<p>Boiler Up!!!</p>
<p>I spend 1 hour/credit hour for gen eds. 1.5 hours/credit hour for math and engr classes. I have a 3.87 and an active social life. Its not about HOW MUCH you study but HOW you study. You just have to know how you make your studying the most efficient for you. It took a lot of experimenting my first semester but you’ll figure it out.</p>
<p>Boilermaker:</p>
<p>Could you provide the name of the company so I can avoid doing business with them?</p>
<p>Do you imply that using facebook gives a person more of a personality? That is ludicrous, and so the comment about personality is really quite irrelevant. </p>
<p>No, that’s not what I was implying. I’m implying that most companies want to hire people, not anti-social math robots. And I would say that the majority of “normal” college students have a facebook, because they are social… You nerds will learn that to have an effective interview or be successful in your respective career path, you must be social. Is facebook being social? Yes. But it is not the do all to being social, and that is not what I inteded to imply. </p>
<p>Could you provide the name of the company so I can avoid doing business with them? </p>
<p>I work at Allison Transmission. They (like most companies) don’t just want a whole bunch of dorks who can’t communicate their ideas. </p>
<p>I spend 1 hour/credit hour for gen eds. 1.5 hours/credit hour for math and engr classes. I have a 3.87 and an active social life. Its not about HOW MUCH you study but HOW you study. You just have to know how you make your studying the most efficient for you. It took a lot of experimenting my first semester but you’ll figure it out. </p>
<p>Totally agree. </p>
<p>Plenty of 3.5-4.0s with personality. Take ECE 477 and you’ll meet them 
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<p>I’m not trying to say that high GPAs=no social life. But you don’t need to obsess over every little thing (like getting rid of facebook to study more) to get the highest GPA, because you can likely get an interview with a good GPA, but once you have an interview it is all about personality, experiences, & social skills.</p>
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I’d like to see a study on the work ethics/personalities of those who spend a lot of time on facebook vs. those who don’t. Maybe it’s within the individual - those who a lot spend time on facebook are probably a different audience than those who don’t. Is facebook the cause or is it simply the type of kids who use facebook.</p>
<p>^Can we define “a lot of time” please? I don’t want to make an ass of myself again. Hehe!</p>
<p>There are times when defining such general statements are important. In this case, why does it matter? The point is out there and is easily interpretable. Secondly, the point here doesn’t even revolve around “a lot,” but rather it revolves around “personality.” The difference in personality & work ethics between those who choose to (frequently) spend their leisure on facebook versus those who don’t.</p>
<p>Without a proper study that would be difficult to determine. Is a frequent facebook user very similar to a frequent video game player, for example? How about two people at work, one using facebook and another leisurely browsing the web? Neither is getting quality work done, possibly. </p>
<p>I tend to think facebook is a distraction similar to how text messaging, IM, phone calls, etc. are distractions if a person is in a classroom or trying to study. Maybe more like a drug; instead of smoking marijuana, these people are “zoning out” using facebook.</p>
<p>“I work at Allison Transmission. They (like most companies) don’t just want a whole bunch of dorks who can’t communicate their ideas.”
<p>Facebook is like collegeconfidential but worse; people with fake lives getting on a computer to invent fake personae for themselves and to get away from a real life with real obligations.</p>
<p>Not necessarily. My facebook account is populated mostly by family members, followed by long time personal friends, and a few co-workers. It’s a great way to communicate with geographically separated family members and friends without having to put them all on conference call. In all, no more than 110 people and extremely hard to fake my life to them.</p>
<p>^ Not all polar bears are white, either.</p>
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<p>You just described Second Life, not facebook. Most facebook people don’t make fake lives, they just embellish their real life a little bit. ;-)</p>
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<p>Try getting a part-time job at one of the academic department libraries (not the main university one). I worked at the Anthropology library and later on at the College of Education’s library at my school. All I did was set at the desk at processed check in/out books for students with some evenings just seeing less than 5 students. I studied the rest of the time on the job.</p>
<p>“I work at Allison Transmission. They (like most companies) don’t just want a whole bunch of dorks who can’t communicate their ideas.”
<p>Who are you going to recommend to not do business with them? You have a contact at trucking distributors? or the military? Doubtful.</p>
<p>And why are you afraid to work at a place that wants its employees to be social with one another or have personalities? I would think that people would want to work in a social yet productive environment. Right???</p>
<p>I don’t get the comment against hiring ‘people with personalities’. Are you saying it’s better to rely more on grade points? They’ve done many studies showing no correlation between grade point and career success, probably because they didn’t take personality, good looks, ambition, etc. into consideration.</p>
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<p>This statement amazes me. Just another data point for you - Gen eds, for me, were an afterthought. I did take English classes where I had to spend time reading, so maybe there I spent the hour/credit hour/week but other classes were easy, easy. Tech classes were hard, hard, hard. An example: For every hour spent in physics lab (upper division classes) I spent at least 2 doing the lab report. Labs took up 4 hours/week ==> 8 hours per lab report per week. This was on top of the class hours, 3/week, which had monster problem sets that required lots more than 4.5 hours/week to do.</p>
<p>I think the amount of time one spends on engineering class work varies all over the place. Some people are excellent students and need the 1.5 hours/credit hour/week. Others will spend every waking hour doing work and still flunk out. Average is somewhere in between. For most “average” students, if they work hard they’ll be OK. If you’re not willing to work as hard as it takes to succeed then either be brilliant or find another major. JMO.</p>
<p>“Who are you going to recommend to not do business with them? You have a contact at trucking distributors? or the military? Doubtful.”
<p>"And why are you afraid to work at a place that wants its employees to be social with one another or have personalities? I would think that people would want to work in a social yet productive environment. Right??? "
<p>Naturally it has little to do with my job but I am ethically tempted to report this to my organization’s ethics division. They encourage that kind of thing, actually. Government contracts have been lost for much less.</p>
<p>Trust me, there won’t be any contracts lost over something like that. Especially not at a company as established as Allison. I think both sides of this debate are now taking pretty radical stances due to interpreting the other side’s rebuttals as being as radical as they could possibly be interpreted. Easy fellas!</p>
<p>Many of you will be SO disappointed (or surprised) when start working for these companies and they will look at your 3.99 GPA, Top 10 school, 105 extra-curriculars, and your fellow engineers say…</p>
<p>“And???”</p>
<p>“Can you help build this system for the deliverable we have due in August?”</p>
<p>@GLOBALTRAVELER:</p>
<p>I think we may both agree that maintaining a good academic record is a good thing. With that being said, I understand what you are saying. My opinion is that many people, myself included, are misinformed about life in general.</p>
<p>One only has to observe the number of posts asking about “job outlook of <insert major=”" here=“”>“, “salary after X years of <insert major=”” here=“”>“, or “will I be more employable if I choose <insert major=”” here=“”> + <insert major=“” minor=“” here=“”>" among others. The best answer to all these is probably “who knows?”</insert></insert></insert></insert></p>
<p>Too many people nowadays think that a college degree entitles them to a job or even that a particular college major matters that much (many job postings ask for a BS in engineering, whatever the concentration may be). The ones I feel sorry for the most are those people that ask about PhDs not realizing that PhDs, especially in the sciences are in oversupply.</p>
<p>Regarding the OP, I encourage students to study as long as they need to to understand the material. At the same time, those students, especially prospective scientists and engineers, would benefit greatly from some real world experience. I’m sure many people with less than “stellar” GPAs were able to obtain jobs thanks to said real world experience.</p>
<p>An hour per day per 3/4 credit-hour class sounds about right to me. That’s what I did and ended junior year with a good GPA in EE. Although I’ll mention that: (a) I’m in solid state devices, which is physics heavy so it’s a lot of “you get it or you don’t” style conceptual problems and almost no labs (most other EE specializations involve large amounts of work that’s time-consuming even if you understand it). And (b) I have some very smart friends who I check all my work with.</p>
<p>The personality argument is ridiculous. The only “math robots” I’ve seen are a few Asian internationals and I suspect that it only seems that way to us because there’s a cultural disconnect. Pretending that people who do better than you have no personality seems like a way to comfort yourself because you can’t come to terms with the fact that you’re probably less intelligent than them.</p>