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Originally Posted by Rick TYler
The moral, and I do have one, is that college can be a tremendously broadening experience, and might be the last chance you have to hang out in an intellectual playground where all you have to do is learn. Don't waste it learning to be a drone. Trust me -- most of the classes you take won't help all that much after you graduate, and no one will care in 10 years if you got an "A" or "B+" in a course. Focus on your education, not school.
And don't be stupid.
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I'll chime in again here, since I agree with TYler here. College is one of the most "free" times you have in your life. You've got time. You've got a nice intellectual playground. You've still got some of your youthful energy. And you hopefully aren't too jaded yet. It's the best time to explore and learn, and it's best if you make good use of the opportunity.
That, and even if you are the pratical-minded type, you never know when skills can be useful, and some of my non-Mechanical Engineering classes I took over the 10 years I spent in college (BS, MS, PhD) turned out to be some of the most useful:
- All those fun computer programming classes (programming gigs and sysadmining basically bankrolled me through school)
- Scuba diving (considering I spend a fair amount of time now working with decompression sickness detection systems, this turned out to be tremendously useful in addition to fun)
- Viticulture (I later ended up having a consulting client who needed some heat transfer expertise regarding issues in his vineyard, and I got the job since I was the only engineer he talked to that knew what he was talking about)
- Intro to industrial engineering (not a major course or a tech elective. I took this since it consisted of nothing but *lots* of factory tours. Probably one of the most educational classes I ever had)
So you never know what will and won't turn out to be useful (indeed, that "Design Creativity" core ME class was probably the least useful class I ever took...). So spread your courseload around a bit. It also makes you a more interesting and informed person.