<p>Ok, this is partly a stupid question, as engineering is known the world around as a discipline that is extremely difficult. However, there are many aspiring students who are very intelligent, and excel in mathematics/science, so if they're so bright in these subjects, why do these smart students complain so much of the difficulty and many drop out of engineering schools ? Is it because they didn't foresee the extreme rigor of engineering before they applied to the program ? Is it so difficult, beyond their wildest expectations ? I mean you have these great math students completing calculus in their sophomore year of highschool, taking AP/IB physics + chem classes, the works, and yet when they get to engineering school, it's extremely difficult, even for the type of students aforementioned. Why is this so ? Maybe I'm wrong ? Or maybe engineering at the graduate level is hard because that's just the way it is and always will be ?</p>
<p>I'm not an engineering major, but I've taken some math classes in which a lot of the students are engineers. My impression is that most engineering students can handle maybe 1-3 difficult science/math/engineering classes out of a total course load of 5 classes. But what often happens is that engineering majors have to take 4-5 rigorous science/math/engineering classes, and the sheer amount of work to keep up with these classes can be pretty tiring and very challenging even for students naturally gifted at science/math. My main point is that if engineering majors could spread out the amount of difficult science/math/engineering classes they have to take each semester, then they wouldn't have as much trouble because they would have more time to focus on just 1 or 2 of their especially rigorous classes.</p>
<p>Good thing I'm doing all of my core courses first.</p>
<p>It sounds like you're really asking how you can avoid being one of the smart math/science students who end up dropping out of engineering. First, even if you're good at math and science, you have to take many required classes each term, each of which covers much more material than calculus. Second, calculus does not require much conceptual thinking, while physics and engineering classes do. Third, most prospective engineering majors are already excellent math/science students, but they'll all have to compete with each other for the limited number of A's set by the curve, which typically has an average GPA at or slightly under 3.0. Fourth, even if all of the above don't deter you, engineering classes simply demand a lot of time because of their lengthy problem sets and design/programming projects. Even a brilliant student couldn't just polish off a weekly problem set in a couple of hours and be done with it. Bugs come up during design, lab equipment doesn't always work as it should, etc etc.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Is it because they didn't foresee the extreme rigor of engineering before they applied to the program ?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I believe so. Let's face it. At many American high schools, to be known as a science or math star is really not that hard, mainly because, let's face it, a lot of American high school students are just not very interested in studying at all, and certainly not interested in studying math/science. So it's quite easy to excel when your competition is that low. </p>
<p>So you have all the students who did extremely well in high school math/science while, frankly, not having to work that hard. Then they enter a rigorous college engineering program and are shocked at its difficulty. It's like making the transition from being a high school football star to becoming a mediocre college player. </p>
<p>
[quote]
Or maybe engineering at the graduate level is hard because that's just the way it is and always will be ?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I am convinced that most of it has to do with the culture of engineering departments and engineering professors around the world. A lot of them simply have it bred within them that engineering has to be hard. I strongly suspect that a lot of it has to do with the fact that they went through hell when they were students, so now they're going to make sure that future students have to go through the same hell. In other words, it's basically a hazing process. It's the same thinking as to why medical students and resident doctors had to work 100 hours a week and pull shifts for 2-3 days straight without sleep. From what I can see, much of that was basically hazing - that doctors in the past had to go through that hell, and now they want to make sure that new doctors feel the same pain that they felt. It's a hazing process with little regard for whether students are really actually learning anything useful by the process. In other words, it seems to be pain just for the sake of pain. Engineering doesn't need to be this painful. </p>
<p>As proof of this, I would point to historically, one of the most 'painful' of all engineering disciplines has been EECS, and especially computer science. I would then note that all of the great successes within the computer industry who not only don't have engineering degrees, they don't even have degrees of any kind. For example, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Wayne Rosing, etc. Those are just the most famous and richest ones. Silicon Valley is replete with software developers and IT workers who never graduated from college, or if they did, did not major in engineering/CS, and yet had highly successful technical careers anyway. They are all living proof that much of the pain of EECS (and by extension, probably all engineering degrees) is unnecessarily - that you don't actually need to the pain to have a highly successful career in computers. Bill Gates never went through the pain of completing a CS degree and that clearly hasn't hurt him one bit. </p>
<p>Further proof is demonstrated by some of the more enlightened engineering programs that are far less painful than average. While all engineering programs are painful to some extent, some are far less so than others. Nor are the ones that are less painful necessarily less respected. Stanford, for example, is an indisputably elite engineering school that is also widely noted for being quite humane (relatively speaking) in the delivery of its engineering education. I think other engineering schools should be more like Stanford. </p>
<p>What would help is if engineering profs were to really look at their curricula and simply admit that a lot of things that they have their students do simply do not add value. The truth is, a lot of assignments, a lot of labs, a lot of projects don't really teach much that is useful and just serve to drain students' time. </p>
<p>Take homework, for example. I don't believe you really need to have weekly graded homework. You can ASSIGN homework problems, but not actually grade them. The purpose of homework is to help you learn the material. But if a student proves that he know the material by acing the exams without having done any of the homework (or doing the homework, but not getting good homework grades), then that should be good enough to get an 'A'. You shouldn't be saying " I see that you did well enough on the exams to get the A, but you didn't do well on the homeworks, so you're only going to get a B". What's up with that? If you aced the exams, then you've proven that you know the material, so who cares if you didn't do the homework? Like I said, the whole point of homework is to help you to learn the material, and if you can prove that you learned the material anyway, then who cares what your homework scores were? Hence, I believe this is a case of pain-for-the-sake-of-pain as homework becomes something that no longer adds value and is just seen as something that can hurt your grade. </p>
<p>The same holds true of many projects and labs - many of them just don't teach you much and instead become solely things that can hurt your grade. I distinctly remember a bunch of labs in which the groups were racing through the assigned tasks, not because they were trying to learn anything but solely because they knew that if they didn't get everything done within the allotted lab time, they would get a bad lab grade. I also remember OChem lab where people were graded based on the 'yield' of their product, and if you didn't produce enough of a final output compound, your lab grade would be docked. So a lot of students would respond by simply using far more initial reagents than they were supposed to. If you start off using more initial compounds, you are going to end up with more final product, and since (strangely) nobody was checking to see how much initial reagent you were using, students would game the system by using as much initial reagent as they could get away with. In fact, some of them used so much that their "yields" increased to over 100%, which is clearly impossible, so they actually quietly threw away some of their final products to get a more reasonable 95% yield, so that they could get the perfect lab score. But the point is, nowhere in the lab grading process was anybody really learning anything. For example, if you got a low yield, then you got a bad lab grade, but you don't have the opportunity to learn WHY you got a bad yield. Obviously you didn't perform a lab step correctly, and that's why you got a bad yield, but nobody ever tells you WHICH step you performed incorrectly and WHY it was incorrect. So if you had to do the lab again, you're just going to make the same mistake you made before. You learned nothing from the experience, and if you're not really learning anything, then honestly, what's the point? This is why a lot of students saw labs as nothing more than a time-wasting experience that had the potential to hurt their grades, and that's why they gamed the labs. </p>
<p>Finally, I would say that engineering is in serious need of grading reform. The truth is, humanities and social science grading became inflated 40 years ago, mostly having to do with the Vietnam War and attempts by people to avoid the draft by staying in school. Profs back then knew that if they failed students out, they might get drafted and ultimately might die in war, so that 'F' might literally be a death sentence for that student. So humanities and social science departments around the country began inflating their grades. The enduring mystery is why the natural science and engineering departments didn't ALSO start inflating their grades to shield their students from war. I have to imagine that this may have had something to do with the politics of academia, where humanities and social science departments tend to tilt far more left-wing politically than natural science and engineering departments do (as evidenced by the fact that studies have shown that something like 90% of humanities profs at certain schools who are registered with a political party are registered Democrats, and similar such statistics, and whatever few Republicans a school happen to have often times tend to be in the engineering/science departments. But regardless of what the cause is, the point is, while other departments inflated their grades, engineering didn't, or at least, not to the same degree. This makes engineering grades look bad by comparison, especially when that engineering student has to compete with other students for things like med/law school admissions or general awards like Rhodes Scholarships. The truth is, a guy with a 3.0 in EECS or ChemE may have worked far harder than the guy with a 3.8 in Film Studies. But who is more likely to win the Rhodes Scholarship? That's why I think that engineering probably should start inflating its grades too, or at least, start letting students hide their bad engineering grades. For example, I see absolutely no point in giving somebody an F or a NP (Not Pass) for a course grade. Instead of that, just don't give him any grade at all, wipe all records of that course from his transcript, and just pretend that he never took the course at all.</p>
<p>Now, don't get me wrong. I still believe that engineering is a fantastic deal for many people. This is especially true in most of the no-name engineering schools where engineering really isn't THAT hard. Granted, it's harder than getting a degree in a creampuff major like Leisure Studies at that same no-name school. But it's still not THAT hard to do. Hence, you can get an engineering degree from one of those schools and get a quite decent engineering job - a lot better than what you could have had otherwise. For the guy who barely graduated from high school, yet gets an engineering degree and gets a 50k starting salary, that is a pretty darn sweet deal. That's why I think that most college students would be better off studying engineering rather than what they are currently doing, for the simple reason that most college students go to no-name schools and are majoring in things that won't exactly get them a great job. I know a LOT of college grads who have found nothing better than stocking shelves at the mall, and to a man, they all wish they had studied engineering instead.</p>
<p>"It's a hazing process with little regard for whether students are really actually learning anything useful by the process. In other words, it seems to be pain just for the sake of pain. Engineering doesn't need to be this painful.</p>
<p>I definitely agree that profs make classes hard because someone made it hard for them when they were coming up. You learn to teach classes by the way you were taught, especially as a college professor where you don't have training in how to teach. </p>
<p>I disagree that this pain is useless. I think it is great that engineering pushes people and is a big reason that engineers are so sought after. I'm sure this does cause a lot of people to quit, but it also makes those that stick it out that much better.</p>
<p>As far as those great CS guys that were mentioned, that doesn't really point to engineering being too hard. CS was in its early stages when they were in school. Most of them had done more on their own than the profs had. Those are rare cases combining CS geniuses with a not-quite-developed discipline which meant they didn't have much to gain by getting a degree.</p>
<p>Very interesting post, sakky. I really never thought of the political leanings of faculty with regard to shielding students from the draft. It certainly makes sense and seems plausible though. (Why are people in academia so overwhelmingly liberal? Are they liberal because they are not working in the real world, or do they choose that environment because it welcomes liberal thought?)</p>
<p>PS - I hope not too many engineering graduates are working at the mall!</p>
<p>I agree with most of your post, sakky, except his part:
[quote]
As proof of this, I would point to historically, one of the most 'painful' of all engineering disciplines has been EECS, and especially computer science. I would then note that all of the great successes within the computer industry who not only don't have engineering degrees, they don't even have degrees of any kind. For example, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Wayne Rosing, etc. Those are just the most famous and richest ones. Silicon Valley is replete with software developers and IT workers who never graduated from college, or if they did, did not major in engineering/CS, and yet had highly successful technical careers anyway. They are all living proof that much of the pain of EECS (and by extension, probably all engineering degrees) is unnecessarily - that you don't actually need to the pain to have a highly successful career in computers. Bill Gates never went through the pain of completing a CS degree and that clearly hasn't hurt him one bit.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>CS happens to be the unique field of engineering which does not require a lot of theoretical knowledge to do well in industry. Back in the dot com boom days, high school grads (and heck, even many high school students) were routinely paid high salaries to work for tech companies as programmers, because you can pick up a lot of it through self-study. Most of the people you mentioned above, like Bill Gates and Michael Dell, made their billions by being shrewd businessmen, and much less so from their knowledge of computer science or engineering. For example, Dell started buying computer parts from catalogs and building and selling computers from his dorm at UT Austin, which any high school student can figure out pretty easily. Of course, after the dot com bust, the CS industry went back to hiring people with degrees, simply because the number of open jobs was much more aligned with the number of graduates.</p>
<p>All of this certainly isn't true for EE. A college dropout doesn't have a chance at doing analog/digital circuit design, integrated circuit fabrication, or computer systems architecture design. Heck, these days the tech industry is moving toward hiring master's degree grads for design jobs, leaving the college grads to do grunt work like testing and verification.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I definitely agree that profs make classes hard because someone made it hard for them when they were coming up. You learn to teach classes by the way you were taught, especially as a college professor where you don't have training in how to teach.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Yeah, but eventually that needs to stop, if not by internal reforms, then via external forces. For example, regarding medical education, several states have passed reforms limiting the number of hours per week that resident doctors can be forced to work. But that is, of course if those external forces WANT to stop it. See below. </p>
<p>
[quote]
I disagree that this pain is useless. I think it is great that engineering pushes people and is a big reason that engineers are so sought after. I'm sure this does cause a lot of people to quit, but it also makes those that stick it out that much better.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I am not saying that all of the pain is useless. What I am saying is that a lot of the pain is useless and should therefore be eliminated. The truth is, like I said, a lot of an engineering curricula simply doesn't teach you anything useful, in the sense that just don't NEED to know a lot of the stuff they teach you. </p>
<p>Furthermore, many of the activities that you have to undergo don't have much of a teaching component in it at all, and just serve to create pain. Again, look at the example I provided of the OChem lab. Nobody is actually teaching you how to do the lab. If you screw up and get a low yield, nobody shows you what you did wrong and how you could do better. You just get a low lab score, and that's it. So, really, there is no opportunity for you to learn anything. Hence, the lab basically becomes a non-value-added activity that just serves to waste your time while possibly hurting your grade. That simply encourages students to game the system to finish the lab as quickly as possible while 'doctoring' their yield in order to preserve their grade. Nobody is really learning anything. </p>
<p>I'll give you another example, again, from OChem lab. I know a student who once spilled some rather dangerous chemicals. But the spill was not obvious, and the TA was busy supervising other students, so the TA didn't notice. The student reported the spill to the TA about what happened and what he should do. The TA then proceeded to dock that student's lab grade for bad lab technique. That student then told me that if he makes another mistake like that, he's simply not going to report it. He'll just quietly clean it up himself, or maybe not even clean it up at all and just leave it for the cleanup crew. By the time they show up, he'll be long gone and nobody will know that it was him that caused the spill. But that injects a hugely perverse incentive into the mix. Dangerous chemical spills endanger everybody in the lab, as they might catch on fire, or somebody might accidentally touch it or breathe it in, etc. But the lab grading policy encourages students to not report spills, or even to not clean them up properly (because if the TA sees you cleaning a spill, he will figure that you must have created it and then dock your grade, so students are incented to simply do nothing at all). It also creates the climate where the lab TA is seen as not really there to help you do anything or teach you anything, but is simply seen as a malevolent force that is to be best avoided for fear that he'll discover a reason to dock your grade. </p>
<p>
[quote]
As far as those great CS guys that were mentioned, that doesn't really point to engineering being too hard. CS was in its early stages when they were in school. Most of them had done more on their own than the profs had. Those are rare cases combining CS geniuses with a not-quite-developed discipline which meant they didn't have much to gain by getting a degree.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I could just as easily point to the many current young people who are currently working in the CS and IT industries who don't have CS/eng degrees (or, for some of them, don't even have college degrees at all). It's actually become something of a running joke within Silicon Valley and other tech hubs to find so many highly paid tech workers who dropped out of college. The problem is that because they are young, they haven't had the time to establish a superstar career like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs did. But I am convinced that one of them will turn out to be the next Bill Gates in another 20 years or so.</p>
<p>But to give you an example, take Facebook. Facebook was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes, and Dustin Moskowitz, students at Harvard. The founded the company in their sophomore years. That seems to indicate, if nothing else, that you don't really need the final 2 years of a CS degree in order to create a highly successful CS company. Furthermore, of the 3, only Hughes actually finished his degree (and it wasn't even in CS). The other 2 guys, Zuckerberg and Moskowitz, still haven't finished, and it's highly probably that they will NEVER finish, but will simply drop out forever just like Bill Gates did. Makes perfect sense too. After all, if I was the founder of a hot tech company that had the potential to make me a multimillionaire, I probably wouldn't finish college either. </p>
<p>Examples like this abound in the computer industry where young people without technical degrees (or often times with no degree at all) are creating cutting-edge technology. I know quite a few startup computer/Internet/IT companies where none of the 'engineers' has an actual formal EE, CompE, or CS degree. Granted, most of these companies will die (as most new business ventures die), but these 'engineers' will then simply move on to the next company. They have built a strong work record with good experience, so they should be hired by somebody despite not having the "right degree". </p>
<p>My problem with the issue of pain is not that I don't think there should be any pain, but rather that there shouldn't be any UNNECESSARY pain. The examples of Facebook and of other such startups seems to indicate that you just don't need to know a lot of the things that they teach you in a formal CS program. For example, with less than 2 years of college under their belt, Zuckerberg et al knew enough to be able to found Facebook. A similar analysis holds for those other people I mentioned. </p>
<p>Hence, that seems to indicate that a lot of the coursework is simply unnecessary pain. If the courses were extremely difficult, but also teach you what you really need to know, that would be fine. For example, if Zuckerberg had to undergo some ridiculously difficult and time-consuming CS design lab course in order for him to learn how to really create a compelling web-based application, then I would have no beef. The problem that I have is that that doesn't seem to be happening - that there really are a lot of courses that are not only difficult and time-consuming, but that, frankly, are not very useful. Hence, it's pain just for the sake of pain. </p>
<p>I think a lot of the problem has to do with the split between the academic and professional worlds. The truth is, most engineering profs at the major research universities have never actually worked outside academia a day in their lives. They work on high theory in academic research labs, but that's highly unrepresentative of what most real-world engineers/CS people do for a living. Most engineers do not work on high-level research. Neither do most CS people. Much of what is in engineering/CS curriculuas is not really designed to teach you to become a regular working engineer or software developer. It's actually geared to teach you to become a future engineering or CS PROFESSOR, but the fact is, most students are not interested in becoming professors. That's why I say that much of the curricula is, for most students, simply unnecessary pain. They just don't need to know that stuff. If you just want to get a regular engineering job, as most students do, you just don't need to know many of the things that they force you to learn. </p>
<p>But anyway, this all gets down to a matter of national policy. The real question to me is, do you want more students studying engineering/CS? Obviously things can simply continue the way they are, with the vast majority of students opting to stay away from engineering/CS because they see it as just too hard and they'd rather study something easy. However, surely you have heard the catcalls from the government and from the business community about how the US needs to improve its technical and engineering knowledge base to meet the challenge from China and India, and so needs to encourage more students to complete engineering degrees. However, the fact is, if engineering continues to include all this unnecessary, time-wasting pain, then that will continue to discourage students from majoring in engineering. Get rid of that unnecessary pain, and you will have more students. I'm sure that a lot of people who work as software developers now, but never got a CS degree, would have gotten one if it didn't have so much unnecessary pain. </p>
<p>Now, that of course presumes that you really do want more students. Government and business may say that they want it, but do they really want it? I get the feeling that they don't really want it at all. Hey, if you don't really want it, that's fine. Just say that you don't really want it, and we can continue with the status quo. But if you truly want more, then some changes will have to be made. If the present state of engineering education was so stellar, then you would already have lots of Americans completing engineering degrees.</p>
<p>I think you are basing a lot of your conclusions off of rare cases. First, your CS example doesn't really fly in just about any other type of engineering. The fact is you do need an education to succeed. Second, how many people working in the CS/IT industry do in fact have degrees. I don't have the numbers, but I am willing to bet that the vast majority of people working in these tech industry do have technical degrees.</p>
<p>I agree with im_blue, combine a genius and a unique field (CS) and you can produce some great results. But for your average student, a degree is necessary to get anywhere.</p>
<p>I tend to agree with many of your points about useless pain in engineering curriculum and think one of the main problems is that the profs teaching you a lot of this stuff don't necessarily think it is useless. I think many would argue about the utilitiy of homework assignments and labs. Regardless if they are graded fairly or unfairly (because frankly they probably don't know since a TA is usually doing the grading) profs tend to see value in these sorts of things. </p>
<p>This doesn't even mention the whole ABET certification, another topic that needs to be addressed when discussing the utility of a curriculum</p>
<p>Organic Chemistry isn't really an engineering class, but I see what you mean in this case. Also, I don't know a lot about CS, so it is very possible that a large part of what they do isn't necessary. I'm not really familiar with the field. I do MechE and know that there is no way I could have done mechanical engineering without going through the rigorous coursework. I haven't had worthless classes like the one you have mentioned.</p>
<p>I know that making the curriculum easier would get more people to do engineering, but only by cheapening the degrees. I think the point is we want more people to have the passion and drive to go through today's curriculum but I don't know how to solve that problem.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I think you are basing a lot of your conclusions off of rare cases. First, your CS example doesn't really fly in just about any other type of engineering. The fact is you do need an education to succeed.
I agree with im_blue, combine a genius and a unique field (CS) and you can produce some great results. But for your average student, a degree is necessary to get anywhere.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Ah, but don't you see the problem with this logic? I agree that a degree is necessary - but only because the present hiring structure of the engineering world FORCES a degree to be necessary as a simple condition of employment. The degree becomes merely a credentialing vehicle as opposed to a method of teaching you what you actually need to know to do the job well. It is therefore utterly circular logic, which I think you yourself alluded to when you invoked ABET and the ulity of a curriculum.</p>
<p>I think Thomas Sowell said it best: </p>
<p>*
"The widespread use of high school diplomas and college degrees as employment screening devices by employers has led to a belief that increasing education will increase opportunities, and/or that the reason for escalating educational "requirements" is a corresponding increase in the knowledge necessary to perform a given job. The well-organized education lobbies exploit these beliefs to the fullest. In fact, however, educational "requirements" are often used by employers who are wholly unconcerned about the specific content of the ducation, but who regard a diploma or degree as an indication of the job applicant's willingness to perservere and his grades as a rough index of his mental capability. The educational requirements are a hurdle which eliminates enough job applicants to narrow the employer's choice down to manageable proportions. By making it possible for more young people to go over a given hurdle, society also makes it necessary for employers to raise the hurdle in order to weed out the same proportion of applicants. The result has been an upward spiral of credentials and requirements, with more and more young people being forced to endure more and more years of education that they do not want in order to quality for jobs where the education is not needed...</p>
<p>...Education has been seen asn an "opportunity", particularly by those who hae achieved success by this route. But any hurdle is a path to succss for those who have succeeded. It has eliminated rivals and left the survivors with a clear field. This is true regardless of the nature of the hurdle or its intrinsic merits. At differnet places and time the hurdle has been membership in the Catholic church or the Communist Party, a British upper-class accent and lifestyle, or being more adroit with a sword or faster with a gun. It may be very rational for the individual to cultivate the ability to surmount whatever hurdles scoeity puts in his way, but it is not therefore rational for the society to insist on a particular hurdle, much less to constantly raise that hurdle, at great expense to everyone." *</p>
<ul>
<li>Thomas Sowell, Race and Economics, p. 231-232.</li>
</ul>
<p>
[quote]
Second, how many people working in the CS/IT industry do in fact have degrees. I don't have the numbers, but I am willing to bet that the vast majority of people working in these tech industry do have technical degrees.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Nobody is denying that there are plenty of people in the CS industry who have CS or eng degrees. The question is whether it is really necessary. I choose the computer industry for a simple reason - because the computer industry has arguably been and probably still is by far the most entrepreneurial of all of the engineering fields in the last 50 years. And not just entrepreneurial in the sense that great advances have been made, but also entrepreneurial in the sense that you can start your own computer company with very little initial cost, as opposed to the large capital outlays you need to start your own biotechnology plant or chemical factory. Apple Computer literally started off as 2 guys in a garage. Microsoft started off as 2 guys in a a dingy motel room in New Mexico. Both Yahoo and Google started off as 2 guys in a basement in the Stanford campus. </p>
<p>The point is, the computer industry seems to be one of the few industries in which a lack of credentials doesn't seem to matter as much Keep in mind that employers are really nothing more than middle-men - they sell the services of their employees to customers. The computer industry is one of the few industries in which "employees" can cut out the middleman and sell directly to customers. As stated by Paul Graham:</p>
<p>*"Any company that hires you is, economically, acting as a proxy for the customer. The rate at which they value you (though they may not consciously realize it) is an attempt to guess your value to the user. But there's a way to appeal their judgement. If you want, you can opt to be valued directly by users, by starting your own company.</p>
<p>The market is a lot more discerning than any employer. And it is completely non-discriminatory. On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. And more to the point, nobody knows you're 22. All users care about is whether your site or software gives them what they want. They don't care if the person behind it is a high school kid. *</p>
<p><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html</a></p>
<p>The point is, in most engineering fields, the way they are structured, I agree that you have to 'play the game'. But in the world of CS, if you don't want to play the game, there is another power you can appeal to, which are the customers themselves. A highly ambitious computer engineer isn't obligated to get a degree. He can create a website or an app or widget and try to sell it directly to the users. Hence such a person only views the value of a degree program only if the education is truly teaching him how to make better products.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Organic Chemistry isn't really an engineering class,
[/quote]
</p>
<p>It's not an engineering class, but the fact is, it is required by every single Chemical Engineering curriculum that I am aware of. So it's basically a "de-facto ChemE class", which means that it ought to be subjected to the same scrutiny that any other engineering class is. </p>
<p>I could have written a perhaps more striking example using Physical Chemistry, which is also a required course sequence within many ChemE programs and which has arguably even LESS applicability to real world chemical engineering. Seriously, how many working ChemE's out there actually need to know quantum mechanics (which is really what PChem is all about)? </p>
<p>
[quote]
, I don't know a lot about CS, so it is very possible that a large part of what they do isn't necessary. I'm not really familiar with the field. I do MechE and know that there is no way I could have done mechanical engineering without going through the rigorous coursework. I haven't had worthless classes like the one you have mentioned.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I'm not talking about entire classes that are worthless. Even I would say that certain aspects of OChem are useful for chemical engineers. </p>
<p>What I'm talking about is that certain parts of courses are worthless and should be excised. For example, most (probably all) OChem labs are worthless to chemical engineers. In fact, all chem labs are probably pretty worthless to engineers. Chem labs burn up a huge amount of time, and teach you little that is useful for an engineering job. They're useful if you want to be a professional chemist, but not an engineer. Furthermore, every engineering class inevitably breaks down into a morass of equation after equation, derivation after derivation, yet the fact is, you don't actually need to know how to wade through pages and pages of math equations in order to work as an engineer. Engineering grading inevitably boils down to who happens to be better at math, yet that is NOT how a real-world engineering job is like at all. Most real-world engineers will never derive a single calculus equation in their entire professional careers. </p>
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I know that making the curriculum easier would get more people to do engineering, but only by cheapening the degrees. I think the point is we want more people to have the passion and drive to go through today's curriculum but I don't know how to solve that problem.
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<p>But the problem is that the degree has ALREADY been cheapened by all those people who became successful in technical fields, especially in CS, despite not having technical degrees (or not having a degree at all). Everybody who is studying computer programming knows full well that the most commercially successful programmer in history, Bill Gates, never graduated from college. I'm quite sure they know about all of the other famous computer pioneers who also never graduated from college, of it they did, did not get technical degrees. Hence, a lot of the best young computer hackers and programmers of our generation treat a CS degree as 'optional'. In fact, I've even myself heard a number of EECS students at MIT say, with a straight face, that if they come up with a really cool new idea, they'll happily drop out of MIT and start a company to pursue the idea. </p>
<p>The point is, at least when it comes to CS, I don't think my ideas would be cheapening the degree any more than it already has been. It would just merely be validating what a lot of insiders already know - which is that the CS degree really isn't all that necessary, and a lot of developers see it as not being that necessary. </p>
<p>I'll give you another quote from Paul Graham:</p>
<p>*"I can't imagine telling Bill Gates at 19 that he should wait till he graduated to start a company. He'd have told me to get lost. And could I have honestly claimed that he was harming his future-- that he was learning less by working at ground zero of the microcomputer revolution than he would have if he'd been taking classes back at Harvard? No, probably not.</p>
<p>And yes, while it is probably true that you'll learn some valuable things by going to work for an existing company for a couple years before starting your own, you'd learn a thing or two running your own company during that time too.</p>
<p>The advice about going to work for someone else would get an even colder reception from the 19 year old Bill Gates. So I'm supposed to finish college, then go work for another company for two years, and then I can start my own? I have to wait till I'm 23? That's four years. That's more than twenty percent of my life so far. Plus in four years it will be way too late to make money writing a Basic interpreter for the Altair.</p>
<p>And he'd be right. The Apple II was launched just two years later. In fact, if Bill had finished college and gone to work for another company as we're suggesting, he might well have gone to work for Apple. And while that would probably have been better for all of us, it wouldn't have been better for him." *</p>
<p><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html</a></p>
<p>I'd debate that understanding derivations is useless. Most of the time, it makes it easier to understand the basis for the equations we use daily. While we could use them without this knowledge, we would not understand them or where they are applicable as well. They are not quite as useless as they sometimes seem. (I'll admit, I hate doing them as much as anyone else.)</p>
<p>Some of the things that engineers learn may not be applicable to the work of a rank-and-file engineer does. To be honest, a lot of jobs can be done with the basics and, in the case of mechanical engineering, some CAD knowledge. But a good number of people who are studying engineering DO want to go into research, be it in academia or industry. The system has to prepare those who want to be industry or academic leaders as well as those who just want a stable job.</p>
<p>I won't argue any of your points about CS. I do think that CS is very different from most engineering disciplines. I'm not really sure why it is usually lumped into engineering, as it doesn't seem to have much in common with the others. I don't think problems with CS can automatically be projected onto engineering as a whole.</p>
<p>What many of you have forgotten, is that education only gives you a BETTER OPPURTUNITY to succeed. You don't need a degree to be successful in your respective field, but it helps to have one (or more).</p>
<p>CS is a completely different beast than nearly every other field of engineering, I'm not really fighting about this.</p>
<p>But, your logic simply doesn't hold to traditional forms of engineering. You need to take a specific series of courses to hold jobs in fields such as Mechanical Engineering, which ultimlately fulfills a degree. You simply need an extensive background in nearly every topic that you study. In my summer internship alone I have used some aspect of nearly every engineering course that I have been required to take.</p>
<p>The finer details of courses, such as your OChem lab example, is another story. When it comes to teaching and grading, there are always things that can be improved.</p>
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I'd debate that understanding derivations is useless. Most of the time, it makes it easier to understand the basis for the equations we use daily. While we could use them without this knowledge, we would not understand them or where they are applicable as well. They are not quite as useless as they sometimes seem. (I'll admit, I hate doing them as much as anyone else.)
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<p>I am not saying that they are COMPLETELY useless. I am saying that they are a low-yield activity. I believe that the time spent doing many of these derivations could probably be better spent learning something else - i.e., touring real-world factories, or taking apart real-world devices and then putting them back together again. For example, in the case of ME's, having a class where you take apart an entire automobile or motorcycle and then explain what each part does and why, and then learning how to reassemble everything back together again - now that would be a highly value-added activity for many students. For ChemE's, take some chemical product that students are interested in (like, I don't know, beer or wine), and then have a whole class teaching how to manufacture that product efficiently, and then allowing students to tinker with their own chemical designs - again, that would be a highly value added activity, certainly more so than slogging through pages and pages of stupid equations. For EE's, do the same thing with, say, a television or a stereo. </p>
<p>This, I believe, would also address your previous concern of how to stoke more interest in engineering. If engineering were to actually teach courses that were highly relevant and cool, more students would be interested in it. Motorcycles, for example, are cool. So why not have a ME class that revolves around motorcycle design? Stereo systems are cool, so why not have an EE class that revolves around stereo system design? </p>
<p>I strongly suspect that a lot of engineering departments DELIBERATELY want to make engineering boring and impenetrable - to the point that they actually seem to go out of their way to make it as abstruse as possible. And again, I suspect that this is part of the perpetual hazing process of engineering - that because present-day profs had to sit through boring lectures, now they want to force current students to suffer through boring lectures too. </p>
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Some of the things that engineers learn may not be applicable to the work of a rank-and-file engineer does. To be honest, a lot of jobs can be done with the basics and, in the case of mechanical engineering, some CAD knowledge. But a good number of people who are studying engineering DO want to go into research, be it in academia or industry. The system has to prepare those who want to be industry or academic leaders as well as those who just want a stable job.
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<p>So devise 2 tracks. Let the ones who really do want to become future profs and academics load up with a slew of theory courses. But let the ones who don't care about that and just want to get regular engineering jobs take classes that will prepare them for those regular jobs. </p>
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I won't argue any of your points about CS. I do think that CS is very different from most engineering disciplines. I'm not really sure why it is usually lumped into engineering, as it doesn't seem to have much in common with the others. I don't think problems with CS can automatically be projected onto engineering as a whole.
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<p>I use CS as an example because the field of CS has been highly highly entrepreneurial to the point that plenty of people succeed in CS without a CS degree (or any degree at all). </p>
<p>But if you don't want to use CS, then fine, we can use some other example. Let's use EE then. EE too has had its share of wunderkinds who have flourished despite not having a formal EE degree. Probably the best example in recent history was Apple with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. They (especially Wozniak) personally designed some of the most important personal computers in history despite neither of them having a college degree at the time. Woz did eventually get an EECS degree from Berkeley, but that was long after he retired from Apple. These guys were just tinkerers in a garage, and eventually tinkered their way into building some truly excellent computer hardware. Would either of them have really benefitted by having completed a formal EE degree? Would the Apple II or the Macintosh have been better designed if they had done so? Probably not. </p>
<p>Keep in mind that EE is a much older discipline than CS. EE has existed as a formal discipline since the late 1800's. Hence, I don't think that one can argue that EE was not a well-developed discipline by the time that Jobs and Wozniak were in business. </p>
<p>But forget about Jobs and Wozniak. Today, there are plenty of people tinkering in their garages, creating souped-up stereo systems and amplifiers, or other such electrical doodads, with no formal EE training. For example, take David Wilson, founder of Wilson Audio, which makes some of the most award-winning (and most expensive) audio speaker systems in the world. He doesn't have an EE degree. His degree is in, of all things, zoology. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.wilsonaudio.com/awards/index.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.wilsonaudio.com/awards/index.html</a>
<a href="http://www.wilsonaudio.com/reviews/index.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.wilsonaudio.com/reviews/index.html</a></p>
<p>So hence, once again, I suspect that many engineering departments are simply not teaching students what they really need to know to become practical engineers, in that they are forcing them to learn things that they don't really need to know, and not teaching them things that they could really use.</p>
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But, your logic simply doesn't hold to traditional forms of engineering. You need to take a specific series of courses to hold jobs in fields such as Mechanical Engineering, which ultimlately fulfills a degree.
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<p>But only because the employers SAY so. It's not because there is any REAL need as determined from the customers themselves. And I think the reason why employers say so is, again, driven by politics. Present engineers at a company had to go through the pain of studying engineering, so they want other people to go through the same pain before they can be hired. But that doesn't mean that the pain has any INTRINSIC value. </p>
<p>Again, take EE, and my example above of Wilson Audio. I think we can agree that EE is a traditional form of engineering. Yet customers don't seem to mind that Wilson's award-winning speakers were designed by somebody who doesn't even have an EE degree. That lack of education hasn't seemed to hurt the quality of the speakers. </p>
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You simply need an extensive background in nearly every topic that you study. In my summer internship alone I have used some aspect of nearly every engineering course that I have been required to take.
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<p>I would contest this point also. I'll give you an example. I know 3 people who graduated from graduate school at MIT who are going to work for Boeing. Yet they all came from 3 different degree programs - one from ME, one from a program called Engineering Systems, and the 3rd from Materials Science. All 3 of them underwent quite different engineering curriculas as befits their different engineering tracks. Yet they all got hired to do basically the SAME job at Boeing. True, they're going to work on different product lines (for example, one will be working on the 787 Dreamliner, the other 2 will be working on 777 superjumbo's), but it's still basically the same job. </p>
<p>I'll give you another example. I know 7 people who left Intel to enter MIT for grad school (with 4 going back to Intel). They all basically had the same job - they were all process engineers. They worked on different products in different fabs around the world, but they still basically all had the same job. But what were their backgrounds? 2 were chemical engineers. One was Materials Science. 3 were industrial engineers. And the last one was, get this, not even an engineer at all. Instead she majored in chemistry. But they nevertheless all got hired by Intel to become process engineers. {Interestingly, not one of the 7 majored in EE}. </p>
<p>If engineering companies are hiring from a wide range of majors, in fact so wide as to include non-engineers (i.e. the girl who majored in chemistry), then that seems to strongly indicate that the company isn't really interested in the specific curricula itself. Rather, they seem to be far more interested in what Sowell mentioned, which is the pure market-signalling aspect of education. For example, speaking of that girl who majored in chemistry, she had a stellar career at Intel and was sponsored by Intel to go to MIT for grad school (meaning that Intel not only paid her MIT tuition, but also paid her a salary while she was studying full-time). So evidently the fact that she didn't have an engineering background didn't seem to hurt her. </p>
<p>Look, I'm not saying that engineering education has no value at all. But what I am saying is that a lot of the curricula in engineering is not particularly useful. I believe that engineering departments need to look at their curriculum and assess whether what they are teaching is truly useful and value-added or not. I still clearly think that an engineering education is more useful and practical than most liberal arts educations are (many of which are TRULY useless in the real world). But that doesn't mean that engineering cannot stand to be improved.</p>
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I know 7 people who left Intel to enter MIT for grad school (with 4 going back to Intel). They all basically had the same job - they were all process engineers. They worked on different products in different fabs around the world, but they still basically all had the same job. But what were their backgrounds? 2 were chemical engineers. One was Materials Science. 3 were industrial engineers. And the last one was, get this, not even an engineer at all. Instead she majored in chemistry. But they nevertheless all got hired by Intel to become process engineers. {Interestingly, not one of the 7 majored in EE}.
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<p>Having done "process engineer" work as a grad student, I'll tell you why this is the case. A typical integrated circuit fabrication lab course will enroll a variety of students, including electrical, chemical, materials, industrial, and chemistry, since not much EE background is required for the course other than a rudimentary understanding of semiconductor devices, e.g. the diode and the MOSFET. Integrated circuit fabrication is a broad interdisciplinary field; for example chemists could work on chemical vapor deposition, materials scientists could work on physical characterization, EEs could work on electrical characterization, industrial engineers could work on improving die yield, chemical engineers could work on molecular beam epitaxy and other deposition methods, etc. Now I don't know if these particular people's Intel jobs were that specialized, but I do agree that the companies are often more interested in your intellectual capacity than your specific course background. This can often be seen in academics as well. Among my peers, there are EE PhD students working for faculty in aero/astro, biomedical, mechanical, materials, chemical, petroleum, CS, and chemistry.</p>