<p>I think it’s more like “Those who can, do. Those who don’t want to, teach.” ;)</p>
<p>But in all seriousness, professors are hardworking, talented people. Some teach well, others don’t, but at the end of the day, they have the credentials that prove they are capable of enormous effort and commitment to their field.</p>
<p>I encourage the naysayers to take a look at what it takes to become an engineering or science PhD at most universities… it is very much worthy of respect in my book.</p>
<p>Here’s what I personally find funny about bschoolwiz’s comments: I have worked at two major engineering companies that have done some truly remarkable things, and both of them relied heavily on academics for theoretical and foundational work. We won a $70 million dollar program based in no small part on some work we essentially subcontracted to two professors, and continued that program in part by subcontracting another section to a different lab at a different school. And that is not uncommon - academics do a heck of a lot of foundational and innovative work in engineering.</p>
<p>Now, complaints about teaching are certainly valid - at most schools there are a whole host of reasons why a good or great researcher might be a bad teacher. In most cases, they are not hired for or ever really evaluated on their teaching ability. Many have to teach classes that are removed from their particular area of research expertise, sometimes far removed. Most inject some personal slant to their teaching that will seem strange to those with mismatched learning styles. None of these mean they are substandard engineers or poor researchers.</p>
<p>How do I hang in there when the homework and the tests look absolutely nothing like the lecture? I’m getting extremely frustrated at how my professor tends to just do derivations of equations in class and then expects us to apply them for everything else. I enjoy solving problems but it’s extremely hard for me to do so by just getting the theory alone. I need like 42 concrete, fully-worked out examples for everything in order for me to actually master the concepts. I can’t help it; it’s just the way I learn best. How do I adjust to these professors? It seems like this is how most of my engineering professors teach as well. Should I just quit? I’m finding I need to go to office hours every single damn time it’s offered.</p>
<p>What you describe is not the same for every professor, do don’t get disheartened there. Although, no professor worth his salt is going to do “42 worked examples” in class. That’s a waste of time. Have you found a study group? That’s the best way to solve this dilemma. You can help each other work out examples.</p>
<p>@Koalass Don’t give up, just go with the flow and keep going even if this crap does not make any sense to you. </p>
<p>Some of the most stressful times I have had so far was trying to rationalize and understand all this stuff logically, it is better to just say “Screw it” and keep going.</p>
<p>This whole “Office Hours” stuff is insane. I mean, we spend 3 x 50 minutes every week in class and sometimes the only way for you to get some sensible explanation on what a professor is even asking on an assignment is to come to Office Hours.</p>
<p>I work 20 hours a week, I wish I had all this free time to be running around campus stopping at Office Hours 1, 2 and 3 to hear some professor talk about himself for an hour. </p>
<p>Stop trying to rationalize or even understand all this crap. Just keep going and stop by Office Hours as often as you can if you have the time. I sure don’t!</p>
Different people learn in different ways. I rarely had to go to office hours to understand what the professors were saying, although I knew some people who wall but lived in the TA’s lap. If you are having trouble and the rest of the class is doing okay, then it would be silly to blame the professor.</p>
<p>
I worked 20-30 hours a week as an undergrad as well, and was married, and during the last two years I had a child to take care of. I still had time to go to office hours as needed, and attend clubs and groups, and even hang out with friends, all while maintaining a strong GPA. If you cannot find the time to keep up, then you need to change what you are doing, and perhaps transfer to a different major - I am pretty sure I would founder in a business major, I see no reason someone with the webhandle “bschoolwiz” couldn’t be misplaced in engineering.</p>
<p>Clearly the purpose of office hours is for the professor to talk about himself for an hour and that’s what they do…</p>
<p>Seriously, have you ever even been to office hours? Most professors genuinely want to see you succeed and are willing to do quite a bit within reason to help you with that. They aren’t there to talk about themselves; they are there to talk about the course material. However, if you are going there hoping for them to basically hold your hand through the problem then you are approaching it wrong, and professors who basically give out the answers in office hours are doing a disservice to the students.</p>
<p>But by all means, keep doing what you’re doing. Engineers certainly don’t need to understand all the crap in order to apply it, and judging by your lack of complaints, you must be thriving with your approach. I hope it can rub off on others.</p>
<p>I am done with this discussion. I think Koalass has some very legitimate concerns and I understand exactly where he is coming from. I guess, the ultimate goal is to get a piece of paper, so keep going!</p>
<p>I am not going to waste my time sucking up to these professors. If you wanna do that, go ahead. They may need some volunteers to clean their office on the weekends. </p>
<p>That sounds more like you need 42 concrete examples to memorize how to solve template problems. An example or two should always be enough if you understand what you’re doing. </p>
<p>This. Different people learn in different ways, but if you are strong in the underlying concepts, you should be able to build up your ability to apply them to problems with fairly minimal examples.</p>
<p>I’ve noticed three different types of professors so far in comparing teaching styles.</p>
<p>Prof 1 shows you how to get from a to b to c
Prof 2 shows you how to get from a to b and wants you to get to c
Prof 3 shows you how to get from a to b and wants you to get to d (or further)</p>
<p>By far most of the lower division classes are type 1 professors, teaching the fundamentals, where there isn’t much expectation of individual intuition. I’m finding as I get higher up I’m running into type 2’s as the norm with a spattering of type 3’s on the horizon. It is more satisfying getting to the right answer on your own rather than relying solely on memorized template of a textbook problem or a hand holding professor. However it is much more stressful to do this alone. Luckily, by the time you get to the upper level courses, you can pretty much pick out who the successful people are and have hopefully befriended them. Even though I got the right answers on a recent exercise, it was a lot more comforting comparing notes with two people I respect who also arrived at the same answer.</p>
<p>I always preferred doing lots of cookbook examples at first. When I’d done enough of those, then I’d start noticing the higher-level patterns involved.</p>
<p>Having a professor present a proof or a general equation with very little practical application, which seemed to be the case in many classes, never worked for me.</p>
And this sounds like dismissing good advice. If you can’t take the underlying principles and apply them in new ways then you will only ever be able to hold the most basic level of engineering jobs out there.</p>
<p>The issue is how do you learn the underlying principals. Too many professors think talking through a proof is good enough, and if a student still doesn’t understand, it’s the student’s fault/problem.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This sounds like an excuse a professor, who can’t explain how principles apply to the real world, would give.</p>
<p>For example, if you start with conservation laws you can understand and derive many other equations in thermodynamics and fluid mechanics: the heat equation, Bernoulli’s equation, and the Navier-Stokes equations, to make a few.</p>
<p>It’s not an excuse a bad teacher gives, it’s the truth. Whether a given professor is effective in conveying this is a completely different issue.</p>
<p>Some people on this forum give professors way too much credit. Now that I am starting to come to Office Hours more often and getting to know them better, all ll I can say is, I am not overly impressed. </p>
<p>Professors in public universities are essentially Government bureaucrats. The job security allows incompetence to run rampant and they are able to get away with things that they would never get away with in the private sector.</p>
There is always going to be a certain disconnect - professors largely come from strong undergraduate programs where they excelled, and then went to very strong graduate programs where they did at least pretty well. They have had more and better math and physics than most of their students, and understood it better. They will have struggled less than the substantial majority of their students. This is indeed a teaching issue, and a challenge in engineering and all other fields.</p>
<p>There is no one solution to this. Every one learns in different ways, and it is physically impossible for any one professor to teach to more than a couple of learning styles in the time allotted.</p>
<p>
The problem is often not explaining how the principles apply, the problem is finding examples that both directly illustrate the principle in question and yet are obvious enough to make sense to someone who is having substantial problems understanding the principle itself. And in many cases, the answer is “you apply this directly - that’s the only way to do it.” Which is 100% true and still sounds like a cop out.</p>
I suggest you complain to your department about the faculty quality then, because you are describing a level of discontent well beyond my experience. I have had bad professors, certainly, but they have been the exception, not the rule. Either you have an unusually bad group of professors or else the problem is not with them.</p>
<p>Are you by any chance at ITT Tech?</p>
<p>
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of both these groups. I work for a government contractor AND am in grad school at a public university. I work with both groups and they are nothing alike.</p>
<p>
Getting that job security generally requires ~15 years of constant academic and then professional excellence, and not many put on the brakes once they get tenure. Some do, but not most. And the point of tenure is specifically to let them “get away with things that they would never get away with in the private sector” because that way you get a different set of results. They research things that are not profitable, or that will take too long to generate profits for there to be corporate interest, or that are too risky for corporations to touch. And the results have been astounding.</p>
<p>I have been working as an engineer professionally for most of a decade at this point, the majority of it spend doing corporate-side research, and I really have no idea where you are getting your ideas about how industry feels about academia.</p>
<p>By the way, I find the following interesting:</p>
<p>(1) Having declared that you are done with this discussion, you have returned only to restate the disdain you have already made abundantly clear.</p>
<p>(2) In other threads you seem to indicate that you consider an engineering degree valuable and worthwhile, while in this thread you show ample disdain for the methods by which they are awarded. I am curious as to your career aspirations - technical sales? Financial engineering? Dreams of management? I would be quite amused if you actually aspired to a technical position.</p>