Anonymous at Tue, 21 May 2024 22:38:38 UTC No. 16186903

>>16186854
No, this seems really stupid and myopic. Even within STEM rigorous engineering tracks cover very different material than anything you'd get in either a math or physics undergraduate curriculum.

Engineering at good schools also tend to have a very different approach to math education. When I graduated with my EE undergrad degree I was much more computationally adept and able to handle a wider variety of subjects than my math and physics counterparts (at the cost of having much less of a proof background than the math students and much less depth in the physical models we covered than the physics students).

Even getting rid of not traditionally STEM disciplines like econometrics or operations research would be depriving students of significant opportunities in very important disciplines.

Anonymous at Tue, 21 May 2024 22:55:55 UTC No. 16186927

>>16186854
Make it illegal to get into debt for useless degrees.

Anonymous at Wed, 22 May 2024 03:17:20 UTC No. 16187268

>>16186854
>Would you support universities changing themselves to where the only undergraduate degrees are math, physics or chemistry
Oh my Fauci I was just thinking about this. You should frankly include all STEM fields in this, there's no need for that much restriction. But I go to a school known for being great in engineering, and all of our stuff for undergrad experiments is from the 90s or earlier, we don't actually do any experiments with electricity or magnetism as an electrical engineer. Meanwhile the humanities college just got a brand-new building and the engineering building is nearly 100 years old and a piece of shit.

Anonymous at Wed, 22 May 2024 05:36:15 UTC No. 16187385

>>16186854
No, that's dumb.

What I would do, however, is significantly strip down core and elective requirements from college programs. The "well-rounded students" obsession has only succeeded in producing students who are sorely lacking in the preparation they need for their areas of study. As it is now, most programs have 40-50 hours of major coursework and 70-80 hours of core courses and electives. Even most STEM majors only go up to about 60-65 hours. The sole reason for this current balance is as an excuse to prop up departments that otherwise wouldn't survive without needless service courses to fulfill gen ed or elective requirements.

Students should be getting their core and electives done in 40-50 hours and spending 70-80 on their majors.

Anonymous at Wed, 22 May 2024 06:03:15 UTC No. 16187401

>>16186903
God, I can't stand engineers

Anonymous at Wed, 22 May 2024 06:22:59 UTC No. 16187411

>>16187401
Is that primarily your inferiority complex speaking or is there something else preventing you from going about your daily life unbothered?

Anonymous at Wed, 22 May 2024 13:19:16 UTC No. 16187816

>>16187411
Meadows by would he feel inferior to engineers? The course work in math physics or chemistry is much more challenging and in depth. Engineering seems to be just a lot of work to artificially make the subjects seem more difficult. The only thing engineers have is salaries over other majors. But the job of an average engineer does not seem very interesting. Just being some cog in some business doing mundane tasks over and over. There are hardly any engineers who are actually designing things in a creative manner.

Anonymous at Wed, 22 May 2024 15:35:49 UTC No. 16188021

>>16187816
I cannot tell if I just went to a very good school, or if I have been very lucky with my opportunities for research.

My undergrad engineering course exposed me to a large amount of mathematics at a pretty significant level of depth for an undergrad education (control theory, signal processing/Fourier analysis, some introductory linear operator functional analysis and optimization theory, probability theory up to WSS CT stochastic Markov processes, etc.).

Engineering seems to exist in a weird dialectical hellscape where on the one hand many engineers do basically nothing but excel spreadsheet work (if others perceptions are to be accepted) and on the other hand pretty much every major advancement in communications, information processing, stochastic optimization and control are made by engineers.