more of it.</p>

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<p>But right there, you just invalidated your own conclusion. You yourself admitted that your school is very well known (within your geographic region).</p>

<p>What I’m specifically talking about are those schools that are not well known anywhere, not even in their home region. How do those graduates do? If it is really true that engineering graduates are of similar quality no matter where they come from, then that shouldn’t matter, right? Yet it does seem to matter. </p>

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<p>You further undermined your argument with that phrase. Nobody is denying that regionality plays a role in determining recruitment. Heck, Google recruits at a bunch of no-name Bay Area schools. After all, it is easy to recruit at a local campus that is just a short drive away.</p>

<p>The question on the table is, what will firms do if they actually have to put in significant effort to recruit? Are they going to fly halfway across the country to recruit at a no-name school?</p>

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<p>Exactly. And part of it is the grading scheme. It is notably relaxed (relative to other engineering programs). Basically, you’re not going to flunk out of Stanford engineering. You might get mediocre grades, but you won’t flunk out. At other schools, you run the significant risk of actually flunking out. I have seen it happen to too many people than I would like. </p>

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<p>I have never once heard of a Stanford engineering degree accused of being a ‘technician’s degree’. The bottom line is that if Stanford can do what it is doing, so can other schools. Those other schools simply choose not to follow Stanford’s lead.</p>

<p>What I am saying is that much of the pain of engineering is unproductive. It is pain simply for the sake of pain. Other schools have shown that there is another way.</p>

<p>Consider the experience of Olin, which I consider to be another school that is on the cutting-edge of modern engineering education.</p>

<p>*Early in her career, electrical-engineering professor Sherra Kerns was called on the carpet after her students said they enjoyed her introductory class in electrical-circuit theory. Fellow faculty members, puzzled by the strong student response, told Kerns that if her students liked the class so much, then she must not be teaching it properly.</p>

<p>“Even today, the assumption is that engineering classes have to be painful to be effective,” said Kerns, who is now vice president of research and innovation at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering (Needham, Mass.). “Professors who have happy students are suspect because their classes may not be rigorous enough.”</p>

<p>At her new post, however, Kerns no longer has to worry about students being too happy. Two-year-old Olin College, where Kerns also serves as a professor of electrical and computer engineering, was cited last week as a top school by the highly respected Princeton Review, partially on the basis of its ability to keep engineering students happy. The school showed up on a host of The Princeton Review’s “top 20” lists, including those involving quality academic experience, accessible professors and happy students — all traits that have traditionally eluded engineering colleges.</p>

<p>Moreover, Olin could provide a ray of hope to engineering education experts who fret that too many U.S.-born students are leaving the curriculum for a variety of reasons, including inaccessible professors, excessive emphasis on theory and too little hands-on design experience.</p>

<p>“The message here is that it can be done,” said Robert Franek, The Princeton Review’s publisher and author of The Best 357 Colleges, which cited Olin. "Olin is just as competitive as any of the top engineering schools, yet they’ve been able to harness their energies to produce a good quality of life and a great experience for the students.</p>

<p>Were Olin a liberal arts college, there would be no cause for surprise. Liberal arts schools traditionally have done well in The Princeton Review’s top-20 lists. A category titled “Professors bring material to life,” for example, lists such liberal arts colleges as Amherst, Kenyon, Centre, Middlebury, Marlboro and Reed. Such categories as “Best overall academic experience for undergraduates,” “Class discussions encouraged” and “Happy students” are similarly dominated in the new 2005 rankings by smaller schools that focus on the liberal arts and sciences.</p>

<p>Engineering schools, meanwhile, have traditionally congregated in the “bottom 20.” In a category titled “Professors get low marks,” for example, engineering schools took The Princeton Review’s first five spots and seven of the total 20. Similarly, engineering claimed four spots in “Professors make themselves scarce,” six spots in “Class discussions rare” and seven in “Least happy students.”</p>

<p>Olin was the only engineering school to make the “happy students” top 20. One other engineering school — Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, Calif. — made the “best overall academic experience for undergrads” list.</p>

<p>Educators say that such results aren’t a surprise, in light of the fact that the majority of engineering undergrads drop out or flunk out of the curriculum within the first two years. With a few notable exceptions, U.S. engineering schools typically have attrition rates hovering between one-half and two-thirds.</p>

<p>The high attrition rate, which is reportedly matched by no other college curriculums, is considered a concern for a number of reasons. Four years ago, U.S. corporations imported more than 90,000 engineers and computer scientists, while American engineering schools produced only 65,000 engineers. Statistics such as those grew more important after Sept. 11, 2001, when national security experts began to wonder about the wisdom of using foreign-born engineers in defense-related posts. Moreover, experts now worry that the practice of exporting entry-level technical positions, combined with low graduation rates of U.S. engineering students, could ultimately lead to problems in engineering-managerial positions here.</p>

<p>“The problem is that all those entry-level people around the world will develop technical skills, and in five to 10 years they will be able to do the midlevel managerial work,” said Frank Huband, executive director of the American Society for Engineering Education in Washington.</p>

<p>That’s why educators have been trying to improve engineering curriculums for the past decade. Many schools now install entry-level design courses in the first two years, mainly as a way of adding some engineering context to the heavy dose of math and physics that students get as freshmen and sophomores. Some schools, such as the University of Texas, have also set up engineering learning centers and tutoring programs for students.</p>

<p>“We’ve made our faculty, particularly those teaching first-year courses, much more aware of the needs of entering students,” said Alvin Meyer, associate dean for student affairs of the College of Engineering at UT in Austin. “We’re also pushing to have those first-year courses taught by the best professors — the student-friendly types — among the senior faculty.”</p>

<p>Real-world engineering
The F.W. Olin Foundation was acutely aware of the problems facing the engineering community when it announced plans for the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in 1997. Beginning with its first class of 75 students in the fall of 2002, the school focused on a coordinated, interdisciplinary approach to education, in which engineering context is always provided, even in introductory math, physics and chemistry courses. “The students are seeing tangible evidence of how science and math connect to the design principles of engineering,” said Michael Moody, dean of faculty at Olin. “From day one, we’re trying to remove the abstraction and provide real-world engineering skills.”</p>

<p>From the first semester, the school introduces students to lathes, mills and laser cutters in its machine shop. It also calls on students to design products and learn how to market them in the first year.</p>

<p>Third-year student Erin McCusker of Lillington, N.C., for example, built a car engine, worked on bottle rockets and designed a wireless sensing system to alert homeowners when mail had been placed in a mailbox, all in her freshman year. Similarly, junior Jeff Satwicz of Newton, Mass., set up the school’s machine shop in his first year and started a business making solar-powered trash compactors, called Seahorse Power Co., in his second year.</p>

<p>“I could probably get this experience at a bigger school, but it wouldn’t have the same depth, and I’d probably have to reach for it harder,” said the 21-year-old Satwicz.</p>

<p>To be sure, Olin, which has lost just two students in two years, has some built-in advantages. Its incoming freshmen, who are given four-year scholarships valued at approximately $120,000, are among the nation’s top students. According to statistics on PrincetonReview.com, the school’s students have an average incoming SAT score of 1,500 and an average ACT score of 33, both considered exceptionally high. Ninety-eight percent of them rank in the top 10 percent of their high school classes.</p>

<p>Olin also chooses students on the basis of their passions — ranging from music to dance to glass blowing and the restoring of cars — outside the classroom. “We see engineering as a fundamentally creative endeavor,” said Kerns of Olin. “So we look for kids who are creative and have the potential to contribute to their world.”</p>

<p>Incoming students, impressed by the Olin philosophy as well as by the four-year scholarship, typically turn down big-name institutions in favor of the startup school. McCusker, for example, bypassed Columbia University; Satwicz turned down MIT.</p>

<p>Such measures, educators say, would bode well for almost any institution. “If we could all pick out a dozen of our best faculty and give them the best incoming students, almost every engineering school would have a 100 percent graduation rate,” said Meyer of the University of Texas.</p>

<p>Still, Olin may be raising the bar for others by infusing the engineering education process with a new ingredient: happiness. In the Princeton Review lists, the school ranked 11th among “Happy students,” 17th for “Best overall experience for undergraduates” and third in “Professors make themselves accessible.”</p>

<p>“Kids have always found engineering education to be difficult, dry, demanding and, in general, a painful rite of passage,” said Kerns. "But we believe engineering can and should be ‘hard fun.’ "</p>

<p>Olin administrators also acknowledge that a certain amount of attrition will always exist, partly because of the demanding nature of the curriculum. “The bottom line is that engineering is hard,” Moody said. “You can make it interesting and compelling, but in the end, there is an intellectual challenge that has to be met, and not every student is going to want to do that.”</p>

<p>Still, said Kerns, work and fun need not be mutually exclusive. “The kicker is that they work harder if they enjoy it more,” she said. “We’ve learned that a passion is something you can’t not do.”
*</p>

<p>[EETimes.com</a> - If I’m happy, can this be EE school?](<a href=“http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=45200041]EETimes.com”>http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=45200041)</p>

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<p>Sure, that’s one way. </p>

<p>But I want more. I want for students to be able to drop courses retroactively if they later decide that they are going to leave the major. Again, it gets back to what I’ve been saying before: who cares if you performed poorly in courses that aren’t in your major anyway? </p>

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<p>Then explain this quote snippet:</p>

<p>*the majority of engineering undergrads drop out or flunk out of the curriculum within the first two years. With a few notable exceptions, U.S. engineering schools typically have attrition rates hovering between one-half and two-thirds.</p>

<p>The high attrition rate, which is reportedly matched by no other college curriculums*</p>

<p>[EETimes.com</a> - If I’m happy, can this be EE school?](<a href=“http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=45200041]EETimes.com”>http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=45200041)</p>

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<p>Well, then let me ask you a simple question. When was the last time you used the Maxwell Relations? Or anybody else in your firm used them? I am going to guess: “never”. </p>

<p>So why did you have to learn it? Why did I have to learn it? Exactly. Like I said, to this day, I have been waiting for somebody who can tell me what the heck the Maxwell Equations (or even worse, the Bridgman’s Equations) actually mean in real life, and I still haven’t found anybody who knows. Heck, I know quite a few people with PhD’s in engineering, and even they don’t know what those equations actually mean. </p>

<p>Look, don’t get me wrong. I am all in favor of gaining as much knowledge as you want. If you want to learn the Maxwell Relations, then by all means, take the class. My question is, why does everybody have to take that class? Perhaps even more importantly, why does that class have to be a weeder? What ends up happening is that a lot of people who could have made for perfectly productive engineers can’t pass thermo because they can’t understand the Maxwell Relations and hence can’t get engineering degrees. That’s nothing more than an artificial barrier that serves only to limit the number of engineers without actually determining whether those who are excluded are actually unworthy of being engineers. </p>

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<p>No, they weren’t, unless your specialty was thermo. I know quite a few ChemE PhD’s who don’t understand the Maxwell Relations either. </p>

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<p>I’ll tell you what I learned. It was precisely that class that crystallized my brewing notion that many engineering programs don’t really care about their students and are simply interested in pain for the sake of pain. The programs surely know that these topics are useless, but they don’t care. They’re still going to use them to weed people out anyway.</p>