Post Thanksgiving Blues

StickerShock
Sun, 25 Nov 2007 12:37:06 +0000

His teachers are very hard to understand.

I’m assuming this means that they are not native English speakers? This was the case when H studied engineering. To top it off, the professors would become angry when students asked them to repeat statements that were unintelligible because of the thick accents & wacky syntax. It can be very frustrating, especially if your son was able to basically listen in high school classes, absorb the material, and not have to spend much time with the books. He will have to change his study habits, which may not match his ideal learning style. But to be an engineer, he will have to spend his entire career self-teaching new material, absorbing R&D information, and functioning in a largely independent way.

I would completely empathize with him, but let him know that in engineering schools, many of his professors will be foreign born. Nothing he can do about it, so he has to deal with it. He could see if reading each chapter ahead of time enables him to grasp what the teacher is trying to convey. I agree with Marian that changing majors is not failure. But it sounds as if he hasn’t given the field a fair shot just yet