engineering graduate school question

Maybe you don't understand the literal translation of the phrase "self-taught". If she reads books then the books are probably teaching her something. If she talks to/works with the best in the field, I'm sure they give her some sort of useful assistance. Now, what hasn't been discussed, is that she probably reads the exact same books that a college student reads. Oh, but she doesn't have a teacher to paraphrase the book to her during a lecture, so that makes her self-taught, or not. Seems like it would be a lot easier to learn in her enivronment, than in a school. She has theory in books and practice in her peers, what a perfect environment.

Many engineers could. There is a whole newsgroup that could in comp.arch.fpga. What she did wasn't complex and there was a lot of previous work done by others in the community that she used to build from.

---Matthew Hicks

That sounds like a somewhat technical activity. At least you'd focussed yourself getween arts and sciences. Some teenagers seems unable to even do that.

At college I was most interested in making computation go fast. The first job I got was to make the computations in signal processors go fast. Colleges didn't generally have courses on DSP at that time. I got Rabiner and Gold, and taught myself what I needed to diversify my work from pure logic architecture. I don't consider that a major shift in direction. Pretty minor fine tuning, really.

By 28 I had been working 7 years, and I'd done a fairly diverse range of things, but all in the same general area.

If you are just going take a year's holiday between school and college I doubt it serves any purpose at all.

I should hope their values and morals are in place. I'm not sure about work ethic, though. I've seen a lot of people get their act together after a short time in the working world, because for the first time they've actually figured out *why* they needed an education. The *why* is sadly something the educators have generally not figured out, and so are unable to pass on to youngsters.

This is a luxury few can afford. I really doubt be a tourist serves any purpose beyond being a holiday. When I travel for work I make a point of never being a tourist, unless I'm dragged into seeing things by people trying to be kind.

I'd be interested in how you ended up there, considering you appear to have the intellectual capacity to succeed in something more mentally demanding.

Given an opportunity to relive my life, I would steer clear of engineering, or anything that interests me. Life has taught me that working for a living in any activity will suck all the joy out of it. Better to do something that seems dull from the outset, and offers better career prospects.

Regards, Steve

I know a guy like this. College degree. Worked as Union laborer in road construction to pay his way through school. It was a pretty sweet deal. VERY high pay, only work in the warm months. Work requires basically no skill, just union suction. When he graduated. (biology zoology etc.) kept the job. Boss moved him to supervisor. Now VERY VERY high pay. Same working benefits. Spends off work time traveling to rain forests in central America and doing bird-chasing all over the country. Not a total success as you still spend half your life doing stupid things for money, but still better than having a job and hating it and not being able to do anything else.

Then you should just DO it! I used to work for Professor A.H. Benade (author of the famed music physics books). One day he says to me: "Do you know what "success" is?" No, say I. "Success", he said, "is thinking of what you'd rather be doing than anything else in the whole world and then finding someone who will PAY you do do it!" He lived that.

And I sort of have. My view has always been that when I take a job, I ALWAYS ask myself the key question: Would I take this job if it paid NOTHING? If the answer is "yes", I sign on! If you have wide interests like me, you'll find that finding jobs like that is not as hard as you might think. But you have to have the guts if you want to be a cartoonist, musician, lawyer etc. to actually go HANG with the group you want to join and start developing the relationships that will make it work. I've seen WAY too many engineers who are in it because it pays well. Feh! I can't think of a worse punishment than doing engineering if you hate it!

This was Einstein's theory. He said that if he had it to do over again, he'd rather be a plumber. A plumber makes decent cash. The work is not mentally taxing. So you get to eat well and still have time to think about the problems that interest YOU. The problem Einstein had was that once you get a job as a physicist, they keep coming around asking when you are going to put out your NEXT world-changing theory!

Of course one does have to understand that the reason some people pay other people money to do certain jobs is because the job is a pain in the ass. But on the other hand, IF you want an education, a pain in the ass job may be just the ticket. What better way to start to learn about sanitary engineering than shoveling gob at the bottom of a manhole?

I think you're really short-changing yourself there, and you're an unusual business traveller if that's really what you do. You learn a lot about the world and about other people and yourself when you're in a foreign environment (and by foreign I mean anything other than you're usual surroundings). I always look forward to being in different places for that reason. When you're in some place you've never been then everything around every corner is new and fresh.

I'm from a fairly small town in the rural midwest; it was a looong way to go to get to any real civilization where there were opportunities other than the sort that I took. It just seemed the natural thing to do at the time.

It's just good fortune that we also had a very, very good engineering college in the same town. A problem for that state is that they have good technical education, but the vast majority of graduates leave the state since there are few local jobs.

Eric Jacobsen Minister of Algorithms Abineau Communications

In every entity i have ever worked for, liability containment was always part of the equation. restaurants, civil service, aerospace.

Each to their own, it took me 14 years to complete my BSEE, I was working full time as an engineer throughout same time. In the end it opened (bureaucratic) doors for me. The MSEE may or may not have the same magic.

The first is alive, and very much so. (Doing what rabbits like to do.) The second is dinner.

Jeroen Belleman

As a business traveler I get to meet ordinary people in their daily lives. I get to drink and eat what they eat (I'll eat almost anything, and I'm crazy enough to have drunk the tap water in rural India). Often to be invited to their homes. This is a far richer experience that I could ever have in tourist mode.

I was lucky enough to attend a world class engineering school in my home town too - London :-)

Steve

This really depends on a lot of things...

There are many scholarships and other financial offerings that are designed to be used by a student going directly from high school to college. You need to apply for them WHILE IN HIGH SCHOOL! (and sometimes, in your junior year!) or you can't get them. To many, this financial support is just about required if they are going to go to college, so a year off is just going to mean they don't go at all... :-(

Charlie

If you're familiar with her history you'd know that for a significant part of it she didn't have the money to be purchasing textbooks (although some people did donate a few, and she was always happy to receive them).

I don't think she'd describe it as "perfect" at all. But Jeri was never one to complain much -- I think that's part of what made her successful: She did the best she could with what she was able to obtain, and always seemed to keep making some progress even when she was very low on resources. But that progress was slow going: She took a *lot* longer to learn about contemporary digital design than someone taking the traditional college route: You can find plenty of evidence that she often *seriously* underestimated how long various development efforts were going to take her. :-)

Ah, but they didn't now, did they? As they say, "the proof is in the pudding."

"Complex" is subjective. I think it's "reasonably complex," considering that it was largely a single-person project. (After all, if it's so simple, why hadn't anyone else done it before? Clearly it was a successful product...) Have other individuals done things as or more complex? Sure, of course -- their articles show up monthly in various magazines and on-line -- But that in no way devalues the work she did.

Heck, I wrote an entire thesis on a topic that arguably has very little application in the real world (although my professor would probably disagree :-) ), and they gave me an MSEE for it. How's that compare? Give the woman a little credit, would you?

---Joel

Ah, I misunderstood what you meant by "tourist mode". I took your statement to mean that you weren't getting out and seeing things, not that you weren't using the usual "tourist" means or venues.

Eric Jacobsen Minister of Algorithms Abineau Communications

These things are not mutually exclusive. I remember when applying for colleges, a couple of them offered me a place "to be taken in the next academic year, or the one following, at your choice". So, it is often possible to get college settled while at school, and still take a year out to work or hatch evil plots to take over the world.

Steve