Memorization for Physics/Engineering

[Dave Flowerday]

Originally Posted by phrontist

Real Engineers: What have you actually bothered to memorize?

I'm not sure if this is the answer you really want to hear, but...

I personally think intentionally memorizing anything is a waste of time. Everything that I need to know on a regular basis on my job gets implicitly memorized by repetitive use, and for everything else it's much more useful to just know where to look to find the answer. If I don't use something often enough to remember it automatically and I do spend the time to actually memorize it, what are the odds that I'm still going to remember it 6 months from now? Not very good (for me anyway), and even if I do remember it I'd still feel the need to look it up to double-check myself anyway.

I always thought that the memorizing thing was a big change from high-school to college. Seems like a lot of time was spent in high-school memorizing things for tests. Once I got to college, I didn't need to spend time memorizing because most (if not all) engineering classes let us bring in textbooks, notes, and calculators. I think the logic there is that it's much more important to spend study time understanding how to work the problem (even if you have to look up the formula) than to spend it memorizing the formulas and then have no idea what the formulas really do 5 years from now.