Thread: Any engineers in here?

I went back to school myself for Civil at 30 years old with two kids. Im in my 4th year (off and on school) and while I work in Engineering for a local govt. I opperate more like a project manager....actually I think I like it better than design work.

Hang in there with the Math classes. I never liked one second of any of the three Calc classes or even the Differential Equasions.... Kept asking what the hell am I doing to myself? You'll get through it.
Oh, check out Cramster on the web. They have solutions to almost every text book you can think of. Of course cheating wont help you when it comes to test time, but seeing how to work the difficult homework problems is a complete plus!!

[QUOTE=cpcohen1945;801461]High school math instruction is a known weak point in US education.

"Arguing with teachers" could mean _you_ didn't understand what they were teaching, or that _they_ didn't understand it, or just that you understood it differently.

Past high school, the teacher _will_ understand what he's teaching.

With two calculus courses coming in 10 weeks, my heart goes out to you.

Looking back on it, it was a combination of two things, one is that I understood the material well in most cases but I hated doing homework. Needless repetition irritates the living daylights out of me. I see the need for problems to make sure that you understand the material but doing something just to do it is not what I like doing. Thing two is that when I really didn't understand the material and asked a question the teacher would just explain it the same way he did the first time which did not clarify things for me at all. I believe they thought I was deliberately trying to be obtuse so that didn't help matters. doing better now though. The main problem that I am running into now is professors not actually knowing how to teach their subject. They are hired on for research and are VERY knowledgeable in their respective fields but don't really know how to relate it to a person not as educated as themselves......Just a personal observation, but I do like most of my teachers so that helps alot.

Originally Posted by acoda

My real question is if there are engineers in here, how many of you actually went directly into a related field or if you sidelined into and engineering position that wasn't really your major?

My daughter left university with a first class honours degree in systems engineering and is now a chartered accountant.