Does it suck to be in engineering school?

March 25, 2008
After the Process Automation Hall of Fame dinner last night, I went and looked at my email, and having just had some of the finest minds in process automation, Dale Seborg, Bill Hawkins and Vernon Trevathan, sharing their thoughts on how to get new blood into engineering and automation, I was unpleasantly surprised to see this in the Slashdot Firehose feed:
After the Process Automation Hall of Fame dinner last night, I went and looked at my email, and having just had some of the finest minds in process automation, Dale Seborg, Bill Hawkins and Vernon Trevathan, sharing their thoughts on how to get new blood into engineering and automation, I was unpleasantly surprised to see this in the Slashdot Firehose feed: Pickens writes "Aaron Rower has an interesting post on Wired with the "Top 5 Reasons it Sucks to be an Engineering Student" that includes awful textbooks, professors who are rarely encouraging, the dearth of quality counseling, and every assignment feels the same. Our favorite is that other disciplines have inflated grades. "Brilliant engineering students may earn surprisingly low grades while slackers in other departments score straight As for writing book reports and throwing together papers about their favorite zombie films," writes Rower. "Many of the brightest students may struggle while mediocre scholars can earn top scores." For many students, earning a degree in engineering is less than enjoyable and far from what they expected. If you want to complain about your education, this is your chance."