Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It’s Just So Darn Hard)
nytimes.com
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It was the soph/jr/sr years where it was very difficult to tie what you are learning to anything real and concrete. The worst part is that you are being asked to remember facts/processes/patterns for a test, then you rarely have to go through them again. So you end up forgetting most of what you learned. Since you didn't know what it was used for in the real world, you end up forgetting about something you didn't even care for in the first place.
The courses I enjoyed, I really enjoyed. At a school on the quarters system, you end up taking about 50 total courses and I enjoyed < 10 of these. My junior year I built a 4-bit processor on a breadboard using discrete parts for everything but the control system (fpga). This was one of my best memories because I understood the real-world applications of a processor and I got to sit in a lab and build it myself.
It's a broken system. It's a long grind thats not effective at getting you up to speed as a professional or getting you interested in your career. Its also terribly inefficient at improving your problem solving and analytical thinking. It still improves your problem solving/analytical thinking through brute force and I think thats a necessary process, but there has to be a better way.
If there was a way to combine the rigors of academic courses (to improve analytic thinking/problem solving ability) with the hands-on experience of vocational learning, I would be all for that. It is more applicable to software than some of the more traditional engineering disciplines, but I think it could work for all of them.
(admittedly my situation was poor because I chose the wrong major. I was an EE who was taking all CE electives and I moved into software after I graduated)
As for not being able to graduate enough STEM majors, ffs let's drop the jingoism and bring in more foreign students.
SRS are your friend. Remember, you will forget everything you will ever know given sufficient time. It's best to exploit study technique that take into account spaced repetition. Your skills and all the things you learn are like a muscle, either you use it, or you lose it.
Right now, I have minuscule amount of haskell knowledge loaded, ready to use when I am ready to learn or code something in Haskell. Once I learn something, I add new stuff to my Haskell deck.
I am at the point in which my programming decks are minimally useful, mostly because I have not memorize much to begin with. I think I was able to use them a few time in my day to day programming task. With a sufficiently sized deck, I would derive more uses out of them since there are more memory to draw upon.
I've used it to great success in a few classes in the last year. You really have to be dedicated in the first few weeks though, and not skip a day in your SRS routine. That first bit of grind really pays off down the line though, as you have to spend less and less time studying from then on. Skip though, and it'll come back to bite you.
This is the goal of lab/recitation. Taking the basic concepts in class and applying them to something you physical build/simulate to get the 'feel' of that design. Rather than making these as 'cookbooks' they should be exercises similar the homework to have a love triangle between hands on learning, lecture, and problem sets.
If someone wants to pay money to spend four years of their life studying Gender Studies or Semiotics then good luck to 'em, but make sure they're paying the full cost of their degree, preferably up-front. Underwater basket-weaving is a fine hobby for the idle rich.
I they want any aspect of their education subsidized, they should be studying something both useful and hard. Every university degree should include serious mathematical content.
What about the students who aren't good at mathematics? They're probably not benefiting from a university education anyway. Let 'em go get the low-level white-collar drudge jobs that they'd wind up in after graduation anyway, and let 'em do it at the age of eighteen and start building up some wealth rather than forcing 'em to wait 'til they're 22 with a net worth in the negative six figures.
This, of course, will never happen. But it's nice to think about.
In many cases grant overhead doesn't even pay for the cost of research; only the top-tier research universities are particularly successful at pulling in enough, and big enough, grants to do that (see this from Georgia Tech's former Computer Science dean: http://innovate-wwc.com/2011/05/18/if-you-have-to-ask-ten-su...).
The liberal arts, meanwhile, are so cheap to teach that in many cases they are actually making money, i.e. their expenses are lower than tuition fees, and the remaining tuition is used to cross-subsidize science education: http://www.today.ucla.edu/portal/ut/bottom-line-shows-humani...
Student loan debts are really a problem.
1. Investors would have more incentive to help students succeed financially, since they get a cut of the profits.
2. Students who strike it rich would, in a competitive market, end up subsidizing everybody else. Think startups: the returns on VC's money come disproportionately from a few successes, and this lets them invest in a bunch of companies that probably won't be big hits, to get the few that will get big.
Put it this way: if Obama waved a magic wand and said "Twelve months from now, anyone majored in engineering gets $100k from the Treasury. No questions asked.", I think you'd see approximately every college in the country debut a tiered pricing structure by next semester.
I paid for a good portion of my college education with external scholarships. Each time I scrounged up another $2,000, the university financial aid department said "Great! We'll decrease your loans by $1,000 and decrease your grant aid by $1,000." (My mother aggressively negotiated with them on this, every time, and got the clawback rescinded "as a one-time exception" something like eight times. I thought this was embarrassing at the time. I plead youth and stupidity on that.)
Let me stress that since Rariel brings it up below: nobody pays tuition (again, except non-US citizens).
People take out loans for extra money (the grants and TA stipends ranged in the 9,000-12,000 dollar range per year in my time, 1992-1997), but nobody pays their tuition. One standard joke was that we were so much better off than the professional students (Business, Med School, Law School) because they did pay tution. I never paid a dime in tuition and finished graduate school with nothing more than mild (< $3,000) credit card debt.
I have no reason to believe that this system has changed. Do you have any sources for your claim?
> This, of course, will never happen. But it's nice to think about. I strongly disagree. It's horrible.
Mathematics isn't the only 'hard' subject. What is hard to one person may be easy to another. I'm absolutely sure that you haven't even tried Semiotics or Gender Studies, and I'm also sure that the skills needed to study in those fields wouldn't come as naturally to you as mathematics does.
Also, just because you don't see the relevance in those fields, it doesn't mean that there is no relevance. Gender Studies, for example, has a place in sociology, psychology, politics.
And of course, wealth is not the ultimate objective of everyone. My peers who wanted to persue a scientific career certainly aren't loaded. In fact, those with art degrees made more contacts at university and many have managed to land well paid jobs.
Maybe engineers should be required to take an intense, no-hands-held Gender Studies class, if the other departments are required to take difficult math classes.
No, because it's bullshit. Bullshit can be made arbitrarily hard to understand, and it's generally productive to do so if you're an academic trying to justify your own existence.
I actually still dislike lots of it, especially the secondary literature (which is, I think, full of garbage), but it doesn't take that much reading in the history of philosophy to gain a basic understanding of what problems 20th-century continental philosophy was responding to, or to realize that they weren't all insincere idiots who somehow pulled the wool over everyone's eyes for 80 years.
I recognize that unnecessarily obscure language is a hallmark of academia and socio-political thought. I think tomes like Negri's "Empire" wallow in it. But what I'm referring to is what happens when you get past that, either as the reader, or as the theorist.
It is, nevertheless, bullshit, because it can not be meaningfully mapped back to reality. Its predictions are bunk, the framework it offers you doesn't work when pulled into the real world, if taken truly seriously it decreases your ability to make accurate predictions about the world and the people in it. People had centuries to polish the turd, even to find painfully clever ways of including little tidbits of non-turd in the turd, but it's still a turd at its core.
The presence of a few good tidbits in a discipline proves nothing about it. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to define something totally false in every detail. The question to be asked is how much truth the discipline has, and how well it can not merely assert the truth, but demonstrate it in a non-self-referential manner. Pretty much every social science in the modern era fails this test miserably.
Ideas that sound profound are a commodity, truth is harder to come by.
I walked out of university with a degree in engineering (CS), conversational fluency in Japanese, and a degree in cultural studies. When I think of moments of difficulty during my education, "Women can be black and blacks can be women, too, which complicates things, because the experience of black women is not the same as the experience of black men or white women. This is ignored by a lot of writing about the experience of being 'black' or being 'women.' That is bad." is not one of them. (This is the thirty-second version of Intersectionality.)
Do you really think that's fair. Don't you think that a snarky "thirty second version" of anything can portray that area of study as a waste of time?
That is, a field of study with a nigh-bottomless reading list. The more you can read, and the deeper and more varied your cultural vocabulary, the better your essays will be. A field with clear advantages for ability to read or speak multiple languages. That is, if you want to excel.
Some of the commenters here have clearly never taken a humanities class with a challenging reading component.
One nice thing about being the sole graduate in your subject? You win all the university and/or departmental awards in that subject by default. Looks impressive (to outsiders) but feels awkward.
For what it's worth, my two languages were Ancient Greek and Latin (I went on to study Classics in graduate school), so apparently, you wrote your comment just for me.
That was one of the experiences, besides the time I took French and had my ass handed to me by people who were also simultaneously studying other languages, that brought home to me the linguistic workload that can be part of a humanities degree.
Fortunately, where I went, that was common in engineering but not in CS, which had more of a "work smarter, not harder" attitude--- still quite a bit of work, and sometimes people pulled all-nighters, but there was a cultural difference in that people didn't see pulling all-nighters as a good in itself, some sort of hazing-esque badge of pride, but just something that, unfortunately, sometimes happened due to too much work, poor planning, or procrastination.
That's a bit different from the actual difficulty of the material; you can study difficult material without that kind of culture, and in the other direction, it's quite possible to grind someone down with piles of work even if they find the subject matter itself easy, depending on how you design courses and assignments.
That said, I know people who went to the same school middle and high schools I went to, but who were never able to get past the introductory algebra class I took in 8'th grade. Sure, some people probably got better or worse teachers, but I believe some peoples brains are just better at math than others.
Then why does the US look so bad at math? I don't know. I suspect that both of these statements are true:
1. Many countries have better alternate education paths for people who aren't that interested in college. People on these alternate paths are excluded from foreign statistics, while people who ought to be on them dilute US statistics.
2. Doing poorly in school is more acceptable to Amercan parents than it is to parents in many other developed countries. (Ironically, this may be because a lack of alternate education paths led parents to becmoe disillusioned with the value of school)
One of my daughters can hit anything thrown at her. My other daughter is more advanced than most kids her age at math, but I know that she has already learned more math than she will ever use in her life (she is in eight grade but is doing very advanced algebra). Her interests will never lead her to a career that requires more than she already knows.
The problem is pushing everyone to one standard, when they do not need it. It makes them feel stupid, and is a waste of time that could be used developing other skills.
*good in this context means AP level. This is not because AP is the correct measurement, it is because AP and the like is the measurement used to judge high schools
I think the intended preparation is actually really important. With AP the flow is Learn ch2 algorithm > learn ch3 algorithm>...> do well on test > not have to take calc in college. If you actually prepare a course for rigorous understanding, I suspect you might end up sacrificing your AP score somewhat for much greater gains later on. However, the system only cares about that short term result.
I believe high school students who take college courses can be a great asset for their high school for this very reason.
As a junior in high school I took college algebra at a community college in the evenings. As a result of the conversations with my math teacher, she made many changes to the subjects she covered in her pre-calc and algebra 2 classes.
Those program offerings are really important, they're like a parallel education track to public K-12. Now there's Khan Academy, the MIT and Stanford courses online, all kinds of resources, but you have to get motivated/gifted together with like minded ones.
To put things into perspective, there is zero AP credit offered at Caltech. The only way to skip classes is to pass Caltech's own placement exams. I took the first placement exam (after finishing the entire AP math curriculum, as well as the entire math curriculum at the local community college—through linear algebra, diff eqns, and multivariable calc), got a 96% on Caltech's placement exam, and was recommended to take an extra, remedial mathematics course in addition to the regular freshman load to help bring me up to speed.
A strange feature of the class was that the weeks where we studied derivatives were a lot harder than the weeks when we studied integrals. Although derivatives are a lot easier to evaluate than integrals, it's a lot harder to prove that they exist. Most of our problems were proving the existence of derivatives and integrals, not evaluating them, so it was a weird inversion in what is normally considered difficult in calculus.
If you want a sample of the problems, here's one of the problem sets from this year's class:
http://www.math.caltech.edu/%7E2011-12/1term/ma001a1/homewor...
(Note: I studied math as well as chemistry and CS at a state college so my background is a little unusual.)
Smart students with everything going for them get to make this decision:
(A) Dedicate their entire life at college to doing useless problem sets. No free time. No social life. No girlfriends. Spend all your time with stinky nerds drilling on useless sets. Then get out of school and make $80k doing the engineering slog. Max out your salary at $140k, 20 years down the road.
(B) Take easy classes while being a professional partier. At parties, have loads of sex and take lots of drugs while meeting many many people. Build up 1000+ Facebook friends and forge lifelong bonds with important well-connected people. Get your degree and use your connections to get hired for $80k. Have your employer then pay for your MBA. Max out your salary at $400k 20 years down the road, not including bonuses and side deal opportunities.
Phillip Greenspun was right. Unless you're a masochist or a social reject, engineering is for foreign students. A top American student from a good family has no incentive to do engineering: not lifestyle, not financial.
When it comes to software this is even more true because you don't even need an engineering degree to write software. Paul Graham has a philosophy degree and most of his wealth came from people skills: convincing Blackwell and Morris to hack for him, and later convincing young engineers to hack for him.
Steve Jobs vs Steve Wozniak is another perfect example. Woz did the work, Jobs got the glory. Woz stayed home nights hacking while Jobs was out fucking the prom queen and taking credit. Our society does not reward engineers so anyone with the ability and foresight to be a doctor, dentist, MBA, or clinical psychologist is not going to torture themselves.
Hacker News entrepreneurs are just a bunch of masochists who never learned that partying, taking drugs and having sex is more fun and pays better than writing Ruby apps.
If you're smart (and I mean really smart), finance is generally a good bet. Once again, adjusted for time input it's not great but it does have a higher expected value.
Just make friends with rich people and get them to hire you at their friend's giant corporation where their job is to undermine democracy and fool people. It's easy and pays well.
id think having a deep enough knowledge on lisp to fill two books probably had something to do with it as well.
Edited to add: I'd like to pose a question. I've always felt that math divided people into two classes -- those for whom it was mostly easy (or at least approachable) and fun and those for whom it was inherently unpleasant. As someone from the first group, it's hard for me to relate to some of the ideas in the article, such as making classes feel more socially relevant. To me, that seems superfluous. My question is, has anyone experienced these sorts of approaches directly, and how did they work for you?
#include <LockhartsLament.pdf>
(edit: differentiation -> integration)
Now can society can divert a bigger proportion of the few people that somehow got it to teach kids?
If this is the attitude in an elite school, I can only imagine what it is like in the public school system.
I'm jealous of other countries that work their high school students hard. I remember meeting international students that had learned all of my engineering college math in high school. Back then, neither me nor my parents knew that I could and that I _should_ absorb that kind of math, let alone how to go about doing it. It would be nice if that notion was more institutionalized in the USA.
Students would be better-motivated to take the challenge if they were applying it to problems that seem relevant to them. In CS, for instance, which is more fun: slogging through an algorithms book front to back, or researching the best way to solve a problem you face in one of your own code projects?
To answer your question about relevance: I made it through my undergraduate physics major not because lectures and homeworks were fun, but because I got involved in research early on. I found it much more fun to learn in the context of a project I felt a sense of ownership of.
At my school, the CS program was designed so that the Intro to Programming class and the Calc I class were filter functions: students had to get at least XX% in one and YY% in the other in order to be admitted to the CS program (and thus be permitted to enroll in the upper level courses required for the degree). As at your school, more students bombed the Calc class than the CS class.
There was no effort made at disguising the filtering function of these courses - in fact, when program enrollment was high, XX and YY increased, and when program enrollment fell around 2004-2005 they decreased (at one point YY was 50%, effectively meaning you simply had to pass the class).
The hardness of STEM was orthogonal to this piece; the focus was on how pointless the seemingly unapplicable dry list of equations and facts were to many students. This made it hard to continue the perceived self flagellation to little gain. They gave an example of a smart kid with an 800 SAT score in math who quit to psychology because his mechanics class was dull in comparison to the more active psych class. They also mention that classes like english give better grades than chemistry and math so people switch cause they feel they are doing better.
Their prescription is more interesting and interactive classes. That is a good idea as long as the essence is not lost to fluff and education does not degenerate to an exercise in marketing I guess.
Then there is the premium attached to integration into social networks. Wall Street bankers are scarfing down large chunks of the national income, more from government guarantee of leverage than productivity. Prices are signalling to focus on placement in the social network, rather than on productive work; and once there, to get good at predicting / managing regulatory intervention. The interest in studies orienting people to the political and social milieu shouldn't be surprising. Especially when these offer less risk of marked out as a loser by poor grades.
There is a premium for government work, too. It's less remunerative, but more secure, and has very high status, in many circles. The effect carries over to nearby careers like law, and journalism. Median income, housing prices, and unemployment rates in greater Washington D.C. all suggest that the worldly payoff for public service isn't bad.
So I worry that we're training less capable people, and encouraging them to think more about where they work than how they work. It can't go on forever, but a lot of folks will get hurt as it ends.
Calc I and II in university were difficult but fun. There was a lot of problem solving and very little tedious calculation.
I switched from a chemistry major not because it was difficult but because it was tedious and uninteresting.
Not the classes. The lab.
And as an 18-year-old I thought the lab was simulating what my future career in chemistry would be like. And so I switched to a liberal arts major.
Those who give the impression of finding it easy, I reckon tend to be either:
(a) freakish geniuses of the rare-even-in-academia variety (b) modestly hiding the fact they've actually spent hours and hours of hard study to push past a series of brick walls in order to get here (c) both the above (d) overconfident and heading for a slip-up (e) not challenging themselves enough.
If, early on, math is painful and frustrating (perhaps through no fault of your own), then that cycle never develops and you form an aversion to the subject.
In classes that have brand new or complex topics the teacher matters a lot. Intro programming and discrete math 1 were the weed out classes at my school. Many people failed both. I managed to get an A in the intro programming only because it was all old material to me. The now retired teacher was horrible.
I go an F in the discrete math course. On the last day of class the teacher admitted to being horrible and then failed everyone. The weirdest thing was I actually felt like I understood the material, but was lost on every test. I had alway done well in math until that class with that teacher. When I retook the class with a different teacher I got an A. The same goes for discrete 2 and every other math course I took in college.
Now, to your question. I don't think the classes need to be more socially relevant, but teachers need to figure out ways to connect the material with students. The problem is you need a teacher who deeply understands the material and cares enough to figure out various ways of teaching it. A good teacher is akin to a good artist. They can take the same base concepts and materials that every other teacher receives, but can weave them into a coherent lesson.
There's "culture shock" of being comfortable within the high school world where there's a lot of busy work but it's easy to get an A in any class as long as you put in the hours and can memorize a few things, even if you don't honestly understand the material. And then getting tossed in the deep end of hard-science in college where you have to put in enough hours to actually understand the material, not just do the busy work. And you have to be able to learn in class and learn on your own as well, because there's quite a lot of material to go through. For some people this is like going from George Jetson's job to digging ditches, and it's too much to adjust to.
Relatedly, high schools have been doing a piss-poor job of actually instilling mastery of basic skills like math, reading, and writing so a lot of students will come into college at a disadvantage. When you have, realistically, about one or two years (if not more) of remedial education that you need to get through before you're able to grapple with the actual college level material then college because a lot more of a slog (and potentially a very much more expensive slog) than it might be otherwise. If you don't have calculus, trig, and technical critical reading and writing skills nailed by the time you start tackling chemistry, physics, biology, math, etc. in college you will be at a severe disadvantage.
And finally, as others have pointed out there's the grade inflation differential. When your class work tends to be things like homework problems, lab assignments, and in-class quizzes where answers are either right or wrong then your scores tend to be directly numeric. Grade inflation is a lot easier in "softer" classes where most of the scores are subjective. Though that can, of course, vary depending on the school, but the average certainly seems to be that way.
So I switched to a fine art degree and now I know more about engineering than 90% of engineers that I meet. Go figure.
There's a catch-22 of sorts. If you got a bad education in HS and you get into a good technical college program you'll be in way over your head. If you get into a bad college program you'll be facing a lot of boring work with little meaning. The best case scenario is to win the lottery and have gone to a good HS and get into a good college. But even then you'll still have a crap ton of hard work in front of you.
- being pushed through a system that treats you like a number (In two years, I never met my advisor or received any guidance from faculty)
- having your entire college career already planned out with no wiggle room or a chance to explore other interests (until the very last semester where there was one free elective)
- professors who spoke English poorly
- classes that were taught straight from books with no added knowledge or insight
And the list goes on and on. For all those who managed to make it through, more power to you. But it wasn't until I switched majors that I started enjoying the academic aspect of college.
Actually even that is not correct.
It's harder compared to other things (Law, MBA, etc.) which can pay more and come with higher social respect, especially in America.
Obama wants to boost STEM; however the policy-makers and educators fail to understand the competitive disadvantage of "home-grown" industry vs. foreign ones; today, scores of Chinese and Indian PhD candidates and post-doc's are willing to take less pay and more hours for a shot for a green card in US and the respect of academia/engineering accorded to them in their culture.
Compare that to an average American engineering undergrad student, who on hand sees that his fine arts/humanities peers are getting laid and party more often, his law/business/medicine peers having greater potential financial payout and the opportunity to manage the engineers down the track - all the while he's suppose to be fretting all night long about problem sets. What a gyp!
Sad thing is US society used to reward engineers who invented things and businessman who actually created things instead of MBAs and marketing exec's - downfall of any great civilization comes when the focus of society turns from production to finance (see Holland, Roman Empire, Great Britain and US). There's still a few opportunities though in engineering to make good money, IMO just don't drink the startup culture kool-aid and always do your own thing.
It was something about the presentation and the sheer vast number of seemingly unrelated rules and regulations. I realized it took a special constitution to digest that stuff. I think I could have gotten it, but I would have had a lot harder time than I did learning about parsers or some other CS-y thing.
Law school was not hard. At an elite school, it's very easy to get B's in your courses, which won't get you on law review, but will generally land you a job at a top firm from an elite school. Failure rates are astoundingly low. I would guess 97+% of the class gets a B or higher, and failing out is almost unheard of (again, at elite schools). Lower ranked schools, from what I've heard, do grade on the harsher scale you mentioned.
My PhD program at Berkeley, on the other hand, was a horror show of attrition and failure. It was so much more brutal than law school it's completely silly to compare the two. My dept at Berkeley said that 40% fail to get the PhD, but that's not counting people like me who were awarded masters degrees and so are considered to have achieved their degree goal. I'd guess that the failure rate is well above 50% - and keep in mind, this is for a very elite program that is extremely selective.
Graduate programs in math, science, and engineering are littered with the broken dreams of exceptionally smart people. It's exceptionally unusual for med, law, and mba students to fail out at elite programs. It's commonplace in top PhD programs.
Funny thing is my husband did his UG in ME at Berkeley and that department ( and the College of Engineering in general) was a sheer nightmare. The unimaginable things that took place and the workload he endured (while working 20 hours at LBNL) blew my mind and that was just a BS. I can imagine a PhD would be insane.
But my point wasn't that one is harder, just that law is hard and it's not an easy thing to grasp because they ask you to learn and be tested in a way that is very non-traditional, at least in my experience. It makes babies out of people who thought of school as a cake walk. It was actually funny at times to see the emotional breakdown over their first B or C because they were so dramatic about it.
But I commend you on your choice to leave law school, probably smartest thing you ever did! ha.
Me personally, I had to unlearn all the bad crap my Physics teacher in High School taught me. It took an entire semester to get back on track but was well worth the hard work.
You can see how much harder Engineering and the Sciences are, from my own experience I thought getting my MBA was a breeze compared to studying engineering. Nearly everyone else struggled and worked their asses off, they had zero preparation for all the math and logic problem you had to work through. The solution is to force EVERY major to take a few REAL math classes and REAL science course so people have a solid foundation.
Maybe you should look into why nobody wants to do it. Like maybe the pay is too low compared to alternatives for instance.
>> But as Mr. Moniz sat in his mechanics class in 2009, he realized he had already had enough. “I was trying to memorize equations, and engineering’s all about the application, which they really didn’t teach too well,” he says. “It was just like, ‘Do these practice problems, then you’re on your own.’ ” >>
Engineers build things. So engineering education should have a heavy component of building things - that's what's exciting and motivating to engineering students. The theory should be in the service of the practice, and most classes get this completely backwards. So they lose students, and grump that kids don't want to work hard.
This is how engineering education was explained to me:
1st year: Well-defined problems, well-defined answers
2nd year: Less-defined problems (labs)
3rd year: Harder problems where part of it is defining what the problem is, more labs
4th year: A vague problem like design a plant to process X and produce Y
I believe the purpose of engineering education is to teach you effective problem solving. Yes,
You can truly call the creation your own, and if you really get stuck you can go talk with the very helpful teacher (or other students) and they will lead you into the right direction without directly giving the answer.
We need to give students more support, don't let them stress out and drop out, we need to be there for them. Sitting at home for hours staring at a badly written text book is not productive and burns kids out.
Now how we do this... more teachers? higher costs? Can maybe technology be the key to lowering costs while increasing support? I'm interested in working on this problem.
I'm a 17 year old in high school right now and having taken Calculus AB and BC (I and II) the teacher was constantly skipping material that I think was very important to have a general understanding of Calculus. Needless to say, I read the book to learn everything she was skipping, and I was also the only one who got a 5 on the AP exam. My classmates weren't stupid, they had just learned to solve very specific problems rather than actually learning Calculus. The very specific testing curricula hurt actual learning.
Another issue lies in the fact that (at least at my school) calculus and other high maths are seen as only for the very smartest kids. We need to change that. If students are required to have been exposed to calculus they won't be in as much shock when they get to college.
The availability of higher classes is a big problem as well. I was super lucky to find a public school program that allowed me to take classes with a community college, because otherwise there would have been no classes for me to take past sophomore year and Calculus I. I'm taking Multivariate Calculus next semester, and I doubt many high school students have this opportunity at all.
I realize that I'm in the minority here. Not many high school students have the opportunity to take Calculus III their senior year, and that really needs to change.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/national-science-foundation...
He's absolutely right, and no first year design project is going to fix this if the rest of the degree is structured the same as before. I think the bigger problem is simply that university is the wrong way to teach engineering.
I graduated 10 years ago with an EE degree (power systems major) and have worked in the field since, so I'm going to pick on EE here. During my degree, I was mainly taught theoretical models of electrical systems, interspersed with contrived lab experiments.
Very few 18 year old kids are going to appreciate the standard equivalent circuit of a transformer or a synchronous machine, less so more abstract things like Fortescue's symmetrical components. Because no kid has ever had much of a chance to look at power transformers or machines in service. Sure, they've seen power lines, but how many have seriously looked closely at them? Or maybe even asked themselves why there are strange, ceramic looking things connected to them?
So the first time I saw a real synchronous machine was in a lab. But looking back, it was really a contrived situation, with everything looking like it came out of a Bob the Builder toy set, alligator clips and all. You would never see a machine hooked up like that in real life... but only work experience has taught me that.
When I graduated, I was clueless. And in the intervening years since, I came across countless graduates just as clueless as I was. It's almost surely a systemic problem. I only met one graduate who really had a clue, and it turned out that he was a qualified electrician before he did his degree.
Which brings me back to my point - IMHO the pure university system is the wrong approach to train engineers. Their premise is that you learn the theory first, then apply it in context after you graduate (with some lame attempts at "practical" teaching in between). This works for some, but I'd wager that for most, it's a waste of time and you'll end up having to learn it all twice.
I would prefer to see a hybrid apprenticeship - university system, similar to the way you train tradespeople, but with more coursework components. The work is aligned with the study (or at least the student-apprentice gets exposure to real environments) and modules don't necessarily have to be done in a set order. It could potentially even be set up on a competency basis (like Western Governors University).
I don't know if this scheme would work, but I sure know that universities conceived for training academic researchers do not do such a good job of training practicing engineers.
A MBA is a relatively easy Masters, but I think it's relevance is rapidly fading.
I'm not bashing my degree necessarily, it's just that there are too many MBAs @ the moment. In the end, if you are interested in management you can do better by reading Drucker than attending management courses, or read Porter & Ansoff (side note: Igor Ansoff is great example of what I am babbling about) if you are interested in marketing, etc.
Whether or not the MBA teaches you anything, businesses still believe it does.
Credentials still have market value.
This is why the best MBAs are also the biggest partiers and social butterflies. Networking is far more profitable than learning.
I'm used to seeing students follow the money, like they did with engineering in the 1980's. I had to get a 3.5 GPA to get accepted to the EE program at my school. The school used GPA as it's valve to restrict students, which had it's drawbacks, but demand was so high for EE back then, they had to raise the GPA that high.
I also wonder if it isn't the calculus the keeps CS majors from completing, it's the recursion, pointers and such that really tied my brain in knots.
Likewise with EE, which was my major - I handled calculus, but eventually I ended up solving systems of equations with complex numbers and doing math beyond freshman calculus.
Of course, I gained problem solving skills that I use throughout my life and a career that's been great. I'm not sure how to better communicate those benefits to an 18-year-old in a way they'd understand.
Steve Jobs dropped out, Bill Gates dropped out, I believe Steve Wozniak saved himself the trouble of dropping out by never going in the first place... Larry and Sergey have big-time CS degrees, but they also aren't as famous.
Let's assume (apparently falsely, according to Alexis Ohanian's anecdotes) that PG is universally famous among techie 18-year-olds. PG literally wrote important books in CS. But does PG encourage everyone who applies to YC to get their CS degree as a top priority? Methinks not. He wants you to build something. To the extent that studying engineering and math doesn't feel like building anything, it doesn't feel like a hot new SV startup.
There's a big demand for software talent, but how are teenagers supposed to grasp that getting a difficult CS degree is the best way to acquire or demonstrate that talent? Especially when we're not even very sure that's true? On the one hand, I've got a lot of Ph.D.-trained colleagues in my job (though, perhaps tellingly, none are in CS) but on the other hand several of our most valuable colleagues have degrees in music or English, and others are too young to have a degree at all.
That position is a caricature - and completely wrongheaded, but it's not much worse than many of the statements here about Humanities. There is no simple move from "non-objective answer" to "easy", nor - even more - from "non-objective and many possible answers" to "anything goes random subjectivism". That's just sloppy thinking.
tl;dr If you find yourself comparing an entire academic field to a degree in basket weaving, you've gone off the rails.
A better question to ask would be to look into why those who ARE capable choose to do other things, like become Quants for Goldman Sachs.
Wringing hands over why those who were never capable to begin with give up isn't worth worrying about any more than we should worry about the clumsy overweight and weakling kids who didn't make it into the state football team when they got to college.
These may be considered not as prestigious as research, but they are just as valuable nonetheless.
I think one of the advantages of an engineering school is that you are all in the same boat with needing to get through the tough classes (and maybe are less distracted by business majors with more time on their hands). I had a tightly nit group of friends who helped each other get through the harder classes like signals & systems, cryptography, etc.
WPI is quarter based so there is intense focus on each subject over a seven week period. If things go truly off the rails and you snowflake it is possible to recover (with semesters the concept of failing seems almost inconceivable).
Of course, the article also includes Engineering, etc.
I started as a physics major, changed to computer science after 3 years. Mostly because I knew physics would require a PhD to do anything interesting, and CS would just take a couple more years.
Math wasn't really a factor, but there was of course a lot less of it in CS, as compared to physics anyway.
Point 1 is fixed; for most people, math is hard, and that's that. Regarding the second point, though, I imagine that there is a certain aspect of social engineering that could take place that would increase retention, without changing the curriculum at all.
I think STEM degrees should actively be subsidized a bit more than other degrees, even at the cost of other degrees, at state universities for a few reasons. First and foremost, they're probably the most likely to be retaken, and secondly to increase the demand and attractiveness of a STEM degree.
I wonder if this is a visible effect of the fact that the most "prestigious" schools typically hire faculty solely on their research record and care not one whit about how good or interested they are at teaching...
How many English majors would there be if everyone matriculated into college illiterate?
Math and science courses still give real grades, with Bs and Cs for average work. Liberal arts classes have been inflated at most universities, to the point that getting a C is essentially failure. People get this perception that math is "harder" because of grading skew.
Also, with top employers refusing to look at resumes with GPAs below 3.5 (regardless of university, major, etc.) it makes sense that people would gravitate toward the "easier" majors.
On the other hand, it was pretty much impossible to get a grade above 89 in an English class. No essay is perfect, it's always possible to improve an essay, so a perfect grade was never given out.
I put in a lot less effort than my friends in humanities and received much better grades than them. Many of my friends in Engineering dropped out, but the ones who didn't received excellent grades.
Look at Moniz (in the article), he bailed on engineering and went to an English/Psych where the classes are "a lot more discussion based."
In math, there are right and wrong answers. In physics, there are right and wrong answers. In engineering - where math & science hit the real world - there are "best answers given the requirements" but it's a similar concept.
In English & Psychology, not so much. There are points of view, interpretations, theories, speculation, and working models, but there are very few "right answers" and lots of "reasonable interpretations."
The impression that I got wasn't that he bailed for discussion courses because he was afraid of being wrong, but rather that the discussions in English classes at least gave him some outlet to feel like he was applying what he was learning.
There's a very weird death march of lectures for 2-3 years in some engineering programs during which you're expected to cram in a ton of knowledge but given zero opportunity to see how it will be applied in the real world. Compared with my own CS background it looks horrific; if I had been expected to spend my sophomore and junior years doing nothing but sit in lecture halls doing theory courses and "practical" courses in which I memorized syntax for programming languages, or facts about OpenGL, or the ISA of a MIPS CPU, etc without being allowed near a computer to actually build some kind of project using that knowledge, I'd have fucked off into Philosophy or English, too. At least it would have made time for me to make stabs at using what I was learning to do philosophy instead of simply regurgitate facts. But luckily for my future employability, CS isn't so lost to bad pedagogy that it's thrown out most of its practical learning opportunities.
My primary take away from this piece, and talking to people who have burned out of physics and engineering programs, has been that a lot of said programs are simply structured in a way almost guaranteed to try the patience of a lot of otherwise bright people who just wanted to feel like they were making progress towards being able to accomplish something more than regurgitate facts on midterms.
If I attempted to teach Computing Science to people by having them sit in 400 person lecture halls while I read K&R and CLRS at them for 4 years, any number of bright people who could succeed in comp sci would rightly get fed up with the uselessness of my shitty curriculum and drop out or switch majors. And yet a surprising number of Engineering curriculums are structured this way, because it's cheap and easy for the professors.
g) I think truly great teachers occur with the same frequency as truly great comics because both fields have something in common.
The rest of engineering is just an endless series of lectures, tutorials, and labs, with little relation to reality. Even when the applicability is obvious, the crushing courseload of your typical engineering program means you can put little of it to real use.
In the end I decided my "education" was more important than "school", so I actively sought to minimize the impact of some courses (read: I skipped a lot of classes) so I can give myself time to, well, build things. And thank heavens for that - I could've ended up being just another clueless engineering grad. Head full of theories and zero experience applying any of it.
Funnily enough, generally speaking, the people who aced their way through an engineering program were also the ones that spent the least time building things, and at the end of the day are the last people I want working on my team. There are exceptions of course - insanely smart, superhuman people who were able to ace the courses and find time to apply it, but they are exceedingly rare. Whenever a company throws up some high "minimum GPA to be considered" on a job posting I have to chuckle. They are probably filtering out the best candidates.
I had a prof (that looked like Santa Claus) and told us point blank that the half life of our studies was about 3 years and that his goal wasn't to focus on the facts but to make sure that we learned how to learn.
I mean, look: math is hard. It takes a lot more mental effort to solve math problems than it does to read books and do research. That's not to say that insight and hard work aren't important in the humanties, but the barrier is lower. It just plain is.
If you're taking a class to learn about 16th century west african colonialism (or whatever other "serious" history class you want), you start at the top of the reading list and work your way through. If you hit a concept or fact you're unfamiliar with, you look it up in your other books or wikipedia.
At no point in that process do you stop and realize "Crap, I'm stuck." In math (and the numerate sciences more generally), that's the normal state of things.
Math is hard. I think we spend too much time lying to people and telling them that it's easy, and far too little time explaining how much fun it is.
I'm trying to get over that now.
On the other hand, every humanities class I've taken, I've gotten the exact grade I have earned.
Now I lecture to physics undergrads who have never been taught calculus. So not only do we have to teach them intro maths techniques but they have never really studied physics - they have been shown fun and interesting demonstrations and given a simple hand-waving 'explanation' - but without being able to follow the maths you can't explain it.
I'm sorry but the answer to fixing the science and engineering problem isn't more fun science games in high school, or pretty computer demos of experiments - it's concentrating on lots of hard boring maths earlier and earlier.
I have an undergrad degree in EE. If someone could find a way to make today's undergrads learn the same material, but have a much easier time of it, why would anyone oppose that? Do I really need to feel bitter because I struggled but a whole new bunch of kids breeze through the material?
Sure, we don't want to waste time, but if the "fun science games" can lead to better understanding of the math behind it so much the better. I once used a weight hanging on a long string held up to my nose as an explanation of conservation of energy: "bet that this weight won't hit me in the face when I let it swing out and back?" "Why didn't it hit me?" "What can I change so it will smack me in the face?"
It's a "game," but they did learn something useful from it.
Two options - one is to make STEM degrees 6 or 8 years and teach 2-4 years of what should be high school physics at the start.
The other is to spend the time in high school teaching them the 'hard' stuff - when they don't have the option to drop out - rather than trying to 'interest them in science' by showing them only pretty/fun things.