As others have said, its a nuclear engineering technology education (as an enlistee, anyway). We did use rudimentary calculus, in the form of graphical methods. Given a strip-chart of x(t), and some nonlinear ODE y' = f(x), the student is expected to be able to draw a reasonable approximation of y(t). You get quite a bit of practice with specific ODE's of interest to the power plant, too.
