Even Chinese Are Rejecting Mediocre American University Education

The liberal arts college I went to allowed you to "roll your own" concentration/major. You had an academic advisor and there was a vetting process but if it got the OK you were more or less free to mix and match courses from different departments to suit your particular needs.

One guy decided to major in Frisbee, that is to say engineering/physics/aerodynamics modeling and business management/marketing, cuz he wanted to design his own novel Frisbee technology and start a company making them. Last I heard that was just what he did after he graduated and was moderately successful at it.

Also the graduation requirements if you took that route were heavily weighted towards projects, not letter grades.

If you wanted to progress to say your third year majoring in Frisbee Design you'd better actually have a novel Frisbee design that works to present to your advisor!

Could a child compose music as good as Mozart's ?

Oh wait, Mozart was a child when he composed much of his music.

Dan

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IIRR 80% of start-ups fail within five years. Most of the people with the m ind-set to take those risks shouldn't, but there's no easy way of separatin g out the over-optimistic idiots from the entrepreneurs with a good idea an d - as John Larkin has illustrated - it can be a fine distinction.

He once observed that his average product development time is two weeks. Th at implies quite a bit of corner-cutting.

My impression is that he's mostly doing bespoke electronics for physicists. Their training means that they can spell out exactly what they want. If th ey'd been through the "electronics for physicists" course at Harvard that s pawned "The Art of Electronics" they wouldn't need John's services, but Rev iew of Scientific Instruments publishes enough rubbish electronics to make it clear that few physicists are that well trained.

Sloman A. W. ?Comment on ?A versatile thermoelectric temper ature controller with 10 mK reproducibility and 100 mK absolute accuracy? ?? [Rev. Sci. Instrum. 80, 126107 (2009)] ?, Review of Scientif ic Instruments 82, 27101 - 027101-2 (2011).

So John can tweak an existing product in less than a fortnight and give the m exactly what they want. Less sophisticated customers are more troublesome - you have to work for a while to find out what they actually need, and fo r while longer to get them to recognise that it is what they actually need.

I've had no formal training in electronics, as such.

Past performance is not evidence of current performance. University adminis trators see an illustrious history as an asset that they can use to attract more students, rather than any kind of guide as to what they should be doi ng now.

They might not have been diploma mills in the past, but if the students com ing out now say that they've come from a diploma mill, that's current evide nce.

My own experience was that I treated the business of passing exams as separ ate from the business of getting an education - I completely messed up one question on one of my final exams by trying to write much too much, but I'd had enough sense to answer all the other questions first, so I did fine on the exam (though not as well as I should have done).

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Name one. Brain development - mostly editing out connections - doesn't stop until about 25 years of age, and people don't start excelling at complex t asks before that. Piano-playing is interesting - there are plenty of child prodigies there, with marvellous technical fluency, but their interpretatio ns tends to be rubbish until they hit mature years.

Art critics aren't all that reliable.

Mozart did compose as a child, but under his father's close direction - Leopold Mozart made a lot of money touring with Wolfgang Amadeus and his older sister Nannerl, and their precocity was his stock in trade.

The bulk of Mozart's output - and the stuff that gets played a lot - is a product of his mature years, after he got out from under his father's thumb. His first work still widely performed dates from 1773 (written when he was 17, and still traveling with his father).

Dan doesn't know quite enough, as usual.

You have it totally backwards. Liberal arts is piss easy.

STEM is *objective*. Whether a story/painting is "good" or bad" is what ever current fashion arbitrarily decide it is. Ever seen Damien Hirst's shit, like "Shark in a Tank".

An amplifier, now gets this, needs to actually work. It has to satisfy the laws of physics. A monkey could paint the Sistine Chapel.

-- Kevin Aylward

He has his pickling factory near me, and sometimes helicopters important clients to the nearby gliding club.

If nothing else he is an excellent businessman. You've got to admire someone that separates rich fools from their money on that scale!

He once had a "Gerald Ratner moment"[1] w.r.t. why he made that diamond-encrusted skull. Oh, what a shame :)

In the same way that analog electronic design looks piss easy to physicists.

You have to know quite a bit to appreciate where the tricky bits are.

But it's work would probably have been over-painted, rather than restored, by the next generation.

Lots of different amplifiers "actually work". The art is in picking an approach that works and isn't too expensive. There a usually quite a few close-to-optimal solutions, and no guarantee that any of them look much alike.

That happened at our university in EE as well. Though in one case I found that ethically borderline. A guy turned his final project into a product made by his own start-up, quite profitably. Legally the R&D results are property of the university.

They don't want an education, they want to be buddies with what they

That's the American way. It fits John, a lot of other guys here and myself very well. We do not like to be cradled by the state. My impression is that this is not for you.

Ever heard of block re-use in designs? Sorry to say but you seem to lack industry experience, big time.

Just FYI I was just tasked to design three different circuit boards for a client. Budgeted time including layout guidance and debug of a fair number of boards is 150h. There will not be any corners cut. These are not cost-critical (within reason) which saves time but neither are John's company's designs.

You have absolutely no clue what they are doing. At least read the "About" statement of a company before blurting out such stuff about them.

It generally is.

That's what most of us do. In my case even more extreme, I pounded into my head what they wanted to hear and pulled the flush handle after the exam. For example whene the prof told us thet radio transmitter output stages must have an impedance equal to that of the antenna. Which, of course, is nonsense in modern (and even back then) transmitter technology.

I have.

, Sydney

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t know quite enough, as usual.

his mature years, after he got out from under his father's thumb.

Nice try. Exactly what did I not know? Where are the other examples that justifies the " an usual "?

So why does a young couple on the next street from here have a pretty home, two cars, nicer mountain bikes than I do, and all with just ordinary jobs? She works a desk job at a marketing agency and he is a driver for a shipping service company. AFAIK they are not even quite 30. Ok, they only have one dog and we have two. Hah! There!

They are by far not the only ones and many have two or more kids.

Where there is a will there is usually a way. At least in America.

Care to investigate just how that situation usually come about?

People think the "need" $200/mo family cell plans, $80/mo cable, $100/mo gym, $6 for coffee and pastry every work day, a new car every three years, per person, then there is that $40,000 wedding, et cetera.

We have: $14/mo for two cell phones. $0 for cable, $0 for gym, $0.25/day for coffee (hey, we invested in a coffee maker, woohoo!), both our cars are well past their 20th birthdays. Our wedding cost under $2k and that included a nice family dinner at a fancy castle restaurant.

Personal financial situations in America are a matter of choices. A few people make good choices, the vast majority makes bad choices.

A last will and testament often does come into it.

If people's parents have money, some of it tends to end up making the kid's lives more comfortable.

The current US administration seems to want to axe death duties

It's always sort of a surprise to me that there are so many "this is objective, there's one right answer" uncompromising engineers when the reality of engineering as far as I've experienced it could be described as the art of compromise. They've heard of the the "three-legged stool", right?

It entirely depends on location, naturally some locations are more desirable than others.

Also it's easy to find very long "anyone can do it!"-themed rambling editorials by young (mostly conservative) men and women giving financial advice on how to be as successful as they are, where if you boil down the verbage the advice is "have mom and dad pay for your education and buy you a home."