Real Life Examples of My $100K+ Education At Work
I’m convinced that in my job, I use 95% of the material covered in engineering school less than 5% of the time. Most of what I do boils down to on the job experience or falls in the category of project management. In many cases, not much would separate me from a talented hobbyist or tinkerer. Of course, this makes me question the value of my education. Why did I spend all that time learning all that stuff? I’ve considered it for a while, and I like to tell myself that the 5% of the time I really use my degree is what makes me valuable as an employee. In a tangential line of discussion, there’s also been a fair bit of talk in the news recently about the workforce, the number of engineers trained in the US, and why so many STEM students change majors. One line of reasoning…
Grad vs Undergrad Teaching Styles
Last semester, I started my first official school year off teaching a senior level undergraduate class. This was a required course that was, from my understanding, a softball in recent years. I decided that I needed to set a different tone for the class than what might have been set in previous years. Incidentally, that tone got me quite a lot of “not very approachable” reviews on my semester student ratings. I find that odd because I never turned away a student from my door and I answered emails all throughout the night. Shrug. But I digress… This semester, I’m teaching a grad class of my design. And there are two distinct differences from teaching an undergraduate class: 1) it’s a free-for-all on material and 2) I find that I’m much more lackadaisical about grad classes. I’ll expound on those thoughts, reverse chronologically because it makes more sense that way. Lackadaisical Approach…
Better late than never
Today I did something horrible: I cancelled my classes. I really didn’t want to, but my younger son had to be taken to the ER for some stitches. (He ended up not getting them because, after hemming and hawing a bit, the doctor decided it was looking fine and the stitches would be more traumatic.) But back to the topic at hand, I hate cancelling classes. The students are very unforgiving of late and absent professors, something I discovered when I was on a much bigger campus where I regularly showed up about 30 seconds prior to the beginning class. Apparently punctuality is actually lateness in their eyes. I remember one of my professors in undergrad who showed up about 7 minutes late for class once. We were all just getting up to leave when he walked in. My infantile (and entirely fictional) telempathic abilities picked up a huge,…
Warping young minds
I got a call last week from the electrical engineering department on campus asking if I would teach a class this semester. The class has the potential to be one of the most important classes that they will encounter in school. No, it’s not circuits 1. It’s University Studies. You see, our university requires every freshman to take a class to orient them to living life at a university. My sister went back to school when I started my master’s degree, and she complained to me over and over about how irrelevant the class is. There was a section on, for instance, talking to your roommate about making living arrangements. At this point, she’d moved out of my parents’ house and been living with someone for 12 years! The custom in electrical engineering has been to try to use this class for something better: what specifically do you need to…