
Would-Be Engineers Hit Books the Hardest, a Study Finds - mikek
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/education/college-student-survey-shows-balance-of-work-and-study.html
======
jackularity
I haven't got a big thesis here but I'm skeptical of the notion that study can
be _hard_.

Bringing your mind gently back to a topic again and again (until thoughts
arise which make it clear, or giving up if they don't) isn't intrinsically
hard in the sense that shovelling coal is hard.

What seems to make it hard is the belief that learning hurts, and fearing
about one's future, which comes largely from the legacy of being continually
graded and assessed at school (as if knowledge could ever be measured!)

Fearing that study is hard seems to make it hard. And this makes it easy to be
distracted by other interesting ideas upon which one _isn't_ being assessed.
Also drinking, partying, and other typical student pursuits (which are in fact
quite straightforwardly boring if you try to take them seriously).

The intellectuals and scientists that came up with the knowledge in the first
place didn't find it hard. They were essentially determined to have a good
time. Fortunately nobody was there at the time to check whether they were
doing it right.

------
selamattidur
Does all the study do much for you engineers when it comes to your careers?

When I was an undergrad (warning: liberal arts majors), I had a lot of friends
who were engineering students. I asked one if all the study was all that
relevant. He said once he was in the workforce, he wouldn't need to have every
little thing he learned memorized because he'd have manuals to consult and
pull off the shelf when he had a problem he couldn't solve on his own. Another
engineering friend seemed way more energized by the assignments where he had
to come up with an actual solution to a real problem, in contrast to cramming
all night for some horrendously difficult timed test.

So is all the ceaseless studying of engineers really just an effort to weed
out those who are not diligent?

~~~
Game_Ender
No, it is important for you to get a good grasp of the fundamentals. Even if
you consult references, like everyone does, without a strong background in the
material you will have trouble applying what's in that material.

When I say "fundamentals" it really covers almost the entire engineering
undergraduate curriculum. There is so much you need to know in engineering
before you can start doing anything of value in the "real world". Most people
learn those things in their first few years on the job or in graduate school.

~~~
selamattidur
Certainly I agree that one cannot succeed in one's field without deep
knowledge of the fundamentals. I just wonder if constant cramming for exams is
the best way to attain that knowledge, in place of exercises that actually
attempt to apply knowledge as it's learned.

And I'm willing to acknowledge that perhaps I'm not giving enough credit to
contemporary engineering curricula, in which much of that 'study' time might
be devoted to problem-solving exercises in place of preparing for tests of
one's memory.

~~~
tikhonj
In my experience, none of the class I (an EECS major) or any of my engineering
friends take involve much memorization. The involve understanding a few
concepts _very_ thoroughly and being able to creatively solve problems that
combine these ideas in really weird ways.

In fact, all of my classes allow at least one sheet of notes to all the exams
and I've even had one class that was entirely open-book. Additionally, the
graders tend to be rather forgiving for details--thinking consistently is more
important.

Even though an engineering degree might be harder and involve more work than
something like Political Science or History, the latter two require much more
reading and memorizing.

~~~
demallien
Nevertheless, unless your school is a lot different to the one I went to,
there is certainly a lot of memorisation that can be done. You can rote learn
the technique for solving a particular problem, just grinding through the
steps, without ever really understanding what you are doing. You'll get good
scores in most tests, as the tests tend to resemble the practice exams that
you no doubt did, but you won't be much use in the real world.

But this doesn't always hold. I remember one class where all of the practice
exercises on op-amps were done using an idealised model of the op-amp, without
having to worry about things like resistance/capacitance in the op-amp. Then
on the day of the test, the professor ran a whole series of questions using
op-amps with more realistic characteristics. A huge percentage of the class
crashed and burned, because they had just rote learned solutions to problems,
but the problems in the exam did not resemble the practice problems. It did
however resemble the material that had been taught in class. Those that put
more emphasis on understanding what the lecturer was saying than on how to do
tutorial problems aced the test. We ended up with a bi-modal result - you
either got about 95% for the test (if you understood the principles, the
questions were actually very easy), or you got about 15% if you had just
learned how to do the practice problems.

The thing that really made that test stand out for me was what it meant in the
real world. I went to a military academy, and after graduation we all had to
work in uniform for the next 5 or so years, so you got to see how the
engineers that got 15% and how the engineers that got 95% in that test fared.
It turns out that those getting by on memorisation turned out to be terrible
engineers, a fact that I found quite frustrating whilst getting my degree,
because their tactic actually worked exceptionally well for most exams. There
were only a couple, like the exam I mentioned above, that really cost them
dearly.

So, be aware that even if you aren't going down the memorisation route (and I
agree with you, engineering _should_ be all about deriving from principles,
not memorising tricks), there are others around you that are not doing this.
You'll meet those people in your professional life afterwards, and they won't
be able to engineer their way out of a wet paper bag, but they will have the
same diploma hanging on the wall as you.

