Is Our Education System Failing Students?

[Angry Citizen]

Only on special occasions are there lectures/HW that stress the derivations/theory of the topic, and those are the lectures where most of my friends say "Well, that was a waste of time."

Really? Here in aerospaceland, the majority of lectures are devoted to theory/derivations. I love every minute of it because the assumptions and simplifications are laid bare, and I know when applying the equations is possible. *shrug*

 

[Angry Citizen]

So, are proofs necessary to use the formula?

It depends on the formula. I would damn well want to know how Bernoulli's equation was derived if I were to ever apply it. Bernoulli was a mystery to me in terms of applications until I saw how it was derived and where it came from.

I also understood and remembered integration by parts when its "proof" was shown to me.

But in others, no, I don't think the proof is necessary, particularly proofs just for mathematical concepts. Physics and engineering proofs are absolutely fair game in engineering.

 

[DrummingAtom]

Seeing as this thread began on vitriol, it's time for me to vent a spleen about this. You see the above from a lot of people on his forum. 'Engineering is not intellectually rigorous', 'it's not this, it's not that.' If you wanted 'extreme rigour' that borders on mental masturbation you should have done some sot of pure or applied physics.

Engineering is not about conceptually solving problems. It's about producing practical solutions to problems. An engineer requires a massively diverse skill set, probably more than any other profession. Engineering encompasses business practices, legal practices, marketing, management of men, time, budget and resources. That's on top of actually solving the technical problem.

Yeah, there are those pompous math/physics people but I don't fall into that category. Any STEM major is intellectual rigorous in it's own ways. But the only way I feel like I know anything is when I start from basic principles and then build from there. In engineering school, it's very stressful for that style of learning. I constantly try to learn that way but then get behind because that's not how it's done. I probably should be a physics major but it's too late now.

 

[DrummingAtom]

Really? Here in aerospaceland, the majority of lectures are devoted to theory/derivations. I love every minute of it because the assumptions and simplifications are laid bare, and I know when applying the equations is possible. *shrug*

Maybe things are different in aerospace, I hope they are. I go to a top 10 aerospace university so I know quite a few aerospace people and actually work with a lot of them too at my job. I haven't talked to them much about how their classes are taught but I do know that the stuff I had to learn for my job (Rodrigues parameters, quanternions and a whole bunch of control theory) seemed much more interesting than circuit level EE math. Lucky you guys.