I’d also suggest that some people consider taking 5 years to get the 4 year degree. Manage how you take courses.
Another thing to consider is co-op. It will take 5 or 6 years but they do better also… And you will make money and not have as much debt when graduating.
I was going to try and get a masters, 3 specializations (only need 2) and a minor in 4 years, I decided to extend it to 4.5, drop my credits from 18+ to about 16 a semester and add study abroad. Worth it to me.
I came in a similar situation to you. Statics is I think the only engineering class I’ve taken in my college career that was not curved, and RPI is known for not inflating grades. It looks awful for the professor if they fail half a class.
There is only so much they can teach you in four years, and engineering requires a lot of theory. The current policy of teaching students a little bit of everything is a good one, I think. When you consider what it takes to apply every class, there simply isn’t time. I think hands on application is great, but ultimately it is up to the student to find these opportunities. If you don’t do something hands on getting an engineering degree, you’re definitely doing it wrong. It puts you head and shoulders above the kids who don’t. Real hardware has problems that just don’t show up in the math, and often times don’t show up in the CAD. Those unforseen problems are often the annoying kind that you have to solve on an engineering team like Formula Hybrid or Design/Build/Fly. You also get a healthy dose of grace under pressure and real teamwork experience. Colleges often like to tout their project based classes, but I found my working relationships during my internship to be much closer to the relationships I have with my friends on intercollegiate design teams than the ones I had in my group projects.
Mentoring is a huge deal in industry, and I think many college students miss out on this. Fraternities and Sororities are pretty good at this, I think there may be some good things to be gleaned from that model. I definitely benefited from having my DBF friends, in terms of schoolwork help and general life advice. That general life advice bit can be really important in college too.
I don’t think engineers are masochists. I don’t like it when things hurt, and I love engineering. I think that is part of the ‘problem’ and I really have no idea what the solution is. A lot of people just really never learned how to work hard, and they aren’t willing to work hard. I play hard, but I work even harder. (And if you want to talk about laughing at mistakes, you can watch the wing fall off the r/c airplane I spent waaaaaaayyyyyyy too many hours on for Design/Build/Fly in my signature by clicking on ‘whoops’)
One of the annoying things about taking semester(s) off is that many of your friends will leave, which can be kind of annoying. I think you get just as much benefit out of interning, and that lets you graduate on time.
One more thing to consider is the language barrier that seems to be a popular issue in math and science classes with foreign professors. In high school, I had people telling me “yes, you will have foreign professors, you won’t be able to understand them, and you will still be expected to pass the class.” My engineering fundamentals professor speaks English very well, but he still has an accent and there is still a slight barrier to overcome in understanding him. My classes with American-born professors and TAs are significantly easier to pay attention in because I can understand them clearly. I was fortunate to only get one professor with an accent, but some of my friends absolutely cannot understand their lab assistants or calc professors and are incredibly frustrated by the classes. Many first-year engineering students take the same sets of classes, and they are almost all weeder classes. While other people have posted about how bad those are, not being able to understand the professor makes a class that much harder.
Ian to further elaborate, I realize the classroom has its limitations on what you can cram in and often theory takes precedent over application. I guess where I think it may be lacking in some areas is the department and college’s push for students to get opportunities to apply their theories in the real world.
The honors program at ISU tries to get freshman into research opportunities their second semester. And I can say for the Mat E department I get at least 1 email a day that was forwarded from a faculty member because someone sent them an email looking for students to employ. I have a folder of at least 100 potential employers because there is such a push in my department and the university to apply your knowledge and do research or internships or co-ops.
Also I wasn’t implying engineers are masochists (it is sorta my way of joking it, one of the ways to stay sane when you spend 10 hours on a lab report every weekend), he is a mechanical engineer taking a materials course because it is required, it is similar to Akash liking statics and hating materials. There is that gradient of difficulty in similar courses when you compare the gen-ed vs the required one (eg Mat E for Engineers and Mat E for Mat Es) My friend is taking a materials engineering for non materials engineers or more of a “gen-ed” style course and finds it awful, difficult and thinks I am a masochist for wanting to go into it. Comparatively my Materials Engineering professor in my intro course is one of the greatest instructors I have ever had. So again it comes down to that gen-ed’s seem to be harder than the actual courses in my experience.
As for the accent part that has huge variation, I am used to first or second generation immigrants as they made up a lot of my friends so accents don’t phase me. But I know people who went to 100% white high schools in 100% white towns. As far as they knew, minorities could have been a myth/propaganda and here they are in a university where many professors received their degrees in other countries and possibly other languages. It doesn’t hinder me at all but I can understand why some may have trouble.
I am just curious. Does anyone have the statistic for FIRST alumni that successfully graduate from college with a degree in STEM compared to student who have not gone through FIRST. Or the drop/transfer out rate also?
#2 and #1 reasons that classes are hard and students drop.
They are hard because your teacher is not always ideal (did you ever think that professors aren’t really trained to teach?).
They are hard because they were meant to be hard. Not everyone was meant to be an engineer.
I got my masters degree from RPI in 1985 while working at GE in Pittsfield, MA. I had one more class to take to finish and I didn’t really care what it was so I picked a class that had no tests. The first day of class, the professor said the reason he doesn’t give tests is that no-one can even do the homework so there wouldn’t be any point. I survived with a C, but to this day I don’t understand why they would structure a course like that…
Neither are teachers
**
That may be true but I was always led to believe otherwise. I heard the opinion that I had stated from my teacher-mother, and I was always under the impression that many teachers took classes on learning theories and other classroom processes. I don’t know, as I’m not a teaching student.
In some of the talks I give to groups I ask “everyone that is a teacher raise your hand” and then I ask “of the teachers here, if you learned how to teach AFTER you left college, raise your hand”. Most all teachers learn how to teach after teacher college. In college they learn a lot of stuff, including a lot of learning and teaching theories. They even get to do an internship called student teaching. But the real learning comes later, in the class, after graduation.
In engineering college it is commonly the same. Learning a lot of theory about a lot of stuff. Really learning how to be an engineer often waits until after college, after a lot of work, and hopefully under the mentor ship of a good engineer…hopefully.
So where does an engineering professor learn how to be a professor ?
.
I can’t believe this section has not gotten more attention:
From the article…
“You’d like to think that since these institutions are getting the best students, the students who go there would have the best chances to succeed,” he says. “But if you take two students who have the same high school grade-point average and SAT scores, and you put one in a highly selective school like Berkeley and the other in a school with lower average scores like Cal State, that Berkeley student is at least 13 percent less likely than the one at Cal State to finish a STEM degree.”
A 13% higher success rate of graduating a STEM student should be investigated.
Berkeley could easily improve their “success rate” by dumbing-down their curriculum.
**
Or by improving services to students, such as better teaching, tutoring, access to learning labs …
Without an in-depth study of what goes on in the two programs, you can’t say why one school has a better success rate than the other. Nor can you say what the “worth” of the degree is to those who complete the program.
Yup. Or whether Cal State’s “success” rate is actually “better” than Berkeley’s.
**
This concerns me. I’m having trouble at a tough school. If my odds of success are better at decent-but-not-spectacular state schools, should I just go to those?
I’ve thought a lot about our current educational process and wanted to share a few of my concepts for revolutionizing education (particularly collegiate engineering):
Direct Competition - As we have all experienced within FIRST, competition is an incredible motivator. Properly structured, competition can both make learning fun and motivate us to keep going farther than we might ever have thought possible. MIT’s 2.007 competition is a perfect example. With regards to courses like statics, I could see integrating CAD products within physics simulation engines to create games requiring statics principles to excel.
Use Technology - Just imagine if every university recorded video of all the statics lectures covered this year and made them available to all the students. This would enable students to get multiple perspectives that best align with an individual student’s learning style. The students could then rate lectures and submit questions for topics not covered (or not covered well). Within a short period of time we would have a comprehensive library of lectures comprehensively covering the material and from a multitude of perspectives. A useful byproduct of this approach would be to give the professor’s more time to dedicate to game design (note that I’m not proposing this to eliminate the role of teaching but rather to recast the role of teacher).
Reduce Abstraction - Teaching fundamental equations and relationships is good but in my opinion equations need to be tied to a physical understanding of the world. Real-world problems would be used to teach how principles are applied and the limitations in doing so. Collaboration with industry would be a great way to bridge the issue with domain expertise.
The flaw with comparing schools success rates is like the flaw of saying that an apple is much better than an orange. Unless what their graduates come out knowing is the exact same (and it’s impossible for it to be, as the experience at a school is unique), saying X is > Y because of Z is impossible to verify because all the variables are qualitative.
I’m assuming you go to RPI? While a state school might have an accredited program just the same, small schools/programs like that excel because they’re focused on producing far-more-than-competant engineers, rather than just a bunch of guys/gals that have a diploma with a BS in [field] engineering because they got by on a bunch of C’s and some B’s while partying for four years. Yes, it’s tougher at some schools, because that’s the primary point of going to one of those schools. If the latter was the goal, then you probably might want to transfer.
As some one who recently graduated from the same tough school I can tell you that there are huge benefits to going to one of the tougher schools instead of a decent state school. Prior to graduating I had multiple offers from major companies, including some that were willing to hire me into non-entry level positions. I have friends who went to decent state schools (it should be noted that there are some state schools with extraordinary programs as well as private schools with poor programs) and they are were not as well prepared to enter the work force as I was. Going through RPI I thought some of the classes were crazy, one example, I wanted to take a signal processing class at another school while on co-op, however I could not find a class that RPI would accept because all of the classes at other schools took two semesters to learn what we covered in one.
I know I could have gone to a decent state school for a much lower cost and probably graduated with a higher gpa but I would have lost out on the Academic Intensity, Undergraduate Research, Professional Development, and Networking opportunities that a school like RPI offered. After 4 years in Troy, countless hours studying (often things I wil never use again like Mat Sci) and student loans that total the same as what my parents payed for there first house I can tell you that I am still confident that I made the best decision for myself and my career when I passed up my Full Scholarship to go to URI and went to RPI instead.
Sorry - Woodie beat you to it, here jump to the 26:00 mark to see super-produced educational material.