Hey,nice to meet a Mechanical engineer here.I have heard this told to me a lot.But I think as John has pointed out,education is mostly used as a signalling device.From what I understand,even if you were to were do a post-grad in Mechanical and work in research field,you would still NOT be using 90% of your education.If you ask that is a huge waste of time.Contrary to John,if you take a Mechanical Engineering degree,you will mostly end up studying/reading a lot of stuff that you surely know that you will not use in the future.We have to finish some specific courses to complete our degree requirements..
I think you are overestimating the time you would have taken to learn your job had you not gone to college(years to do so)-(I dont know I am in undergrad).But a simple exercise,I would ask you to do is-
1.Imagine if you only took courses that would help you in the job(lets say the courses where 30-50% of course content(or any other parameter that you choose) directly helps you) and then look at the time req to train.
2.Imagine if you did not have to take any of the course you did not like.
How much would it still impact your skills/knowledge level right now/time req to train for your job?
All this is assuming,that you get the degree with the same grades that you have right now.This should not be a problem as trying to hack the test requires much less(1-2 orders of magnitude lesser) effort than actually learning the subject.So outside of its utility as a social signalling device,most college courses provide low knowledge-utility.
I will concede that it helps you have a general layout of different courses,but my question is it worth spending 30-40 hours per course for this general layout?
I think 90% is an exaggeration, but even if you get a research job in the same sub-field as your graduate degree, it’s true you probably will not be using the majority of your engineering course work. The problem is that you can’t pick out the 20-30% you will benefit from and learn that in isolation. And I don’t think judging on the basis of which courses you did or didn’t like is a very good indicator (though admittedly there were some I disliked so much that I did badly and learned next to nothing). The way an engineering curriculum is structured is to let each topic build on past knowledge. Consider the class on statics that you probably took or are taking. Could you have understood bending moments and deflection of beams without first learning the concepts of derivatives and integrals? How about trigonometry? If you’re like me, you’ve forgotten 90% of your high school trigonometry class, but if you hadn’t taken it at all you’d really be struggling with the more advanced material.
I do think a lot of courses could be condensed down to a much smaller kernel of key concepts, which could be taught in far less than a semester and then retained with spaced repetition. If you have the impetus and self-discipline to design a system like that for yourself then it might be worth trying, with a couple of caveats. First, the credential of a degree is pretty important—more so in mechanical engineering than in computer science. Second, you want to choose a curriculum designed by someone who has already learned this stuff—you can’t pick the topics yourself. And third, part of what you’re doing when you take an engineering class is practicing application of key ideas. To return to trigonometry—we did lots and lots of proofs using trig identities. I have forgotten most of them, other than sin^2+cos^2=1. But I don’t think it was all wasted, because I still derive formulas from geometric relationships sometimes, and I think it would be much more difficult and error-prone if I hadn’t done a lot of that sort of thing in school. This is a small portion of my work hours but probably some of the highest-value work I do.
Here’s another example from my experience. I was asked to build a simulation of a system based on some old photocopies of engineering diagrams. These included a big list of Laplace-domain controller coefficients and a diagram for a feedback system using lead and lag controllers. One of my colleagues had looked at it and didn’t really understand what it meant so they ignored it. Luckily I had taken a controls class. I couldn’t have defined a Laplace transform for you off the top of my head, but I could see how the controller fit into what we were modeling and figure out the gist of its purpose. My colleague could have borrowed a textbook, taken a few days to study control theory, and understood the system much better than I did. But even if that were practical in a business environment, you wouldn’t know it was worth doing if you didn’t have background knowledge of the topic. Did that (plus the few other times I’ve used control theory) make the whole course worth it? Maybe not in a naive calculation of time spent. But a big part of your value as an engineer is being able to recognize a problem and know where to look for the solution. If you have to call an expert for the solution that’s often fine. But if you have to call in an expert to tell you what the problem is, well then they could have just skipped right past hiring you, couldn’t they?
At one point I wrote some questions for a work-sample test to give to prospective hires at my company, with the goal of testing for general engineering competence. I don’t know if they’d be helpful for demonstrating what I mean, but message me if you want to take a look at them.
I see your point and this is what I have more or less been repeatedly told.I think like you told,the best thing to do would be to condense a lot of courses down to their key concepts that can be kept refreshed through spaced repetition.
I think 90% may be an underestimate(you could probably tell me more about it).Like, over the course of your career,you would have used less than 10% of the info you collected through your college(including all the nitty-gritties of various topics-the derivations,the special cases etc..).These contribute immensely to your understanding of the topic,but my question is do the nitty-gritties stay after a long time? This is my main question. I’m quite alarmed at the possibility that I might not remember something that I had understood so well when I need to use it and like you told generally people seem to be getting on well without it.
For example,lets take the situation you mentioned, a preliminary understanding of Control Theory had helped you identify the problem and correlate it with your existing problem.Even if the problem demanded a more in-depth and a rigorous analysis using Control theory(one that you would have easily done just after finishing the course), you would have not been able to do it and would probably have to spend time reading up on it(the time may be lower than if you were reading it completely new).But mostly you benefitted from the preliminary/broad understanding of the course than the full blown one.It would have been much more efficient(as in you could’ve done a lotta other stuff),if you had instead initially spent your time just getting upto speed on the very broad view of the topic and used spaced repetition to strengthen it.of course we can debate on the exact amount of content,but we can agree that the full blown one is probably waaay off.
I also agree with what Kaj said.But “Control Systems” is a course that you know, you wont use in anywhere near full capacity when you become a Mechanical engineer.And there a lot of courses to which you can say that(as in you definitely know that you wouldnt want to work work in any field involving that majorly).
This whole thing occurred to me because I realized I was learning a lot of stuff that I didn’t like and probably want even gonna use.Now my concern,there a lot of stuff that i really invested time on -so how do I make sure that I am going to be able to use them
I guess I wasn’t counting every little derivation or example or even formula that comes up in a class against that 90%. Those are things you see in lecture, but you don’t “learn” them. The stuff you actually learn is concepts and techniques, like what you would need to answer the test questions. Even that stuff, of course, you’ll mostly forget if you don’t review it regularly. But… I’m not very confident that you can strip out all the stuff you’re going to forget and still learn the stuff you would have remembered. I don’t know of any real examples of this working. It seems like maybe the academic system of “present a whole bunch of info rapidly and then force students to study key ideas from it for homework and tests” might have become entrenched over time because it performs better than the obvious alternatives.
I would love to see evidence of something better, though. It seems like good use of spaced repetition is a non-obvious candidate to replace the lecture-homework-test system. If you haven’t seen quantum.country, that’s the kind of thing I’m thinking of and my initial experience with it is promising.
From what I understand,even if you were to were do a post-grad in Mechanical and work in research field,you would still NOT be using 90% of your education.
I’m not sure that this is the right way of thinking about it. It’s hard to know in advance which parts of your education are going to be useful. If each unit of learning only has a 10% chance of being useful, studying 10 units worth of learning rather than just 1 unit gives you much higher chances of at least 1 of those units being what you need. In that case, the “unused” 9 still weren’t wasted, because they increased your odds of knowing something valuable.
You ask
Imagine if you only took courses that would help you in the job(lets say the courses where 30-50% of course content(or any other parameter that you choose) directly helps you) and then look at the time req to train.
but this assumes that you know in advance which of the courses are going to help you with your job. If you’ve never taken them and don’t understand their contents, you might not be able to know this.
Hey,nice to meet a Mechanical engineer here.I have heard this told to me a lot.But I think as John has pointed out,education is mostly used as a signalling device.From what I understand,even if you were to were do a post-grad in Mechanical and work in research field,you would still NOT be using 90% of your education.If you ask that is a huge waste of time.Contrary to John,if you take a Mechanical Engineering degree,you will mostly end up studying/reading a lot of stuff that you surely know that you will not use in the future.We have to finish some specific courses to complete our degree requirements..
I think you are overestimating the time you would have taken to learn your job had you not gone to college(years to do so)-(I dont know I am in undergrad).But a simple exercise,I would ask you to do is-
1.Imagine if you only took courses that would help you in the job(lets say the courses where 30-50% of course content(or any other parameter that you choose) directly helps you) and then look at the time req to train.
2.Imagine if you did not have to take any of the course you did not like.
How much would it still impact your skills/knowledge level right now/time req to train for your job?
All this is assuming,that you get the degree with the same grades that you have right now.This should not be a problem as trying to hack the test requires much less(1-2 orders of magnitude lesser) effort than actually learning the subject.So outside of its utility as a social signalling device,most college courses provide low knowledge-utility.
I will concede that it helps you have a general layout of different courses,but my question is it worth spending 30-40 hours per course for this general layout?
I think 90% is an exaggeration, but even if you get a research job in the same sub-field as your graduate degree, it’s true you probably will not be using the majority of your engineering course work. The problem is that you can’t pick out the 20-30% you will benefit from and learn that in isolation. And I don’t think judging on the basis of which courses you did or didn’t like is a very good indicator (though admittedly there were some I disliked so much that I did badly and learned next to nothing). The way an engineering curriculum is structured is to let each topic build on past knowledge. Consider the class on statics that you probably took or are taking. Could you have understood bending moments and deflection of beams without first learning the concepts of derivatives and integrals? How about trigonometry? If you’re like me, you’ve forgotten 90% of your high school trigonometry class, but if you hadn’t taken it at all you’d really be struggling with the more advanced material.
I do think a lot of courses could be condensed down to a much smaller kernel of key concepts, which could be taught in far less than a semester and then retained with spaced repetition. If you have the impetus and self-discipline to design a system like that for yourself then it might be worth trying, with a couple of caveats. First, the credential of a degree is pretty important—more so in mechanical engineering than in computer science. Second, you want to choose a curriculum designed by someone who has already learned this stuff—you can’t pick the topics yourself. And third, part of what you’re doing when you take an engineering class is practicing application of key ideas. To return to trigonometry—we did lots and lots of proofs using trig identities. I have forgotten most of them, other than sin^2+cos^2=1. But I don’t think it was all wasted, because I still derive formulas from geometric relationships sometimes, and I think it would be much more difficult and error-prone if I hadn’t done a lot of that sort of thing in school. This is a small portion of my work hours but probably some of the highest-value work I do.
Here’s another example from my experience. I was asked to build a simulation of a system based on some old photocopies of engineering diagrams. These included a big list of Laplace-domain controller coefficients and a diagram for a feedback system using lead and lag controllers. One of my colleagues had looked at it and didn’t really understand what it meant so they ignored it. Luckily I had taken a controls class. I couldn’t have defined a Laplace transform for you off the top of my head, but I could see how the controller fit into what we were modeling and figure out the gist of its purpose. My colleague could have borrowed a textbook, taken a few days to study control theory, and understood the system much better than I did. But even if that were practical in a business environment, you wouldn’t know it was worth doing if you didn’t have background knowledge of the topic. Did that (plus the few other times I’ve used control theory) make the whole course worth it? Maybe not in a naive calculation of time spent. But a big part of your value as an engineer is being able to recognize a problem and know where to look for the solution. If you have to call an expert for the solution that’s often fine. But if you have to call in an expert to tell you what the problem is, well then they could have just skipped right past hiring you, couldn’t they?
At one point I wrote some questions for a work-sample test to give to prospective hires at my company, with the goal of testing for general engineering competence. I don’t know if they’d be helpful for demonstrating what I mean, but message me if you want to take a look at them.
I see your point and this is what I have more or less been repeatedly told.I think like you told,the best thing to do would be to condense a lot of courses down to their key concepts that can be kept refreshed through spaced repetition.
I think 90% may be an underestimate(you could probably tell me more about it).Like, over the course of your career,you would have used less than 10% of the info you collected through your college(including all the nitty-gritties of various topics-the derivations,the special cases etc..).These contribute immensely to your understanding of the topic,but my question is do the nitty-gritties stay after a long time? This is my main question. I’m quite alarmed at the possibility that I might not remember something that I had understood so well when I need to use it and like you told generally people seem to be getting on well without it.
For example,lets take the situation you mentioned, a preliminary understanding of Control Theory had helped you identify the problem and correlate it with your existing problem.Even if the problem demanded a more in-depth and a rigorous analysis using Control theory(one that you would have easily done just after finishing the course), you would have not been able to do it and would probably have to spend time reading up on it(the time may be lower than if you were reading it completely new).But mostly you benefitted from the preliminary/broad understanding of the course than the full blown one.It would have been much more efficient(as in you could’ve done a lotta other stuff),if you had instead initially spent your time just getting upto speed on the very broad view of the topic and used spaced repetition to strengthen it.of course we can debate on the exact amount of content,but we can agree that the full blown one is probably waaay off.
I also agree with what Kaj said.But “Control Systems” is a course that you know, you wont use in anywhere near full capacity when you become a Mechanical engineer.And there a lot of courses to which you can say that(as in you definitely know that you wouldnt want to work work in any field involving that majorly).
This whole thing occurred to me because I realized I was learning a lot of stuff that I didn’t like and probably want even gonna use.Now my concern,there a lot of stuff that i really invested time on -so how do I make sure that I am going to be able to use them
I guess I wasn’t counting every little derivation or example or even formula that comes up in a class against that 90%. Those are things you see in lecture, but you don’t “learn” them. The stuff you actually learn is concepts and techniques, like what you would need to answer the test questions. Even that stuff, of course, you’ll mostly forget if you don’t review it regularly. But… I’m not very confident that you can strip out all the stuff you’re going to forget and still learn the stuff you would have remembered. I don’t know of any real examples of this working. It seems like maybe the academic system of “present a whole bunch of info rapidly and then force students to study key ideas from it for homework and tests” might have become entrenched over time because it performs better than the obvious alternatives.
I would love to see evidence of something better, though. It seems like good use of spaced repetition is a non-obvious candidate to replace the lecture-homework-test system. If you haven’t seen quantum.country, that’s the kind of thing I’m thinking of and my initial experience with it is promising.
I’m not sure that this is the right way of thinking about it. It’s hard to know in advance which parts of your education are going to be useful. If each unit of learning only has a 10% chance of being useful, studying 10 units worth of learning rather than just 1 unit gives you much higher chances of at least 1 of those units being what you need. In that case, the “unused” 9 still weren’t wasted, because they increased your odds of knowing something valuable.
You ask
but this assumes that you know in advance which of the courses are going to help you with your job. If you’ve never taken them and don’t understand their contents, you might not be able to know this.