I got a lot of value from that degree. But little of it related to my career, which was probably mildly disadvantaged by it. The guy who recruited me for my first actuarial job had a hard time getting them to consider me. “She won’t stay, she’ll get bored and leave.” He pointed out that my husband was in a PhD program nearby and i was kind of stuck, at least geographically, until he graduated.
IMO, law school typifies this. While being a lawyer requires some idea of how to analyze things and some vocabulary, a large part of practice requires knowing the nuts and bolts of where you practice. Where do I file what documents? How many copies? What forms are required? To a large extent, that can be handled by having a competent clerk/secretary. Basically, the only way to get good at being a lawyer is by being a lawyer.
It has been a long time since I looked into it, but my understanding from decades ago is that law schools could endanger their accreditation if they offered too much practical “clinical” training. Instead, the idea was to provide some kind of esoteric unapplied knowledge. (No, I was not a huge fan of my law school experience.)
My son graduated from a Big 10 school with an engineering degree. In his experience, the placement office was useless. He obtained every one of his interviews and his eventual job from his directly contacting prospective employers.
MIT actively engages alumni, including in ways that out them in contact with students. I know a lot of MIT grads who found their first post-college jobs by networking with older MIT grads.
(Sadly, MIT is cutting back on that sort of thing, but that’s a rant for a different place.)
My grad school did a fantastic job at preparing me for my career. The students were an excellent resource because many of them already had some experience. On top of a full course load we had 24 hours a week of unpaid internship. My first-year internship sucked. My second year internship taught me a ton about grant writing, strategic planning and program development. I was assisting with a federal application to make a culturally specific organization into a Federally Qualified Health Center. I got to do all the planning for program integration. I did a detailed SWOT analysis of the whole organization, which was really important for me learning how programs work and fit together.
The coursework was often academic but usually it had some application. And that’s how I discovered grant writing, because I had to write one for class, and it was super fun and intuitive for me, and I knew I’d found my thing. By the time I graduated, I knew what I was doing.
Unfortunately it was a terrible labor market so it took me a while to find a job writing grants. But when I did, I excelled pretty much from day one.
I have some criticisms of the school itself, but my program was solid. It did what it was supposed to do.
Undergrads call me up all the time asking for money, but they also chat. The 50 year class gets to march in front of the graduating seniors at graduation. I did that a few years ago. And there are many MIT clubs scattered about the country. I’ve never gone to anything for the Bay Area club, but I was active in the Princeton club. I didn’t need the networking, but it was there. I know there are Harvard clubs also - we had our board meeting in the one in Princeton and my MIT interview was in one in New York.
I didn’t get a lot of direct advice on looking for jobs either. I guess they think that those of us who are in Harvard or MIT are smart enough to figure it out. And by 40 years after I graduated almost nothing I learned in college was relevant. But learning how to learn was.
This, to me, is the point of college. More important than having a lucrative career or fancy facilities.
YMMV.
I think that’s probably what it should be. A place for educating people on how to be better people.
In reality, college has always been a bit controversial as a sort of institutionalized elitism masquerading as a path to building connections, employment options, wealth, and social status. As much a place to hire the best and the brightest as it is to hire the son of some Managing Director’s fraternity drinking buddy from the lacrosse team.
No, I’m talking about an undergraduate program, in which first year engineering (FYE) students have not yet chosen their major, but everyone is placed onto a level playing field and given the same courses / evaluated the same way.
As for the stress of the course workload, it is seen as a useful and necessary part of the learning process. Actual engineering work in a competitive world will have strict deadlines and lots of difficult work under pressure. Students also get a lot of experience working on team projects, writing reports and presenting. They are evaluated on all of this, not just homework and exam scores.
Thanks for clearing that up. Makes sense.
How do you view that interpretation of “beneficial stress”? Others in this thread (and per my perception elsewhere in society), maintain that stress ought to be minimized whenever possible - at least for some people. Should someone who is susceptible to stress - needing accommodations - eschew study/employ in engineering?
Who has said that stress should be minimized everywhere?
I think it’s obvious that there’s a level of stress that becomes unhealthy and counter productive. And honestly, just as obvious that some level of stress, at least from time to time, is healthy and productive. You build strong muscles and bones by stressing them, and then giving them recovery time. You also tear muscles and break bones by over stressing them.
I think I was conflating a different thread in which people were discussing school accommodations, and the effect of difficult/easy lives on people’s development.
Agreed. We do offer specific accommodations in cases where student performance can benefit. Such as, longer testing time, private room, permission to visit the restroom whenever, etc. These are offered to students on a case by case basis.
But some “accommodations” have become the norm, especially since COVID. So for the most part, we eliminate “needlessly stressful” activities like having to use actual paper and hand in your homework assignments live, in class. (Digital is the norm now, even for many students’ note-taking.)
I think we have to differentiate between learning and preparing for a specific career. If the goal is to teach someone a subject, then it makes sense to provide reasonable accommodations so they can learn.
Some careers are inherently stressful and demanding. So there may be limits as to how much accommodations can be made.
It’s been a long time since I was in school, but I also thought that college was inherently stressful because you have a bunch of young people in a new environment, trying to fit into a new social structure, unsupervised, all more or less competing for a future which is often constantly changing and uncertain. And it’s expensive!