Posted on 09/24/2005 5:52:55 AM PDT by ladyrustic
I am an engineering washout. I left a chemical engineering major in shame and disgust to pursue the softer pleasures of a liberal arts education. No, do not pity me, gentle reader; do not assuage your horror and dismay at my degradation by flinging a filthy quarter into my shiny tin cup. Instead, hear my story, and learn why the United States lacks engineers.
Not long ago, I showed up for my first year at Smartypants U., fresh from a high school career full of awards and honors and gold stars. My accomplishments all pointed towards a more verbal course of study, but I was determined to spend my college days learning something useful. With my strong science grades and excellent standardized test scores, I felt certain that I could handle whatever engineering challenges Smartypants U. had to offer. Remember: Kern = real good at math and science. You will have cause to forget that fact very soon.
I had three options for a chemistry class: the intro course, the accelerated course, and the genius course. My high school chemistry background made me a good fit for the accelerated course, but my academic advisor warned me not to take it. The course instructor was a legendarily incompetent teacher, even by the dubious standards of Smartypants U's engineering department. He was so incoherent and capricious that academic advisors were warned to steer students away from his courses. So why was he kept on staff? His research was outstanding. My tuition dollars at work.
Being too arrogant to waste my gifts in some kiddie intro course, I enrolled in the genius course. Memo to freshmen, wherever you are: unless you are a certified, card-carrying prodigy with a four-digit IQ, do not EVER EVER EVER sign up for a chemistry class whose informal nickname contains the word "Turbo." "What happened?" said the comment on my second test. I wish I knew.
In high school I had grown accustomed to math classes that featured clear, helpful instruction from teachers who liked to teach and excelled at teaching. At Smartypants U, the jewel in the crown of American academia, my math instructor was a twenty-something teaching assistant whose classroom style never deviated from the following pattern:
1) Greet class.
2) Ask if there were any questions about the previous evening's problem set.
3) If so, work out the problem in question on the chalkboard, without further explanation.
4) Repeat step 3) as needed.
5) Announce the pages in the textbook from which the next problem set would be derived.
6) Perform a sample problem from the new problem set.
7) Ask if anyone has any questions.
8) Give the problem set assignment.
9) Dismiss the class.
Total elapsed time: never more than 25 minutes.
Clutching the shredded tatters of my pride and dignity, I trudged to the office hours of my math instructor every week, seeking an explanation for the increasingly mysterious problems in the textbook. My instructor welcomed my presence as she would welcome the Angel of Death. Irritated? She was terrified. Explain…the problems? Articulate…the steps? Relate…the concepts? I would ask questions, and she would respond by completing yet another sample problem as fast as she possibly could, blushing nervously. I felt like I was on a Star Trek episode. "Captain, I think I understand…the creature communicates through multivariable calculus problems!"
I know what you're thinking, and you're wrong. She was as American as I am. Spoke perfect colloquial English.
Engineering physics was only marginally better. The harried teaching assistant could actually explain the occasional physics concept. But he made sure you understood that a poor grade on any assignment reflected upon your merit in the eyes of God. "If you get a 60% below on ANY quiz," he wrote on the chalkboard on day one, "YOU ARE NOT STUDYING HARD ENOUGH." I wondered what would happen if you got a 30% on a quiz. Were you branded? Expelled? Excommunicated?
The social-life-killing workload was the stuff of gallows humor among the three or four upper-class engineers who could still laugh. "Sleep is for the weak!" they bellowed, when gathering at the listless engineering parties. "Your underwear has two sides," they whispered, pressing their furry acne-ridden faces into the ears of bewildered freshmen. "Use them."
Reader, let us not dwell upon the endless problem sets, the wretched grades, and the weary nights spent screaming at my inscrutable textbooks. Compose in your mind a montage of quizzes covered in red ink, classes wasted in the stupor of incomprehension, and frowning instructors muttering strange incantations in their eerie scientific argot. And of the hands-on laboratory portion of the chemistry class, I will say only that I still hold the record at Smartypants U. for most failed attempts at that hateful titration experiment. ("No - not dark pink! You filthy godless soul-eating beaker! Damn you to hell!") They assigned grad students to watch me after failure number six. And I still screwed it up.
Meanwhile, my friends majoring in the liberal arts pulled dandy grades while studying little. "You just wait," I thought, gazing upon them like the ant regarding the grasshopper in the summer. "You party and blow off homework now, but in ten years, you'll be making merely wonderful money as investment bankers and consultants, while I'll be getting laid off from a great job at General Electric."
My first-semester GPA was the engineering major average: 2.7. But to a former academic superstar, a 2.7 GPA was akin to a public flogging.
I nearly fainted when I learned that I received a 43% on the Physics final. I nearly fainted again when I learned that the class average was 38%. A sub-50% grade on a science test is a curious creature, as much the product of grader whim as academic achievement. "Hmmm…looks like he understood a tiny bit of this question. I'll give three points out of ten. Or should I give four? Whoops…tummy rumbling…better make it three." Having allegedly mastered 43% of the course material, I was now deemed fit to take even harder Physics classes. I wondered: at the highest levels of physics, could you get a passing grade with a 5% score on a test? A 3% score? A zero? Could drinking from a fire hose actually slake your thirst?
Exhausted and demoralized, I stumbled into my next semester of engineering. My new math T.A. had all of my old T.A.'s inability to teach, but half of her mastery of English. One day in class I heard myself saying: "If I understood what I didn't understand about the problem, I would understand the problem, and therefore I wouldn't be asking a question." The T.A. stared at me across a void that seemed increasingly unbridgeable.
The course was called "Discrete Mathematics." Many people thought that the course was called "Discreet Mathematics." Wrong. To clarify: "Discrete Mathematics" is "the mathematics in which Kern was getting a D at midterm." "Discreet Mathematics" is "how Kern dropped that class along with the rest of his engineering course load and signed into liberal arts classes, all on the last day he was eligible to do so, because he couldn't stand the stress, abuse, and lack of comprehension anymore." No one waved goodbye to me at the engineering door.
The United States contains a finite number of smart people, most of whom have options in life besides engineering. You will not produce thronging bevies of pocket-protector-wearing number-jockeys simply by handing out spiffy Space Shuttle patches at the local Science Fair. If you want more engineers in the United States, you must find a way for America's engineering programs to retain students like, well, me: people smart enough to do the math and motivated enough to at least take a bite at the engineering apple, but turned off by the overwhelming coursework, low grades, and abysmal teaching. Find a way to teach engineering to verbally oriented students who can't learn math by sense of smell. Demand from (and give to) students an actual mastery of the material, rather than relying on bogus on-the-curve pseudo-grades that hinge upon the amount of partial credit that bored T.A.s choose to dole out. Write textbooks that are more than just glorified problem set manuals. Give grades that will make engineering majors competitive in a grade-inflated environment. Don't let T.A.s teach unless they can actually teach.
None of these things will happen, of course. Engineering professors are perfectly happy weeding out undesirables with absurd boot-camp courses that conceal the inability of said professors to communicate with words. Fewer students will pursue science and engineering majors, and the United States will grow ever more reliant upon foreign brainpower to design its scientific and manufacturing endeavors. I did my part to fight this problem, and for my trouble I got four months of humiliation and a semester's worth of shabby grades that I had to explain to law schools and employers for years. Thousands of college students will have a similar experience this fall.
So engineering is suffering in this country? It deserves no better.
But his observation is accurate: it is simply more economically sensible to go into another career than engineering. Unless that dynamic were somehow to change, and I don't see that happening, our best and brightest will tend more toward careers that make more money and are less subject to lay-offs. (Though I might point out to the young man that while the legal profession doesn't seem to have many lay-offs, investment banking is not immune to them.)
Well, I could certainly never be an engineer, or anything else that requires a good grasp of pure mathematics, but my conclusion is that our author needed to study more. I think he gives us a good example, in himself, of Americans who only want to do the things that come easily; and to be grandly rewarded for their mere competance. And yes, if that continues to be our attitude, we will remain dependant on harder working foreigners.
I think that Kern he is bitter because he didn't have the 'knack'. Verbally oriented individuals should become english majors, history majors, lawyers, etc and I commend engineering departments that weed out all the non-hackers, because if an english teacher screws up a sentence, you just have a screwed up sentence, but if an engineer screws up, a bridge could collapse or an airplane could fall out of the sky and kill a few people.
The probable truth is that the author couldn't survive on an average of 4 hrs of sleep per night.
Back when I was an engineering student, there was a legend about an old civil engineering professor who had a unique grading system. His tests consisted of four questions, each graded all-or-nothing. If you answered four of the four correctly, it was an A, 3 was a B, 2 was a C, 1 was a D, and none correct was an F. One student asked him, after a disappointing result, why partial credit wasn't awarded. The professor stated, "If you build a bridge, and it falls down, no partial credit".
I know that in good schools of archotecture there are more incoming students than the schools wants to graduate. The goal of the teaching staff is to convince at least half to drop out before the end of the second year. If you don't get the message in class they simply refuse to admit you to the upperclass courses.
If you find yourself at a schools that doesn't teach, look for one that does.
Someone set you up the test.
First day of class, the profs said only 2 in 3 will make it. It's tough, and it ain't for everyone.
However, I've found a great deal of respect based on the title. However, the one thing schools do not teach is interpeersonal skills, which for me is probably the most important part of my job.
I worked a night shift, and still managed to finish in 4 years. I was married and had 2 kids by graduation, too.
One of my profs had a single-beam balance for grading. At the far left (the light end) it started out with 'd' and worked up to 'a' about 2/3 the way. anything heavier than the 'a' was an 'f'.
I was lucky na d had all PE profs who were military veterans. We had no TA's. All my profs also hosted ASCE keggers at their houses.
Got a degree in maths, instead - silliest thing I ever did. LOL.
Ah, well. what we don't know as kids...
And the author of this piece knows nothing. What an idiot. LOL.
Oh, look - a chicken!
(/adhd)
So I switched to math.
Idiocy. I have worked my entire career as an engineer.
Oh, well, LOL.
I disliked the math stuff as well. Physics was better. Statics was ok. Circuits & thermo killed me. Structures was cool, and water (clean&dirty) was better, but soils rocked! I loved making 18,000 psi floating concrete, rolling clay in my hands to find pl, ll, etc.
My prof was a jokester and in class defined N value, standard penetrastion resistance as 4 wine coolers.
i believe you, robt. you are the smartest man i know. : )
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I think Mr. Kern here suffers from an inflated sense of self-esteem. He may have gotten great grades in high school so he thinks he's a genius and his teachers and parents told him was. So he goes into the real world where the rubber hits the road and he's just chopped liver.
The younger ones right now have never been told that they are wrong. They always been congratulated how how smart they are and how great a job they did and how much effort and so on, when usually all they are doing is barely getting by with normal involuntary bodily functions. They get out in the real world and it's an eye opener.
I'm not sure I would advise anyone to go into engineering right now, given all the outsourcing that is going on.
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