why is engineering so hard?

College Majors Engineering Majors
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<p>Sakky,</p>

<p>Actually The Maxwell Relations were never actually part of my curriculum as a mechanical engineer. I'm not sure about other programs but at UT, all engineering classes are pretty specialized and tailored to their discipline--there is ME thermo, ChemE thermo and so forth. I switched into ME after a stint as a English/Math major and taking some BME/Nuclear Eng. classes. When I signed up to take ME thermo and other classes that required it, an overzealous adviser would not allow me to due to some red tape. However, the ME department said they would accept ChemE thermo in place of ME thermo and therefore allow me to graduate on time. So I took ChemE thermo and learned about the Maxwell Relations even though that subject in not a part of ME thermo.</p>

<p>That is why I must argue that I'm not sure about a ChemE perspective but as ME perspective I found the bulk of my classes as useful and pertinent. It is of note that even though Thermodynamics is Thermodynamics and the laws are fundamentally the same, ME Thermo focuses more on the system analysis and never talks about Maxwell Relations--perhaps that isn't a pertinent topic to an ME but it is for a ChemE, I'm not sure. I did "teach" myself ME thermo since as you said, ChemE thermo was more of an advanced math class, and I found that ME thermo was much more useful and helpful in the work industry (especially head/pump sizing).</p>

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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.

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<p>True, but graduate school is much more specialized. Each discipline is further broken down into specialized zones and the goal is to be an expert of a tiny niche. You are right that thermodynamics isn't a cornerstone of all ChemE PhD programs but I bet those who specialized in thermodynamics made use or were familiar with the relations.</p>

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That is why I must argue that I'm not sure about a ChemE perspective but as ME perspective I found the bulk of my classes as useful and pertinent.

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<p>I tend to agree. Most of my classes were pertinent to a future civil engineer, though there were a few that were useless to me (physical chem, modern physics). The requirements can be tinkered with to benefit the students, but by no means do I think it needs to be gutted. Engineering shouldn't be made easier for the sake of being easier. The unnecessary courses should be replaced with technical electives or courses pertinent to one's intended field of practice. If that makes the curriculum easier, then so be it. </p>

<p>I think a good rule of thumb would be if what you learn in a course can't be applied in a senior design project in your major, then it shouldn't be in your curriculum. </p>

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I'm not sure about other programs but at UT, all engineering classes are pretty specialized and tailored to their discipline--there is ME thermo, ChemE thermo and so forth.

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<p>Same for me for fluid mechanics. There were separate sections for thermo too, but the civil section was taught by a HVAC engineer, so it didn't work out well.</p>

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Actually The Maxwell Relations were never actually part of my curriculum as a mechanical engineer. I'm not sure about other programs but at UT, all engineering classes are pretty specialized and tailored to their discipline--there is ME thermo, ChemE thermo and so forth. I switched into ME after a stint as a English/Math major and taking some BME/Nuclear Eng. classes. When I signed up to take ME thermo and other classes that required it, an overzealous adviser would not allow me to due to some red tape. However, the ME department said they would accept ChemE thermo in place of ME thermo and therefore allow me to graduate on time. So I took ChemE thermo and learned about the Maxwell Relations even though that subject in not a part of ME thermo.

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<p>Which only goes to show that you don't need to know a darn thing about the Maxwell Relations, and in fact, to have never even heard of them, and still know enough about thermodynamics to be an engineer, which has been my point all along. </p>

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ME Thermo focuses more on the system analysis and never talks about Maxwell Relations--perhaps that isn't a pertinent topic to an ME but it is for a ChemE, I'm not sure.

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<p>No, trust me, it really isn't useful to a ChemE either. Either that, or I just happen to know a highly peculiar group of practicing chemical engineers who not only have never actually used the Maxwell Relations on their job - not even once - and not only that, don't even understand what they actually mean in a real-world sense. You think I would have found one *person by now who actually understood them. I can't even find *one. </p>

<p>But OK, maybe it is true that perhaps I just have the extraordinarily poor luck of knowing only those people who just don't understand Maxwell's. So then I leave it as an open challenge to any and all chemical engineers out there: What the heck do the Maxwell's Relations actually mean, in a real-world sense?. Not in a mathematical sense, but in terms of their connections to the real world. </p>

<p>I am going to make the bold prediction right now that nobody is going to have an answer to this question. </p>

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True, but graduate school is much more specialized. Each discipline is further broken down into specialized zones and the goal is to be an expert of a tiny niche. You are right that thermodynamics isn't a cornerstone of all ChemE PhD programs but I bet those who specialized in thermodynamics made use or were familiar with the relations.

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<p>Which, again, only proves my point even further, which is that the vast majority of ChemE's will never need to know it. So why force all of them to learn it? </p>

<p>Instead, why not take that tiny subset of ChemE's who actually will need to know it (i.e. the ones who are actually going into thermo research PhD specialty fields), and just teach it to them? Why bother the rest of us with it? Maybe more poignantly, why do programs insist on using it as their undergraduate weedout tool, when - like you said- very few of them will ever need to know it anyway? </p>

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Most of my classes were pertinent to a future civil engineer, though there were a few that were useless to me (physical chem, modern physics).

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<p>Exactly. I am sure that all of us have our examples.</p>

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The requirements can be tinkered with to benefit the students, but by no means do I think it needs to be gutted.

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<p>I have never used the term 'gutted'. After all, I don't think anybody would accuse Stanford of offering a 'gutted' engineering curriculum. </p>

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Engineering shouldn't be made easier for the sake of being easier.

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<p>Like I have always said, my preferred strategy is quite simple: simply admit fewer students. That's a key part of the Stanford strategy: it's extremely difficult to get in, but once you're in, it's almost impossible to flunk. What that means is that Stanford doesn't have to deal with the collateral damage of students with shattered academic records. Those students who would have done poorly are simply not admitted in the first place, and hopefully that means that they can go to a school that is more matched to their capabilities. Other schools should do the same. </p>

<p>But the second thing to do is, if you're not going to raise your admissions standards, is to let those who leave engineering walk away with a clean slate. I see no need to trample on a guy's permanent academic record with a bunch of F's in engineering courses if the guy isn't going to major in engineering anyway.</p>

<p>But the biggest reform I see is sociological: we need to get rid of the notion that an engineering curriculum needs to be painful to be effective. This needs to be eliminated right now. It simply encourages a pedagogical mindset of pain just for the sake of pain. </p>

<p>Again, I point to the following EE Times article in which an EE prof was chastised by her bosses because her students actually enjoyed her class, as if student enjoyment was actually a bad thing, and that her classes ought to be painful. It is precisely that sort of cultural mindset that encourages engineering programs to be deliberately painful and cold: that the profs actually want the students not to enjoy the subject, that they will actually go out of their way to deliberately make their classes unenjoyable. We need to get rid of this mentality post-haste. </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>EETimes.com</a> - If I'm happy, can this be EE school?</p>

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<p>
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Like I have always said, my preferred strategy is quite simple: simply admit fewer students. That's a key part of the Stanford strategy: it's extremely difficult to get in, but once you're in, it's almost impossible to flunk. What that means is that Stanford doesn't have to deal with the collateral damage of students with shattered academic records. Those students who would have done poorly are simply not admitted in the first place, and hopefully that means that they can go to a school that is more matched to their capabilities. Other schools should do the same.

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<p>I'm not a fan of this type of admissions. There's a so many kids who get rejected that would have done just fine at the school. But I guess if they let everyone in they would have way to many freshman...</p>

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<p>I'm a materials engineer, so maybe this doesn't fit sakky's critera for a ChemE.</p>

<p>Maxwell's relations are used in deriving a number of other useful thermodynamic equations. I seem to recall using them in the Gibbs-Duhem relation as well the equation whose name I can't remember that lets you relate the conditions for a phase transformation given a few properties of the system. It's used in deriving practically all worthwhile relationships in thermodynamics, which are frequently used.</p>

<p>Take Thermocalc. It's a piece of software that lets you calculate phase diagrams based off of measured values. Without the use of Maxwell's Relations that piece of software wouldn't be able to exist.</p>

<p>Now, certainly, you don't need to know about Maxwell's Relations in order to use all of the results of thermodynamics, but you also don't need to know how to do a lot of the math that people use Mathematica for in order to use it, but I think all of us can agree it's good for everyone to learn how to do the math by hand.</p>

<p>And don't forget, colleges are there to both prepare you for higher education in addition to the workplace. As engineers we're supposed to be interested in learning about everything, and why it works the way it does. Saying you don't want to know about why you're using the equations you're using flies directly in the face of what engineering education is all about.</p>

<p>Also, I can't really say anything about Stanford, as I haven't attended there, nor do I know anyone that's been there for undergrad (though my friends there for grad school seem nonplussed about the classes). All I know is in my experiences at CMU nobody failed out of engineering and the only people that left were ones that realized they were more interested in other fields (ie. math and business).</p>

<p>And, please stop bringing up that article about the dude from Harvey Mudd. All the professors I had felt classes should be interesting, motivating, and something you can really get interested in. How can they encourage lifelong learning (one of the ABET requirements, if I recall correctly) if they make you dread every class? I think everyone here is supportive of having good professors, but having good professors doesn't necessarily mean the class has to be easy. Hell, we had this professor that was renown for being a real hardass in the upper-level classes, and we were expecting a poor reception to him teaching the freshman level intro course. He wound up getting some of the highest scores from students (our school has an internal "rate my professor" like system) ever. They all said he was really hard, but he was a fantastic teacher that made the coursework very interesting.</p>

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<p>
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And don't forget, colleges are there to both prepare you for higher education in addition to the workplace. As engineers we're supposed to be interested in learning about everything, and why it works the way it does. Saying you don't want to know about why you're using the equations you're using flies directly in the face of what engineering education is all about.

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<p>Well, the key to what you said is "using the equations." If you learn something only to never use it again (either directly or indirectly as a prerequisite to a higher course), why should engineering students be interested?</p>

<p>I believe your original idea was to admit fewer students assuming you have a good way of predicting success as an engineering major. That I support. Simply admitting fewer student won't work as you'll still have a percentage that will drop out. </p>

<p>Even if you're more selective, and these students CAN pass the weeder courses, I still think irrelevant courses should be eliminated as requirements. Why should a student have to suffer through a course that is meaningless to them?</p>

<p>Taking a quote from the EETimes link:

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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. *

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<p>While I believe theory is important, only relevant theory should be taught. And when it's taught, it should have some connection with practical applications in industry. If you can't use what you learn as an engineering major, why learn it at all?</p>

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<p>I think you thought my post is by sakky, but whatever.</p>

<p>You're learning those things because you're learning how to learn. I agree about wishing there was more emphasis on how some of the material is actually useful in the real world (though some of my professors did a superb job on that). I mean, in my field, there are so many diverse jobs that teaching to every possible one would be impossible. Is it really reasonable to assume the same curriculum would be able to prepare a worker at a steel mill as well as a ceramicist as well as a someone that goes into biocompatibility? Of course it's not. That's why they try to teach us the skills we need in order to teach ourselves once we get out of school.</p>

<p>I think learning stuff, no matter what it is, can always be useful. One summer I worked in a chemistry lab on an REU and in passing learned the color of the various titanium ions. Does that sound like something that would be useful? How about when three years later one of my co-workers is doing a corrosion experiment on one of our new alloys and doesn't know why his solution is turning purple?</p>

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<p>It's not a good idea to have engineers blind to other fields, let alone unaware of basic science. If you want a hands on, practical degree light on theory, go into engineering technology.</p>

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You're learning those things because you're learning how to learn.

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I mean, in my field, there are so many diverse jobs that teaching to every possible one would be impossible.

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<p>I'm not advocating that you teach all of them; just one of them, but don't teach none of them. Let's say your major is pizza making. The professor should teach the student how to make the dough and tomato sauce, and even how to fold a pizza box, but why teach this pizza making major how to weld? Wouldn't it serve the student better to learn how to cook chicken and broccoli? When is the student going to need to know how to weld when running a pizzeria?</p>

<p>Why do I *need *to understand Schrödinger's equation as a civil engineer? Can't I learn something else for the sake of learning? What civil engineering concept is derived from Schrödinger's equation? I'll make it easier. Show me a civil engineering textbook where the word "Schrödinger" is in it.</p>

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It's not a good idea to have engineers blind to other fields, let alone unaware of basic science. If you want a hands on, practical degree light on theory, go into engineering technology.

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As I said earlier, I'm not against learning theory, but it should be at least somewhat relevant to your major. There are other theory-heavy courses that would have benefited me more than modern physics. Do you consider modern physics to be a basic science that everyone should be required to learn?</p>

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I think learning stuff, no matter what it is, can always be useful. One summer I worked in a chemistry lab on an REU and in passing learned the color of the various titanium ions. Does that sound like something that would be useful? How about when three years later one of my co-workers is doing a corrosion experiment on one of our new alloys and doesn't know why his solution is turning purple?

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I think you just disproved your own point by stating how you used your knowledge of the colors of the various titanium ions.</p>

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As I said earlier, I'm not against learning theory, but it should be at least somewhat relevant to your major. There are other theory-heavy courses that would have benefited me more than modern physics. Do you consider modern physics to be a basic science that everyone should be required to learn?

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<p>No, it's odd that you had to take pchem and modern as a civil engineer. I'm mostly referring to within an individual major course, neglecting the theory and teaching with practicality in mind.</p>

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<p>
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Maxwell's relations are used in deriving a number of other useful thermodynamic equations. I seem to recall using them in the Gibbs-Duhem relation as well the equation whose name I can't remember that lets you relate the conditions for a phase transformation given a few properties of the system. It's used in deriving practically all worthwhile relationships in thermodynamics, which are frequently used.

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<p>Hey, I remember using them for a whole host of derivations again. But to echo ken285, what's the point of that if, after the class, you never use them ever again? Or if you don't even really know what the heck it all meant anyway? Again, I challenge anybody to explain what the heck any of the Maxwell Relations actually mean in a real-world sense. For example, what the heck does it mean 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 does that mean in plain English? </p>

<p>The problem is that I think that practically nobody actually knows. So all you end up doing is just playing games with equations without any idea about why you're doing it or what any of it means. And the exam then becomes just one big game of who can play with the equations better, but without any visible connection to the real world. </p>

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As engineers we're supposed to be interested in learning about everything, and why it works the way it does.Saying you don't want to know about why you're using the equations you're using flies directly in the face of what engineering education is all about.

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<p>No, I never said that I didn't want to know why I'm using the Maxwell Relations equations. In fact, I specifically said that I do want to know, but before I can know why, I first have to actually know what the equations actually mean, and to this day, nobody can actually tell me, because nobody seems to know. I've asked countless practicing chemical engineers what those equations mean and none of them know. </p>

<p>Hence, as it stands today, you just end up forced to learn how to play with a bunch of arbitrary equations and you don't know what they mean and you don't know why you're doing it. Is that what you would call a quality education? </p>

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but I think all of us can agree it's good for everyone to learn how to do the math by hand.

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<p>Hey, lots of things in life are good to know. But the real question is, what do you really need to know, and, more importantly, what do you need to know in order to avoid being weeded out of an engineering program? I would argue that if you are going to be weeded out for not knowing something, it should be because you don't know something that is actually important for being a practicing engineer. Otherwise, it would be like preventing somebody from majoring in English because he can't speak French. Sure, it's nice for somebody majoring in English to also know how to speak French, but if somebody can't, why should he then be weeded out of an English major?</p>

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I think learning stuff, no matter what it is, can always be useful.

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<p>Look, like I've always said, I'm not stopping anybody from taking the class if they want. You want to learn a bunch of theory that has nothing to do with being a practical engineer? By all means, go ahead and take all the classes you want. I'm not stopping anybody from doing that. </p>

<p>The question is, why do we need to force everybody to have to do it? That simply means that people are being forced to take classes that they don't want and aren't relevant to what they want to do. </p>

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I'm not a fan of this type of admissions. There's a so many kids who get rejected that would have done just fine at the school. But I guess if they let everyone in they would have way to many freshman...

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<p>But look at what we have now...people flunking out of the school that they were admitted to. Is that better? </p>

<p>Like I said before, we live in a day and age where you basically need a bachelor's degree. The degree can be in anything and from *any<a href="accredited">/i</a> school, as long as it is a degree. After all, when employers see that you don't have a degree, they're not going to care why. All they will see is that you don't have a degree. </p>

<p>Hence, it is safer to err on the side of caution, meaning to not admit borderline students to a difficult program, such that they will then go to an easier place where they are more likely to graduate. That's a heck of a lot better than them going to the difficult school and then flunking out. </p>

<p>Like I said in other threads, it's better to graduate from San Jose State than to flunk out of Berkeley; I have sadly seen numerous people that belong in the latter category. At least the San Jose State guy has a degree. </p>

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It's not a good idea to have engineers blind to other fields, let alone unaware of basic science. If you want a hands on, practical degree light on theory, go into engineering technology.

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<p>I'm not aware of too many Stanford engineering graduates who are blind to other fields, or are unaware of basic science.</p>

<p>See, that's my basic point: We have a live working example of an elite engineering school that is also notably relaxed. If Stanford can provide an elite engineering education without the harshness, why can't other schools do the same? I think the answer is clear: of course they could. They just don't want to do it.</p>

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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?

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<p>Interesting question, @sakky. I don't know what the current UC enrollment policies are. When I went to UCLA, undergraduates who flunked out once could be readmitted, but only once. Twice and you were out for good. Also, there were stiffer standards for the College of Engineering than other colleges. People whose grades fell below a certain level had to transfer to another college such as L&S.</p>

<p>I could make the argument that if you accept that there are declining numbers of US citizen engineers, that these very people who are flunking out of engineering schools should be readmitted as often as necessary (provided that they meet admissions standards). I personally wouldn't have a problem readmitting students who sat exams taken by other enrolled students, and scored at least the mean grade.</p>

<p>When I spoke to someone about the policy, I was told that it's in place because the UC schools are so swamped with students that they can't deal with multiple readmits. Again, if you buy the argument that we need to produce more engineers, the UC schools should allow any number of readmits to qualified students. A possible other reason is that they feel repeatedly readmitting students devalues the degrees they confer, but as you have pointed out, other universities have much more relaxed standards while maintaining high demand for the degrees they confer.</p>

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Look, like I've always said, I'm not stopping anybody from taking the class if they want. You want to learn a bunch of theory that has nothing to do with being a practical engineer?

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<p>It all comes down to whether you believe an undergraduate engineering degree is a professional program. I don't, I feel that is an undergraduate engineering program is an education for whatever--be it the industry, academia or pig raising. Yes, those theory classes might not be used in the industry but as I said, I bet they are used in some specialized portion of R&D and graduate school. For those people who want to pursue that aspect, then all those other engineering classes that don't pertain to that field are superfluous. For those who want to go into the industry, well then all those theory classes are just nonsense.</p>

<p>The point is, most students are not 100% aware of what they want to do with their education and therefore, it is better to err the side of caution and give them exposure to a wide range of fields and cover all your bases.</p>

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Hey, I remember using [Maxwell's relations] for a whole host of derivations again. But to echo ken285, what's the point of that if, after the class, you never use them ever again?

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<p>Some professors will argue that they don't know what any particular student may need to know in the future, but teaching principles gives students a chance to figure things out on their own (that can be derived from those principles). Arguably, they can't teach everything; they must (at least) teach things that are nominally useful.</p>

<p>There are certainly quite a lot of things I've rarely used in my 20+ year career. It's been ages since I've used abstract algebra, for example. OTOH, if I had to develop (or argue the security properties of) some kind of cryptographic algorithm, having seen abstract algebra would give me a head start over someone who'd never seen it at all (and did not realize that an algebraic analysis of the problem was necessary). That said, I sometimes wish that instead of so much focus on abstract algebra, there had been more emphasis on some of the IQ-type problem solving that has become popular (at interviews) at some companies like Microsoft. OTOH, maybe the future will require more of an algebraic approach to problem solving.</p>

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No, I never said that I didn't want to know why I'm using the Maxwell Relations equations. In fact, I specifically said that I do want to know, but before I can know why, I first have to actually know what the equations actually mean, and to this day, nobody can actually tell me, because nobody seems to know. I've asked countless practicing chemical engineers what those equations mean and none of them know.

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<p>I can remember being similarly frustrated while in grad school struggling (relatively speaking) through graduate algorithms classes, asking professors how to get better at the subject without memorizing every algorithm in question (which is impractical if not impossible).</p>

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Hey, lots of things in life are good to know. But the real question is, what do you really need to know, and, more importantly, what do you need to know in order to avoid being weeded out of an engineering program?

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<p>Well, that's sort of hard to say. But a possible way to look at this is if a particular university's policies prove to be ineffective for some reason (e.g. because it either produces lower-quality engineers, or it costs more money to educate said engineers), it will be forced to change. What you have written about Olin shows that there are alternate approaches to engineering study, and if those results produce engineers that are at least as good as the engineers at the other schools, those approaches will gain more favor. It may take a long time, however; schools like Berkeley will see a disproportionately high number of applicants based on reputation alone.</p>

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I'm not advocating that you teach all of them; just one of them, but don't teach none of them. Let's say your major is pizza making. The professor should teach the student how to make the dough and tomato sauce, and even how to fold a pizza box, but why teach this pizza making major how to weld? Wouldn't it serve the student better to learn how to cook chicken and broccoli? When is the student going to need to know how to weld when running a pizzeria?

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<p>I feel a more appropriate analogy would be to teach what makes a good pizza and basic differences among the kinds of pizza (ie thin-crust, deep dish, stuffed crust, what the various toppings are) instead of just teaching them how to make only a good sauce and not anything about how to prepare a dough, what kind of cheese to use, and how to operate the oven.</p>

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Why do I need to understand Schrödinger's equation as a civil engineer? Can't I learn something else for the sake of learning? What civil engineering concept is derived from Schrödinger's equation? I'll make it easier. Show me a civil engineering textbook where the word "Schrödinger" is in it.

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<p>I agree, you probably don't need Schrodinger's equation as a civil engineer. That's probably why CivEs at CMU didn't have to take the class. I think it's more of poor planning at your school that made you take a modern physics class than anything else. The only engineers I knew that were "required" to take modern physics were Materials engineers, and even we had the choice between Quantum Mechanics of Materials (a course actually developed by the physics department for engineers interested in modern physics), Biology I, or Organic Chemistry.</p>

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I think you just disproved your own point by stating how you used your knowledge of the colors of the various titanium ions.

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<p>My point was that you never know what will be useful in your career, even if you think it's completely trivial information when you're learning it. I mean, I did a project based around stereology of grains, and I'm now working in a group that does amorphous materials (no grains), but I've still found instances where the knowledge has come in handy.</p>

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what's the point of that if, after the class, you never use them ever again?

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<p>How are they to know what you will and won't use after you graduate? I took a class on semiconductor processing (a very industry-view centered course), and I haven't used my knowledge of Czarnowski since (I had to look it up for the correct spelling, even), but does that mean the class was a waste of time?</p>

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Again, I challenge anybody to explain what the heck any of the Maxwell Relations actually mean in a real-world sense. For example, what the heck does it mean 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 does that mean in plain English?

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<p>It means the change in temperature with respect to the change in volume for an isentropic process is equal to the change in internal energy with respect to volume and entropy during an isothermal and isobaric process.</p>

<p>See, the problem is, you're looking at Maxwell Relations which don't use easily measured values. By using Maxwell Relations along with the chain rule, you're able to get relationships between thermodynamic variables in things such as isothermal compressibility, thermal expansion coefficients, and things such as that. If we lived in a world where isentropic processes were common, then the Maxwell relations would be a lot simpler to understand. However, we don't, so you have to do some other crappy math in order to get it into more physically reasonable terms.</p>

<p>I agree, Maxwell's Relations are a bit of an abstract topic which are confusing, but if you're going to do any sort of higher thermodynamics then you need to understand what they are. To me, they're a nice artifact of calculus more than actually having a physical meaning. It's like asking an electrical engineer why e^(i*pi) = -1. Sure, they can tell you it's true, but what's the fundamental reasoning behind the mathematical meaning?</p>

<p>
[quote]
Hey, lots of things in life are good to know. But the real question is, what do you really need to know, and, more importantly, what do you need to know in order to avoid being weeded out of an engineering program? I would argue that if you are going to be weeded out for not knowing something, it should be because you don't know something that is actually important for being a practicing engineer.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>I'd consider fundamental calculus and physics to be things all engineers should have a pretty solid grasp on. The only people that dropped out of my major after first year (at which point I was actually the only declared freshman MSE) did so during our classes in crystallography and defects. You know, the stuff that everything in materials is based around (except for amorphous ones, ironically enough).</p>

<p>It would be more like flunking out an English major for not being able to write properly. Oh, wait, that's right, we don't do that. Colleges are supposed to just be degree mills where you pay some money and put in some time for a piece of paper.</p>

<p>
[quote]

Look, like I've always said, I'm not stopping anybody from taking the class if they want. You want to learn a bunch of theory that has nothing to do with being a practical engineer? By all means, go ahead and take all the classes you want. I'm not stopping anybody from doing that.</p>

<p>The question is, why do we need to force everybody to have to do it? That simply means that people are being forced to take classes that they don't want and aren't relevant to what they want to do.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Why do philosophy majors have to take courses in all types of philosophy? Why do English majors have to take classes in all sorts of literature they don't care about? Why do abstract math majors have to take calculus?</p>

<p>Frankly, I feel like most of these weeder courses you're talking about are ones which happen very early on in one's college career, which is before most students even know what they want to study.</p>

<p>I agree the pain isn't something that's necessary in an engineering course; I think the pain is just an excuse that many engineering and science professors use to cover up for their own inability to teach well. It's kind of like how there are so few "good" textbooks for engineering out there. It's not that they're trying to make them bad, it's just that the people doing the writing aren't necessarily the best at their job.</p>

<p>So, yes, I agree that an engineering education shouldn't be painful, I think it's still very important to keep the breadth of the education and the focus on understanding the fundamentals of the technology instead of just teaching to whatever technology is current. Think about it this way. Do you think the best CS degree is one which teaches you how to be fluent in 20 computer languages, or one which teaches you very complex ideas and developmental strategies in one? And which one do you think will be better off 10-20 years down the road when all the languages they learned in college have become archaic?</p>

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<p>
[quote]
Interesting question, @sakky. I don't know what the current UC enrollment policies are. When I went to UCLA, undergraduates who flunked out once could be readmitted, but only once. Twice and you were out for good. Also, there were stiffer standards for the College of Engineering than other colleges. People whose grades fell below a certain level had to transfer to another college such as L&S.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>What makes the Berkeley situation even more acute is that failing engineers actually can't switch over to L&S, for L&S switch requests are not guaranteed to be approved and GPA is an issue; according to official policy, having a 3.0+ GPA makes you more likely to that you will be approved. I'm sure we can all think of plenty of engineering students who have nowhere near a 3.0 GPA. That's nothing more than a Catch-22: those Berkeley engineering students who really need to switch to L&S the most are precisely the ones who are unlikely to be approve and those who will be approved are precisely the ones who don't need it. </p>

<p>
[quote]
When I spoke to someone about the policy, I was told that it's in place because the UC schools are so swamped with students that they can't deal with multiple readmits. Again, if you buy the argument that we need to produce more engineers, the UC schools should allow any number of readmits to qualified students. A possible other reason is that they feel repeatedly readmitting students devalues the degrees they confer, but as you have pointed out, other universities have much more relaxed standards while maintaining high demand for the degrees they confer.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>The other way to go is to simply wipe out their grades so that they can transfer to another school with a clean slate. Why not? Like I said, if the guy isn't going to get an engineering degree from your school anyway, who cares what his engineering grades were? </p>

<p>As a case in point, I know a guy who flunked out of Berkeley engineering and couldn't even transfer to San Jose State afterwards because his grades were so poor that even SJSU didn't want to admit him. But why should that matter? He could have easily gone to SJSU right out of high school, and if he had done that, he probably would have graduated. </p>

<p>(Now, to be sure, maybe he might have even flunked out of SJSU, but now we'll never know. A better solution would be for him to at least let him transfer to SJSU. If he flunks out again, fine, then kick him out, but if he passes, then let him graduate. Right now, they won't even give him that chance. )</p>

<p>
[quote]
The point is, most students are not 100% aware of what they want to do with their education and therefore, it is better to err the side of caution and give them exposure to a wide range of fields and cover all your bases.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>But you're not erring on the side of caution. You're erring on the side of danger. How? Because you're kicking people out. You're kicking people out for not knowing things that, like we agreed, they probably don't really need to know. Kicking people out of a school is a quite brutal penalty that I think should be used as a last resort. It instead seems to be the *first*resort. </p>

<p>Just consider this. Somebody who gets a C- in a thermo class will certainly get the message that he doesn't know much about the topic and so he probably shouldn't choose to be a researcher in that field. Heck, even if he (misguidedly) still wants to be a researcher in that field, that sort of grade will serve as a red flag to any graduate program that he applies to. But at the same time, it's still a (barely) passing grade. There's no reason to actually give an F to the guy when a C- conveys the same information and in a far less painful manner, particularly on something that he probably doesn't need to know anyway. </p>

<p>
[quote]
Some professors will argue that they don't know what any particular student may need to know in the future, but teaching principles gives students a chance to figure things out on their own (that can be derived from those principles). Arguably, they can't teach everything; they must (at least) teach things that are nominally useful.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Right - they're supposed to be nominally useful. Supposed to be. </p>

<p>But they aren't. Like I said, to this day, I still don't know what the heck the Maxwell Relations actually mean. All I remember is playing lots of games with equations and derivations in hope of knowing enough to pass the exams, but having not the slightest idea what any of it actually meant in a real-world sense. This seems to be the general consensus amongst chemical engineers that I know: none of them actually know what the point was, or if there even was a point.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
It means the change in temperature with respect to the change in volume for an isentropic process is equal to the change in internal energy with respect to volume and entropy during an isothermal and isobaric process.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Uh, of course that is a simple restatement of the formula. But my question is not simply to restate the formula but to actually explain to somebody in plain English what that really means. </p>

<p>
[quote]
See, the problem is, you're looking at Maxwell Relations which don't use easily measured values. By using Maxwell Relations along with the chain rule, you're able to get relationships between thermodynamic variables in things such as isothermal compressibility, thermal expansion coefficients, and things such as that. If we lived in a world where isentropic processes were common, then the Maxwell relations would be a lot simpler to understand. However, we don't, so you have to do some other crappy math in order to get it into more physically reasonable terms.</p>

<p>I agree, Maxwell's Relations are a bit of an abstract topic which are confusing, but if you're going to do any sort of higher thermodynamics then you need to understand what they are. To me, they're a nice artifact of calculus more than actually having a physical meaning. It's like asking an electrical engineer why e^(i*pi) = -1. Sure, they can tell you it's true, but what's the fundamental reasoning behind the mathematical meaning?

[/quote]
</p>

<p>And you're getting to the heart of the problem. You're freely admitting that the Maxwell Relations don't have any physical meaning that can be easily explained and that furthermore, like has been conceded by others before, most engineers will never have to know them. For example, nshah9617 would surely agree that you don't actually need to know the Maxwell Relations in order to be a useful practicing engineer. </p>

<p>Here's an analogy I would make. I would equate topics like the Maxwell's Equations and Bridgman's Equations to mathematical analysis (i.e. real analysis, complex analysis) coursework. Mathematicians would surely say that you don't really know mathematics, i.e. you don't really know what the concept of the derivative or the integral, unless you've studied analysis because only in analysis will you truly and rigorously understand what topics like limits and continuity truly mean. </p>

<p>While I'm sure that notion is true, my response is simple: most people (and certainly most engineers) don't need to know mathematics to that depth. They don't need to be able to know how to rigorously prove what a derivative truly is. Now, might it be nice to know? Sure. Those engineers who really want to know that are welcome to take all the mathematical analysis courses they want. But they shouldn't be forced to take them. For almost all engineers, it is sufficient to simply know how to compute derivatives or integrals without knowing all of the rigorous mathematical theory behind it all. Similarly, in thermodynamics, it is sufficient for most engineers to simply know the final usable results as opposed to trying to know the underlying Maxwell Relations behind it. Again, those engineers who really want to know the M.R.'s are welcome to take course on it. But those courses should be optional. </p>

<p>
[quote]

It would be more like flunking out an English major for not being able to write properly. Oh, wait, that's right, we don't do that. Colleges are supposed to just be degree mills where you pay some money and put in some time for a piece of paper.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Yet sadly, that is precisely what does happen. That's why guys like Dexter Manley were able to stay in college for 4 years playing football before revealing decades later that he didn't even know how to read. </p>

<p>Dexter</a> Manley's incredible story: 'I broke down and started crying … how did I get through school when I couldn't read?' | Ebony | Find Articles at BNET</p>

<p>That only reinforces what I have been saying regarding the engineering students. Frankly, it really isn't that hard to get some sort of college degree. Hence, when an engineer gets expelled, many people won't understand that he got expelled because he was an engineering student. They'll just think "Well, I know a bunch of lazy idiots who nevertheless have degrees, so if that guy got expelled, he must truly be a fool." What they obviously fail to see is that the reason he got expelled was because he chose a very difficult program. If he had chosen an easy program, he would have graduated. </p>

<p>Which gets back to what I was saying before: if a guy isn't going to major in engineering anyway, then who cares about his failed engineering grades? Wipe them off his record. Let him major in something else with a clean academic slate. Why do those failed grades have to haunt you forever? </p>

<p>
[quote]
Why do philosophy majors have to take courses in all types of philosophy? Why do English majors have to take classes in all sorts of literature they don't care about? Why do abstract math majors have to take calculus?

[/quote]
</p>

<p>You are arguing a straw man. I never said that engineering students should not have any requirements. There are obviously some things that all engineers need to know, just like there are some things that all students in any major need to know.</p>

<p>But then there are things that all students in each major don't really need to know and should be purely optional. The trick is to find out which ones should be mandatory and which ones should be optional, and I think it is quite clear that when even most practicing chemical engineers don't understand what the M.R.'s mean, then they should be optional to learn. Again, I am not stopping anybody from learning the M.R's. You want to learn it? The courses are there. They just shouldn't be mandatory.</p>

<p>This is particularly so when it comes to weeders. If you are going to weed people out, then it should be for things that they actually and truly need to know, not for things that are irrelevant. It would be like weeding people out of the English major because they can't speak Latin. </p>

<p>
[quote]
Frankly, I feel like most of these weeder courses you're talking about are ones which happen very early on in one's college career, which is before most students even know what they want to study.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>And the way to deal with that is to force them through a ChemE thermo weeder that forces you to learn topics like M.R. that real-world ChemE's don't ever use anyway? Really? That seems wildly suboptimal to me. </p>

<p>Like I said, if you're going to weed engineering students, it should be based on something that real-world engineers actually need to know. </p>

<p>
[quote]
I agree the pain isn't something that's necessary in an engineering course; I think the pain is just an excuse that many engineering and science professors use to cover up for their own inability to teach well. It's kind of like how there are so few "good" textbooks for engineering out there. It's not that they're trying to make them bad, it's just that the people doing the writing aren't necessarily the best at their job.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Nah, I think it's more of 'chronological revenge': the notion that because they went through pain when they were students, they now want others to feel the same pain. Whether that pain is actually productive doesn't matter, all that matters is that they want to inflict the same pain that was inflicted on them.</p>

<p>But that's completely immature, for at some point, that cycle has to stop. At some point, somebody has to step up and take the high road and say: "Well, it sucked that I had to undergo unnecessary pain when I was young, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to inflict unnecessary pain on others." I will once again point to Stanford as the 'model' school: an elite school that tries to go out of its way to minimize the pain of an engineering education. Maybe Olin will be that way too. Time will tell.</p>

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<p>Sakky,</p>

<p>It seems that your overall problem with engineering is focused more towards UC Berkley's academic practices, which make sense if UC Berkley was your primary source of engineering experience. I say that because I have not personally seen such actions at the previous two institutions I attended. I know at UT-Austin, you won't get kicked out of engineering unless you maintain a GPA less than 2.00 for more than 3 semesters and even then you can be readmitted. Furthermore, the "engineering college" is the hardest to gain admission to and if you want to transfer out/leave, most other colleges will readily accept you. </p>

<p>Could these policies be more localized at UC Berkley rather than an overall trend in engineering schools?</p>

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<p>
[quote]

It seems that your overall problem with engineering is focused more towards UC Berkley's academic practices, which make sense if UC Berkley was your primary source of engineering experience. I say that because I have not personally seen such actions at the previous two institutions I attended. I know at UT-Austin, you won't get kicked out of engineering unless you maintain a GPA less than 2.00 for more than 3 semesters and even then you can be readmitted. Furthermore, the "engineering college" is the hardest to gain admission to and if you want to transfer out/leave, most other colleges will readily accept you

[/quote]
</p>

<p>While some of my specific problems are Berkeley-centric, most of them are quite general. Let's harken back to the EETimes article that I posted previously: why do engineering faculty presume that the program always has to be 'painful' such that a eng professor whose students actually enjoy the class will be ostracized? Why do engineering programs across the country exhibit such notably high attrition rates, relative to other majors? Why do a disproportionate proportion of engineering programs tend to rank among the lowest of all programs in terms of student satisfaction and professor's teaching ability or empathy with students? None of these problems are specific to Berkeley but rather are nation-wide problems. Why does it need to be this way? </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?</p>

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<p>sakky, can you empty your pm inbox, i have a message to send you</p>