<p>My guess is it depends on the students major. I wrote 20+ page papers during sophomore year, but I can pretty much guarantee that my graphic design roommate did not. She did however have a 20+ page paper during her senior year as part of a group and she was stressing out about it. I remember laughing and showing her the 100+ page paper my group was working on for my one class, and my 80+ page paper my group was working for in another class at the same time. She shut up real quick.</p>
<p>Without knowing the time given to write the papers it isn’t meaningful to compare the number of pages. It also isn’t meaningful to compare the length of group assignments without specifying the number of people in the groups. </p>
<p>fendergirl, she probably “shut up real quick” because you laughed at her. Additionally, with 6 instances of “my” and 3 instances of “I” in 5 sentences you seem to have a oversized ego…</p>
<p>Sk8…No, she is a junior.</p>
<p>PM wrote,
</p>
<p>I absolutely agree. When I hear someone complaining that the college their child attends does not “challenge” their student, I have no sympathy as that is the students fault. Due to being a military family we’ve moved a lot and I have attended many different colleges to complete my degree. There are kids coasting at the most selective colleges and there are kids who could be coasting at community college but instead choose to make their educational time and dollars count.</p>
<p>Has anyone here had the experience of having a kid graduate from college and go onto work and be unprepared for their job? </p>
<p>Has anyone here had the experience of having a kid start graduate school and find themselves unprepared for the work?</p>
<p>Just curious.</p>
<p>DD college must not be part of the study otherwise the time she has to spend doing the Problem Set (PSET) is insanely long. </p>
<p>Now I understand why they say if she’ll survive her college she will thrive anywhere.</p>
<p>Poetgrl, I have had the unfortunate luck to have hired a few people who graduated with seemingly high gpas from good schools and then turned out to have the skills of turnips. These were not for jobs where one could learn it as they went along…they were supposed to already possess a certain degree of knowledge. I always wondered if they bought their grades/test papers! Anyway, they did not survive beyond the probationary period.</p>
<p>Sorry to hear that Skatermom. I haven’t found those I have hired to be lacking in skills. Some of the nuanced thinking that comes with real life, not out of a book experience, is lacking. But, that seems to come with time. </p>
<p>So far so good for me.</p>
<p>Anyone else having bad luck with the education the graduates are showing up with at work? I’ve heard one of the big issues can be a lack of etiquette and people skills from all the computer time and texting and whatnot, though I haven’t seen that yet, either.</p>
<p>I did have one mother try to talk to me before I hired her daughter, something about a family reuinion she wanted her daughter to schedule into her initial year? I didn’t hold it against the girl, though I suggested she ask her mother to send me a resume if she wanted to come work for us, as well. ;)</p>
<p>1q2, I’m sorry… would you rather me have made an example by stating how many papers you wrote in college? I didn’t exactly have that figure so pardon me if I used a personal example. Maybe you should count up the other uses of “I” that the other posters have made in this thread. It’s commonly used. Not exactly an ego boost.</p>
<p>All I was trying to state is that learning is different by person, major, and school. It might be common for someone like maybe a writing major to write 20 page papers every semester however it may be uncommon for an art major. I used 20 page papers as an example because that is what the initial post partially referred to.</p>
<p>poetgrl, That sounds like something my mother would do. Lol!!</p>
<p>Job unpreparedness might come from how the school goes about teaching the students. There’s a difference between reading and memorizing something out of a text book, getting an A on the exam, and applying it in the “real world.” That’s one thing I loved about my college. We did our readings, our exams, and whatnot however I LOVED our projects. I took a course during my junior year where we learned about management from an operations standpoint. The course required us to visit local businesses (on our own time) and tour the premises to get a general understanding of how actual companies worked. After everybody completed their required visits, we broke up into teams of 4 and were assigned a mentor from a local business that we would be working with for the remainder of the semester. Our assignment was to get to know their business, the employees, their policies, etc. We did a giant SWOT analysis of the business and presented our findings to the heads of the companies that we were working with (Imagine being 21 and telling the leaders of Harley Davidson what you think about their company). The companies reps sat there taking detailed notes of everything that we presented to them. It was a great program and we learned a lot (plus the companies got some free consulting, haha). Some of the kids in our class wound up being offered post-graduated jobs at the places they were assigned to work at.</p>