<p>I agree with all the posters who recommended taking the most rigorous math and science courses available, but it is very nice if you aren’t a big history or english buff to eliminate some of those non-major college level courses with AP credits. Even if he could have gone to a higher level in calculus based on his AP BC Calculus scores, he opted to take a course that was more of a review for him so he could build a stronger foundation in Calculus – but was very happy not to have to take any more history as those requirements were met with his AP US History and AP government. In retrospect he wishes he would have taken AP English as he could have eliminated that course from freshman year as well.</p>
<p>Little Lee is leaning towards engineering as well. </p>
<p>Here are some sites for free online learning that include engineering related courses:
[Courses</a> — Open Yale Courses](<a href=“http://oyc.yale.edu/courselist]Courses”>http://oyc.yale.edu/courselist)</p>
<p>[Free</a> Online Course Materials | Courses | MIT OpenCourseWare](<a href=“http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/]Free”>Search | MIT OpenCourseWare | Free Online Course Materials)</p>
<p>[Khan</a> Academy](<a href=“http://www.khanacademy.org/]Khan”>http://www.khanacademy.org/)</p>
<p>OP - Your son should take rigorous math/science course (all types) and a variety of other courses. At Engineering colleges, there won’t be much time for humanities electives. </p>
<p>“Don’t neglect music and artistic endeavors” - I agree. DS thoroughly enjoyed his hs years. His IB courses gave him great academic prep, but his experience enriched greatly by his many music endeavors.</p>
<p>I’d suggest some computer courses. My kids didn’t have time for that. My music geek has found ways around that deficiency, helped a lot by his natural knack. The other one did not, but I think that was only a minor factor in the non-fit of engineering.</p>
<p>Humanities classes are useful, and it’s a pity engineering schools don’t have them. If one ends up being the type of engineer that ‘faces the public’, humanities provide an excellent conduit to their customers’ needs and wants. </p>
<p>One needs to understand not only the solution, but the social and economic context in which the solution was crafted for.</p>
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<p>A typical engineering bachelor’s degree program probably has about 15-20% of its course work in (required) humanities and social studies.</p>
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What “engineering school” doesn’t have them?</p>
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<p>You can usually get out of the majority, if not all of them, through APs. Good news for the kid who never wants to do comparative literature again!</p>
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<p>As part of the curriculum, I mean…</p>
<p>I would gladly - as a parent - pay for 5 year engineering school if only to add more ‘humanities rounding’ to engineering students. I usually get an intern from a Big 10 flagship state every year or two, and while they’re very good in the STEM’s, I’m not so sure I would feel comfortable having them face the customer or user early on after they graduate. A lot of it is what I would call general knowledge that a university should provide regardless of major. Courses like:</p>
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<li>advanced writing (proposals, documentation)</li>
<li>philosophy / logic (deep thinking skills)</li>
<li>speech/debate (obvious)</li>
<li>psychology (figure things out that are not always spelled out)</li>
<li>economics (not the engineering economics) & decision sciences</li>
<li>sociology / cultural geography (for dealing with people from all over)</li>
<li>arts (especially in my very graphic design oriented work)</li>
<li>music / media (how can you design multimedia devices if you don’t know this?)</li>
<li>foreign languages (obvious)</li>
</ul>
<p>: : : :</p>
<p>Again, it boils down to how rounded you want to be. After 14 years of college and 4 degrees sure, I’ve taken pretty much everything I wanted in both engineering and humanities classes. And while I’m sure I can find some dude in Elbonia to do my software work for less, it’s the ‘well rounded’ candidate that impresses me the most, someone who learned stuff and took interesting courses outside engineering…</p>
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<p>Technical communication courses are often popular. However, the literature-centered freshman composition courses sometimes turn off students who would rather read and write, but not analyze literature the way an English major does.</p>
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<p>Math with proofs will also do that. (This probably means taking the honors version of the lower division math that engineering majors take, or taking upper division math major courses.)</p>
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<p>These are probably among the most popular breadth courses, for engineering and other majors.</p>
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<p>At least in theory, a university student should have encountered people from all over in personal interaction with others in class, people living in the residence hall, etc…</p>
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In many if not most cases, no one doesn’t. In fact in some cases it’s counterproductive. You don’t need a team of people all with their own individual vision for the technology and it’s use.</p>
<p>If you are designing a defibrillator the only “social and economic context” you need to know is that the unit needs to sense an irregular heartbeat and stop the heart so its natural pacemaker can restart it. You can be given the “specs” it is supposed to operate at. I don’t do this, but I suspect you don’t really even need to know much about heart disease. </p>
<p>If you are designing a mixed signal IC you need to understand the inputs you have, the outputs you want and the various specifications you need to meet. You don’t really need to know anything about the “social context” of it’s use,</p>
<p>If you are designing a system to track incoming missiles and destroy them you don’t need to understand international relations. </p>
<p>If you are designing a protective system for an electric generating station, you just need to trip off the generators under the proper conditions - you don’t need to know the sociological aspect of it, and it wouldn’t help to think about it. Other people worry about that.</p>
<p>If you’re designing a semiconductor processing tool you only need to know the various actions it needs to perform - the recipe if you will. Heating things, spraying gas on things, zapping things with beams ,moving wafers around - that sort of stuff. You need absolutely no knowledge about what devices it is even going to fab in many cases.</p>
<p>You just need bridges to stay up and car engines to deliver HP. You don’t need detailed “social context” about the people walking on them or driving them. City planners or marketing people need to know this, but not every single engineer. </p>
<p>All of this contextual stuff might be of some value in coding for consumer electronics. I’ll defer to you on that. But you do realize that not every engineer designs Linux based systems for consumer devices? </p>
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Sociology is interesting but most people don’t need that type of knowledgfe in their day to day work. And in most cases you can’t learn day-to-day people skills in a sociology class. That’s not the purpose of the class.</p>
<p>The guy who owns my favorite restaurant is an expert in dealing with clientele from all over the world, and I don’t think he graduated high school. I bet most flight attendants never took a university level class in general sociology - they learn customer service skills relevant to their work. I suspect my gardener is better at this type of personal interaction than many university professors.</p>
<p>Another big reason for extra humanities is the prospect of working overseas… The more global the perspective the better.</p>
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My last job I worked extensively oveseas in Europe and Asia. Probably half the time out of the year. I don’t think the humanities courses I took were relevant in the least. Some of the engineers who worked with me took virtually nothing in the way of humanities and they were all out dating the locals, dining with families, negotiating for things. In addition to our normal duties. It was no problem.</p>
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<p>I did qualify my statement by mentioning the most popular use case - facing customers or users. </p>
<p>Having spent nearly 30 years in consumer electronics design and development, I can tell you that the quickest way to mess up a project is to NOT consider cultural, geographical, linguistic, or other such ‘soft’ areas in your product design. I could make the same argument for product design (Industrial design), Architecture, Information Technology, Service design, and many other ‘hard’ areas.</p>
<p>If you’re in the business of designing and making anything that the public will use (and I do not count power stations or missile defense systems as such) you need a solid understanding of who will use your product or service and how they think. In theory, we have customer interface engineers and marketing types to deal with the customers, human factors engineers (I am one) and industrial designers) to deal with such things, and software/hardware engineers) to do the actual work (I am one); but the upper layers of the cake don’t always understand the technology or the solution they’re selling, the customer expects miracles, and there many other factors (well documented in Dilbert of all places) that can cause a project to fail.</p>
<p>Sure, if you design IC’s for a living, no problem, or if you’re doing manufacturing processes, but overall, at some point in one’s career, one will deal with the public in one form or another. </p>
<p>What makes companies like Apple so successful is that they actually think about such things… At every level. As the cycle time for products gets smaller and smaller, it is likely that engineers will need to wear multiple hats and/or switch assignments often; so, if they see a spec or customer requirement that is silly (for any reason) they’ll need to figure out why, explain it up the chain of command, and fix it instead of blindly following the spec.</p>
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Since you insist on thinking that every engineer works at some sort of consumer interface level, let’s concentrate on that. Please give an example of a “silly spec” that you identified as a result of a college sociology course, that you could not have identified through common sense or life/work experience. I’d like to know which course that was.</p>
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Very few people can give a reference back to a single “college course” that allowed them to solve a particular issue. However, that does not mean that the college courses were worthless in learning how to deal with them. They often teach the old “think outside the box” philosophy. Or are you among those who believe that humanities/social science majors don’t learn anything in college that they couldn’t learn through “common sense or life/work experience”?</p>
<p>Common sense is not as common as you may believe.</p>
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I can think back to specific classes in my major fields and say how I use specific things today. I took a survey course in civil engineering as part of my EE curriculum and last week used the notion of moments to calculate a safety factor on a pole. Of course, I had to use the textbook I saved as a reference. But notes I wrote in it, and things I learned helped me understand the book when I tried to use it.</p>
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<p>No, I think it is valuable and I took a wide variety of general ed courses. I still take courses like that when I can. I just don’t believe it is essential to take huge numbers of courses like that to perform an engineering job. in fact, I know it isn’t. I also wouldn’t expect a psychologist to take classes in Complex Analysis. Or macroeconomics for that matter. It would be great if everyone could study everything, I’m talking about how much is necessary. How many science and technology classes do you believe an Arts student should take? Because turbo presented a pretty lengthy list of requirements for engineers.</p>
<p>I also believe you can learn to “think outside the box” without even earning a college degree. You can also learn valuable lessons in school, I just don’t think you need to take every course in the catalog to learn them.</p>
<p>And I’m not going to get into a reprise of this ridiculous “Humanities” vs STEM argument. If that’s what you’re interested in, maybe someone else will take you up on it. </p>
<p>I’m talking about specific subjects and their relevance to a specific career, not the notion that a broad based learning experince is good for all careers. Which it is.</p>
<p>Chedva </p>
<p>BTW - I fondly remember almost all of my gen ed classes.<br>
I took a course in Arts in Non-Literate cultures where I made a little wine bottle holder. We had to say how it fit into the context of our current popular culture, and I quoted the Chief from “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest” where he said that every time he took a drink out of the bottle it took a drink out of him I got a B becasue my artwork was pretty crappy. </p>
<p>I remember learinng about John Nash and the Prisonoer’s Dilemna in an economics course long before “A Beautiful Mind” came out. </p>
<p>I took a course in Spanish literature where we read Ricardo Palma and debated Borges in Spanish. Maybe that’s why I married a Peruvian lady and we still speak primarily Spanish in our house to this day.</p>
<p>I took many more. As a group, they were all valuable. I believe I was enriched by every single one. But if I had missed one or two I honestly don’t think it would have affected my career in any major way. THat’s what I truly believe. </p>
<p>Of course, if I haven’t convinced anyone that I believe life is far more than just career, I probably need to retake those communication and logic/philosophy classes I took.</p>
<p>Mapping specific courses to specific career tasks is what trade or technical school is all about… University education usually transcends above this level.</p>
<p>One may not need a psych class to tell them the difference between rules, skills, and knowledge acquisition in designing how a product or software program works, or the social/geographic issues involved with, say, unpackaging a consumer product, or the gender bias issues involved in designing voice based interfaces, but they’re all there.</p>
<p>Consider the old joke about the hapless coder who puts up a message calling “Illegal Operation”… Sorry, the user pressed the wrong button, it’s not illegal to do so for crying out loud. Or, “Operation Aborted”. Again, some people may not prefer this wording. These are all boo-boos I see in specs and have to address. </p>
<p>As you said, ‘as a group’… This extra knowledge and experience comes in handy simply because of a Gestalt-like synergy (oops, Dilbertism) where what one gets out of a number of non-engineering courses is much more than the individual contents of particular classes.</p>
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<p>I took classes in Psych and Abnormal Psych at a community college whiile a senior in high school. I can’t recall learning much that was particularly applicable to these issues. Of course that was 35 years ago.</p>
<p>I did learn something about this kind of stuff in Marketing class in grad school. My grad degree was IS and Decisions Sciences so I also learned something about Product Development in there someplace.</p>
<p>BTW turbo - out of the laundry list you provided, did you actually take all these courses in college? Psych, art, music, econ, sociology, languages, etc.? Because I actually did take most of them at some point, but it took a while and a couple degrees and major changes. More than 5 years for sure. A lot of people just aren’t in a position to devote that sort of time and money.</p>
<p>Obviously, I’m not an engineer. I remember way back when in the dark ages when no one outside of programming really knew what a database was. I was an attorney. One of our programmers came to show us how a database they had designed worked, and told us that we could use it. </p>
<p>When he asked for questions, I said, “OK, this is all very impressive, and I understand how to use it. But why would I want to?”</p>
<p>I got the deer in the headlights look. I’m sure he was very good at his job, but he couldn’t answer my question.</p>
<p>I now help design databases for legal practice. With 2 classes in programming.</p>