engineering is hard

I was one of those that left my initial cohort. Family circumstances just caused me to continue on at a different (and arguably better) engineering school. So those "look to the left, look to the right, one of you will be missing" speeches at the beginning of engineering school imply but in reality don't necessarily mean the disappeared didn't go on to get their engineering degree elsewhere.

I skipped my graduation. Can you imagine standing around for hours in a black robe in the sun in New Orleans listening to fatheads talk?

We did have a neat seafood boil in Audubon Park, under the oak trees, with lots of beer.

Especially when there are multiple "approaches" to further confuse things.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

As did I, as I can't stand most formal ceremony.

It's a complete waste of time standing in line in fancy dress waiting to be called and shake hands with someone you've almost certainly never heard of, and be handed your degree certificate. As it happened I got mine by post several days before anyone who attended the event.

It used to be the case that in Oxford and Cambridge you were refused graduation unless you attended the formal degree presentation ceremony in person, although that is no longer the case. Amazingly, though, the ceremony is still conducted in Latin! Lots more waffle here:

At Melbourne in 1970 I did have to attend in person and hire the Ph.D, gown and bonnet before I could claim to have finished the course.

My father showed up with blank and white film in his camera which was a pity - Melbourne followed Cambridge in having a scarlet Ph.D. gown.

The quid pro quo for showing up for the Ph.D. ceremony was that I was allowed to graduate M.Sc. in absentia. Much cheaper.

I think that has changed to a black gown now, although there seems to be an option to have a scarlet facing for certain occasions:

Snazzy!

You got an M.Sc. after a Ph.D.?

I'd got the M.Sc. (in inorganic chemistry) before I started the Ph.D. (in physical chemistry) in the same department, but with a different supervisor (the professor of physical chemistry rather than the professor of inorganic chemistry - both smart people, but in rather different ways).

I'd never bother to actually graduate M.Sc. - the project had been speculative and hadn't turned out well, so I'd written it up mainly to get what I could out of it. There was nothing publishable in it. I should have published the Ph.D. work - it was novel and interesting, but I never found the right journal to publish it in nor the right point of view to present the novel and interesting aspects (which mostly invovled the system I'd set up to process the experimental results (which I ended up recording on a PDP-8 which we'd got after I'd started on the Ph.D.). Weirdly, the PDP-8 had been bought (or a least a half share in it) by the professor of organic chemistry, and I got my claws on it mainly by being quick to see how I could use it.

I'd got into programing while I was doing the M.Sc. and turned out to be pretty good at it - I did Theory of Computation 1 as additional undergraduate course during the first year of my Ph.D. and joined the mob of people who could book the university computer and run my programs on it on my own between 11.00pm and 8:00aam, not that I could ever get out of bed early enough to book anything earlier than 2:00 am or later than 6:00am.

The electronic engineers tended to book the 11:00pm to 2:00am slot every night, and run lots of short programs then. I got to know them well enough to be able to sneak in then and run short programs of my own.

In the UK most universities have a wide range of courses.

The odd ones out were mostly science and engineering by foundation. University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (aka UMIST) or Herriott-Watt (for example). I think there are some medical and dentistry only schools attached to hospitals (not my field).

It is much more confusing now that some of the big player UK universities have global campuses in other countries.

Yes. I meant in the context of doing hard sciences. Typically there was something like English, Geography, History, Maths, Music, Modern Languages, Woodwork, Metalwork A'levels all in the same building. That's for a normal state school - private (UK "public") schools offered a much wider range of subjects and were better equipped.

I think the examiners were having a laugh when they set the English syllabus for our year O'level "Henry IV pt 1" (nothing much happens) and for A'level "Waiting for Godot" (nothing much happens *again*).

I think at any other university my course would have been narrowed down to just chemistry or just physics much more quickly in the first year.

There was absolutely no requirement to learn any humanities as a part of a science or engineering course at a UK university (or vice versa). The requirement to study other subjects like that ended after 6th form.

However, language courses like German and Russian were still needed for chemistry back when I was at university were popular. Computing was compulsory - that was quite unusual at the time.

In the UK you typically choose the course first and the university second (at least you do if you want somewhere good for that subject).

If you flunk your A'levels and go into clearing then you pretty much have Hobson's choice of whichever university will take you on.

There was once an 11+ exam (my year were the last to take it). There was also a sort of IQ/SAT test at secondary school but the results were never shared with either the school or the students.

You were free to not attend lectures provided that you kept up to date with coursework and passed the exams. You could also go to lectures for courses that you were not studying but would get no credit for them.

No such scheme at least not when I was there. Theory class was pure class and entirely optional - it thinned out PDQ.

Our physics course had after term electronics courses because physicists were expected to build their own experiments at graduate level. Most of the kit involved was way too complex for home experimenters e.g X-ray diffractometers, spectroscope, oscilloscope, microscope, fume cupboards, Young's slits, gas lasers, holographic tables.

Two electronic courses I recall most were digital logic (making an LED digital electronic dice being the final challenge) and how to use opamps effectively. Measuring the properties of a FET and relating them to solid state theory was already in the mainstream physics practicals.

Some were quite inspired hybrids like computing the dynamics of a coin set spinning on a vertical axis as it slows down due to friction and precession/nutation take hold. Or how a very tall tower of Lego falls over.

Labs were staffed and open 2pm to 5/6pm every weekday. Some of them you had your own cupboard and glassware to look after too. Computing was cheaper at the midnight hour but that mainframe was a 24/7 operation.

That is the same at my university (I did double physics at that point). Had I gone anywhere else I would probably have been a chemist.

Funnily enough I know that the mechanical engineering course in our year the first practical had to build a structure from Dexion to hold 3 anchor points apart against specified forces and torques. Teams of 4? designed their best effort and then they were tested to destruction.

It was a pretty good team building exercise and fun to watch the tests.

Prior to the final year we had a long vacation course where it was either dedicated morning lectures and theory classes or whole days spent on seriously tricky experiments (Josephson junction being one such). Firing DU slugs into targets and measuring stress strain another.

I think the teams were judged on how little material they used while still meeting the strength requirements.>

Attendance at my Tulane graduation was mandatory, but I got my boss to write a letter saying that I had to be out on a sea trial, so they let me off.

We did attend my daughters MBA ceremony at UC Berkeley, but that was actually nice. It's a beautiful campus (walk it if ever you can) and we had drinks at the faculty club.

I moved to California as the result of a walk across the Berkeley campus. That's another story.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

One estimate is that there are 9000 programming languages.

Study faster!

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

. . . or that your parents didn't have the dough to live in the 'right' area.

RL

Your statement above is true, because of the word necessarily. However it hides the fact that many times the cost is prohibitive and the deciding factor in which college one goes to - or even if one goes to college. This is not to say there aren't many other factors. But the fact remains that there are many qualified who can't afford the $$$ or are forced to drop out after a year or two.

Ed

My dad was a milkman. My mom was a cafeteria worker. I got a full scholarship to Tulane.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Tulane High School?

Bet there were neighborhoods around you where no-one even thought of applying to colleges.

RL

High schools had councilors who recommended what grads should do next. For example, a short fat clumsy kid wouldn't be recommended to apply for an football scholarship.

Where did you go to college?

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

We're talking about adequate prep for higher education.

Some parents go to a lot of trouble these days, making sure their kids don't go to a dead end high school.

Melbourne University in Australia collected statistic on which students did best at Melbourne in the 1950s.

The best single indicator was the number of books in the parental home, and having at least one near relative who had been to university was the second best indicator.

Both correlate with family prosperity, but that didn't correlate all that well with academic success.

The favoured explanations were that university was about book learning, so being exposed to lots of books early was directly helpful, and having a near relative who had already been through the mill left the family primed to deal with the sorts problems that undergraduates ran into.

The "intelligence is heritable" faction weren't fond of this, but no amount of multifactor analysis (which we can now do reasonably cheaply) seems to have been able to pull out anything all that significant.

Might it differ between science subjects and arts subjects?

If I'm remembering the story correctly, it was about all students, not split into faculties.

Everybody has to hit the books when they study.