I tried looking up the graduation rate for EE at my school, but couldn't find anything conclusive. For one thing, there are 3 times as many seniors as there are freshman. I can think of several reasons for this, but it says nothing about how many of those freshman make it. By mere observation, however, I think that about half of the people in my freshman engineering class made it past the second year. Most of my friends are around the same place I am. At this point, nearly everyone talks about changing majors next semester, but we've all come too far to turn back now.
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Originally Posted by Gdeaver
At some time in college there is a change from learning the basic tools to solve problems to actually solving real world problems. Not all colleges address this well but colleges that do usually have a couple killer courses where they make this transition and they hit it hard.
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Now that you mention it, I just realized that my school does that. Last semester, I was learning some math, learning some physics, and doing some stuff with fairly simple circuits. This semester, I'm suddenly trying to figure out whether or not the sample of germanium that was thrown at me would be suitable for aerospace purposes. I also took digital design, which, obviously, is geared toward being able to apply what we're learning. One of the questions on my Materials test actually asked me why InP is used in high frequency electronics. He never explicitly went over it in class, but there was enough data in the charts that were given to us to figure it out and the previous question hinted at it. There was this sudden shift from collecting knowledge to being able to apply it. Even if we don't have to do so directly, all of the classes that I'm taking now are geared toward knowing how this knowledge is used in the real world.
My Digital Design professor mentioned an important point though. He admitted that we are being taught a lot of information very quickly. On one occassion, he made it apparent that if he were taking the class, he'd probably have as much trouble as us. He claims that the reason for this is that the curriculum is designed for transfer students. My school has a lot of people transfering in from community colleges. He said that, ideally, we would have learned some of this material a few semesters ago so that we wouldn't have to learn so much right now. I'm not convinced that this is the whole reason though.
I had to take four semesters of physics, four semesters of math, and a handful of liberal arts classes. That was already full time right there. In order to add extra engineering classes, other lower division classes (i.e. liberal arts) would have to get cut out. They already cut out several liberal arts classes for engineers and we still have to take more classes than everyone else. I can only think of three of these classes that could be cut. The others, like english and history, are probably just as important as thermodynamics and electromagnetics.
There's just too much to try and learn in four or five years. I think that the only way to make it easier would be to spread it out by making it longer. A lot of people wouldn't be too happy about this, but it might be the only way to fit all of this in without driving engineers-to-be to the brink of insanity.