It Sucks To Be An Engineering Student
Slashdot has a discussion going about this article in Wired, Top 5 Reasons It Sucks to Be An Engineering Student. I sent the link to my sister, but the more I think about it, the more I have to say. To summarize the article:
5. Awful Textbooks 4. Professors are Rarely Encouraging 3. Dearth of Quality Counseling 2. Other Disciplines Have Inflated Grades 1. Every Assignment Feels the Same
This isn’t my top 5, but it’s not too far off the mark. For one thing, I never experienced #1. The assignments were monotonous at times, but never lacked variety. Often one assignment was a replay of another, but not that often.
I like to think that #2 is more true these days than it was in 1992, my last full year of full-time engineering school. There were always rumors of declining academic standards and grade inflation, but we couldn’t see it in our department. There were some serious hard-asses handing out the lessons - especially in the lab. Lab instructors weren’t tenured like the white-bearded wizards up in the department offices. I usually had a knack with the lecture material, so I’m probably the wrong guy to ask about that - those classes did sometimes seem to basic to me, but that was less of an issue as I went along.
Amen to #3. I never did figure out what Engineers did. That’s why I’m not one now. All I ever needed was a vision of my future that I could share. Most of what it seemed I would be doing was vaguely “missile guidance systems”, and I desperately needed someone to show me there were other paths I could walk.
I can’t remember a single inspiring professor at this remove. Mainly because enough of the non-engineering professors were so engaging. I had a really good experience studying Japanese - but that was my only real college experience, when I felt almost no pressure to pay my way or worry about the outside world, and I could bring a lot of effort to bear on one thing that I found rewarding. The engineering professors were like robots. They shielded themselves from you with TAs and put you to sleep in their lectures. These guys in my Communication Engineering class came to me once asking me if I would tutor them. “Tutor? - Are you guys out of your minds?”. It turned out that they concluded that I already knew the material because I would read a book in the lectures. If I was trying to provoke the professor, he didn’t rise. I was ready to field any snarky professorial questions. So before the exam, I was tutoring these guys on Convolution Integrals. I doubt they got much out of it - I was a little worried it was over their heads. They hadn’t the foundation for it, you could see it in their eyes. There I was, a 21-year-old, very worried about how people were (or weren’t) being educated. I guess I’ve always go that to fall back on.
Oh, yeah: I think I can explain #5, although there are no good excuses. My textbooks routinely cost $100 a pop in 1990. Other subjects didn’t experience that for another decade or so. The complaint in Wired is not apt: I never expected the textbooks to “inspire” me with design and color. Maybe that’s because I grew up in a house full of engineering textbooks. They’re not meant to be entertaining. Most of the textbooks that I used were precious distillations of crucial information. They were utilitarian, not diverting. “Interrupted by lengthy equations” is the definition of Engineering - what’s the problem? Moving from one symbol system to another doesn’t bother a student of Chinese. The problem is that publishers are going to use the editors they have - namely non-engineers. The equations often had typos. The books were well worth the price… provided the equations were correct. With the errors it felt like a betrayal. My bridge was going to fall down, or my circuit catch fire if I put my trust in those equations. The only bright side was the lesson in fallibility: Get curious as to where those equations come from and learn to verify what you’ve got. So much of engineering was contained in ‘cookbooks’ with canned formulas. Lots of people can follow a recipe, but that doesn’t mean that the food will come out tasting good.
Maybe I should close with a quote from the peanut gallery - ahem! - the Slashdot discussion:
Engineering education works perfectly; it prepares you for the boredom ahead of you.
Posted by Evan Bittner Mon, 24 Mar 2008 18:04:00 GMT
