Post Thanksgiving Blues

weenie
Sun, 25 Nov 2007 16:01:48 +0000

Almost - We have close family friends whose eldest son shifted out of engineering at U Del. Now, admittedly, this kid was partying up a storm and having a grand 'ole time and it caught up with him (!). He says the temptations were great because the kids he was living with didn’t have as much work as him. Anyway, now I think he’s in Comp Sci or something, but he’s happy and seems to be holding his own. I think he re-took a couple of pretty bad classes during the Christmas break terms they have - and that was good because it was only one class at a time and there were few kids on campus to get distracted by.

Anyway, I just offer that because he did manage to turn things around (he is a junior now) after a shaky start. As much as I have reservations about the “tech” schools, like RPI, WPI, RIT or whatever, for being unbalanced, I do think it helps that basically all the kids have a ton of work to do.

Your son may already know this, but RateMyProfessors.com should be his best friend when it comes time to register for classes. Of course that site should be taken with a large grain of salt, but used in conjunction with opinions from upperclassmen that he knows it might help. So far my engineering son has managed to avoid all the hard-to-understand profs at his school, and it looks like he’s in the clear through the end of this, his freshman, year. I know he won’t avoid it forever, but at least he’s off to a sound start. (SO FAR.)