Weekend Journal — The Value Of School Lies In Opportunity
I’ve been pretty down on higher education lately. Rising costs that don’t seem to equate to raising educational levels, a large amount of mismanagement of funds and schools’ increasingly brazen one-ups-man-ship in terms of building larger buildings and offering unnecessary perks to students. I don’t like it. But I’m a bit hypocritical. I’m a graduate of an engineering program that taught me quite a bit, in buildings that were just a touch larger than they needed to be. Further, I encouraged my wife when she expressed a desire to go back to school this semester to try out a completely different field. So why was I ok with that? Access. In my case, access to facilities. Access to faculty capable of teaching me difficult concepts. And most importantly, access to co-ops and potential employers. Similar reasons abound in my wife’s case, though she’ll be taking many of her classes online,…
This class is a joke
Next week, I’ll be finalizing the syllabus for my fall classes. I am again teaching the university studies classes for the electrical engineers. My goal in teaching last year was to help my students develop good study skills and awareness about their learning preferences. I also attempted to teach them some STEM specific skills, like keeping a lab notebook and learning some basic programming, along with helping them try to understand what they were getting themselves into by pursuing a major in engineering. However, in the past two weeks, I’ve been inundated with requests from various people around campus. “Can I give a presentation on X?” where X may or may not be of interest to campus students, especially engineers. I have to admit that this is getting rather annoying as I have a mostly full curriculum. There are times here and there where maybe I have 15 minutes where…
Training Professors to be Educators
The Atlantic had an interesting article entitled The Forgotten Student: Has Higher Education Stiffed its Most Important Client? which parallels a recent Op-Ed in the NYTimes on why one former executive left Goldman Sachs because they lost sight of their client. I remember reading the NYTimes Op-Ed over breakfast and I thought to myself, “I really wouldn’t want to work in a place that wasn’t looking out for the best interests of their client.” After reading the article in The Atlantic, I think the veil has been completely lifted from my eyes. I guess I should explain that. This is not to say that everything in the article was totally foreign for me and that I have never thought about some of those things. However, I never really thought of it from the view that administrators might be failing their clients. For example, there’s discussions here and here on college…
The Art of Mathematics [Part 1 of 3] (by Carmen Parisi)
Some time ago while stumbling around online I came across a rather interesting essay about the state of mathematical education. Entitled A Mathematician’s Lament, it was written back in 2002 by Paul Lockhart who argues that there is next to no real math being taught at the K-12 level. His essay calls for a radical reform of the educational system to change the way the public perceives mathematics. Years later in 2009 Lockhart expanded the original 25 page essay into a 140 page book which is currently for sale. I find Lockhart’s essay to be thought provoking and though I agree with him on a few of his overall points, I take issue with a decent portion of his argument. In what’s to become a three part series I will discuss Lament and include my own objections to Lockhart’s argument. A Mathematician’s Lament opens with the hypothetical world wherein which…
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…
Preparing for…everything!
I’ve probably mentioned before how I never intended to get a degree in engineering. I started college with the notion of being a research scientist, but initially decided I wasn’t scientist material. I spent a couple years switching through various majors and ended up in journalism for a while. I managed to even bag a couple awards for my writing. Fortunately, I ended up being second in line for a journalism position, and when I didn’t get it, decided that I missed physics and should go back to school. One unexpected side effect of this detour in my education is that I got a lot of very valuable experience writing. I didn’t realize it until much later, but a lot of science and engineering revolves around writing, and that background, as useless as it seemed at the time, has come in very handy. As an undergrad back in physics, I…
Imaginary STEM labor shortage
The only thing worse than training employees and losing them is not training employees and keeping them. Zig Ziglar Back when the economy wasn’t in the dumpster, I was talking to a friend who works at one of those Internet (with a capital I) companies. He was complaining about their inability to find people with the right qualifications. After spending time talking with him, I ascertained that what his company really wanted was for someone in the same position at a different company to be laid off so that they could hire them. His company had a very exacting list of qualifications and wasn’t willing to train any potential employees. They wanted someone off the shelf, so to speak, and weren’t going to take anyone without those qualifications. On the other hand, they would wait months rather than train the employees themselves. It didn’t make much sense to me at the time. FrauTech has…
Comprehensive Exams and Curves
As you can see from the mean (47) and standard deviation (22) of my comprehensive exam results, the numbers are a lot lower than I expected. I thought the exam would be tough, fair, but tough. I did get comments from students saying things like that but nevertheless, the numbers are lower than expected and basically show more than 23rds of the class would be failing. I mentioned a few weeks ago at GEARS that grades in engineering programs are skewing towards the 80-90 range. I would prefer a system that grades 0-100 (0r 0-10) where above a 50% is passing. While that won’t fly academically, it’s probably a true representation of the material learned by the average student. But because educators must deal with this grade inflation and dissatisfied students in a course are more likely to write negative reviews than satisfied students writing positive reviews, this presents a significant problem.…
Pace of Grad School
Currently, I’m out of town attending a workshop with some very specialized people in an area in which I’m trying to make inroads. And while I won’t bore you with the details (I knew people could have such levels of nuance), I will share with you a comment that I heard over drinks. Let me paint the picture for you a little bit first. I was having a discussion with someone very high up in the food chain about current/potential/future projects. This person asked a very specific technical question related to the problem, something that would mean significant money for the company that person represents if possible. I, wanting to hold on to my ideas, remained steadfast with a response like “Talk to me in 18 months when we have it working in the lab.” This is basically a nice way of saying like hell I’m going to let you…
Mixed signals
While I would really have loved the title to be a pun on signal processing, I have to admit that today’s post is not about that esteemed branch of electrical engineering. Instead, I’m going to talk about mixed messages I’ve been receiving. I had some colleagues from our university career center come and speak to students last week about the services they offer. Recently, the career center held a job fair, and one of the speakers said that many of the companies asked her where all the electrical engineers were. Apparently, the midwest has really had some serious job growth since the economic downturn in 2008, and there just aren’t enough students for internships and maybe even jobs. While I appreciate that being the perspective from a career counselor, I spent a bit of time looking over the engineering entry in the occupational outlook handbook compiled by the Bureau of Labor…