For what it’s worth, I took a control engineering class where the lecturer split his time between teaching classes and designing aircraft at Boeing. He was adamant that we learn to do all the calculations by hand, even though he taught us the software as well.
You have to know the theory in order to understand when to use it and when not to use it, but I don’t think I’ve ever done a least squares calculation by hand. At the same time, you really need to know at least two different ways of implementing it, because you will at some point run into a problem where OLS doesn’t work well and you’ll need to apply some kind of fancier model that can’t be done by hand.
I’d trust this opinion more if it came from someone who had taken upper level classes in both disciplines, but most engineer’s opinions are based on the lower level electives they’re required to take, which are generally targeted towards nonmajors anyway. I have no reason to doubt that an honors seminar in history or political science is challenging. (And as I’m often fond of reminding my engineering friends, pure math is one of those liberal arts that they love to look down on.)
In my field (statistics), the master’s is the entry level degree, to the point where very few programs even offer an undergraduate major.
Things are a little different here in Québec. Assuming a standard Québec education (11 years to the end of high school, 2 years “general” requirements completed through Cégep), a BA or general BSc program is then 3 years after Cégep (education, business, physics, chemistry, psychology, etc).
So called “professional” degrees, or end-state degrees are 4 or 5 years after Cégep, and these are things such as the BEng (most schools here give a BEng, not a BSc (eng)), veterinary medicine, etc. I admit I’m not sure about law/medicine, other than the general sense that they are at least 4 years.
I think whether it takes 5 years or not depends on whether you choose to specialize or have an honours degree; the honours Mech Eng at my school involves an extra year, a concentration in certain subjects is at least an extra semester, etc, and my sister, in vet school (though actually in a different province) would do a fifth year if she chose to specialize in large animal, or equine or zoo animal medicine.
So this province, at least, has found there to be a distinction in the time/extent of knowledge needed to teach certain subjects, but it isn’t as simple as a liberal vs technical/science distinction.
Another thing that may not be taken into account is that many undergrads are also working for a group. I don’t know how this compares in physics, but every group I’ve been in had as many undergrads doing research as grad students. So class time isn’t the only thing that counts in the degree. Now, the work isn’t usually required, but it is highly recommended. Besides, you get paid. Undergrads will likely spend as much time in the lab as in class. For those undergrads that do labwork, I would guess that the workload is very comparable to an engineering degree.
As an example: At my undergraduate school, Villanova, scientists were required to take some English, philosophy, etc. courses, and English majors, philosophers, etc. were required to take some science courses. But the English majors could fill their science requirement with a single astronomy course at literally the third-grade level, while the the astronomy majors needed an introductory-level (freshman or sophomore) and an advanced (junior or senior level) literature course. When I took my upper-level lit requirement, I was in the same Shakespeare class with senior English majors, but there’s no chance you’d see an English major in even the same class as sophomore astronomers or physicists.
This is getting into GD territory, but: I’m not sure whether this is indicative of the difficulty of physics/astronomy courses or just the fact that they build on each other. It’s possible to get something out of an upper-level literature course without having taken first-year lit, but if you walk into a course on Lagrangian dynamics without having taken a first-year mechanics course you’re going to be completely lost.
You’re assuming that I haven’t taken upper division course in the liberal arts. In fact, while in school I took upper division classes in history (WWII and two on US-Soviet relations in the Cold War), literature (Medieval European and Romantic Literature), economics, and philosophy; and have independently read the core coursework in undergraduate psychology and a fair amount on neuroscience and cognitive science. I also completed coursework in Physics up through E&M and two classes of modern physics, physical chemistry, a variety of EE classes (linear and nonlinear circuits, signals processing, basic energy transmission and conversion), basic computer science and applied numerical methods, mathematics up through partial differential equations, differential geometry, and game theory, and then the complete undergraduate curriculum for mechanical engineering with an emphasis on structural mechanics and dynamics.
So I’d say that I have a fair understanding of the difficulty across both the breadth of liberal arts, and the hard science and engineering. While some of my liberal arts classes required a lot more library research and paper writing than engineering, and some of the professors were more hardassed than the course matter seemed to require, overall I sweated a lot more over and spend more time pouring over my engineering and science classwork. I never really studied for any of my non-science and non-engineering classes except for econ, whereas I can only remember one engineering or math course that I breezed through without cramming, and that was a management class.
I don’t sneer down my nose at the classical liberal arts as you seem to imply, and indeed I think many technical majors would be vastly enriched by a greater exposure to literature, art, economics, and the soft sciences, but let’s not pretend that reading Shakespeare or even Chaucer is at the same level of difficulty as continuum mechanics, electricity & magnetism, or chemical kinetics.
Well the fact that the sciences do built on each other, and upper division classes require extensive prerequisite knowledge does tend to suggest that this field of study is inherently more difficult and demanding, although to be fair there is a not-insignificant amount of prerequisite knowledge to get the full benefit of many upper division liberal arts classes, too. Still, the coursework, both in hours and effort, for a typical liberal arts degree is far less than one in the hard sciences or engineering.
Well, I did say most, not all. Physics and Math would be the two of the three exceptions to that rule, along with Chemistry.
OTOH… having known quite a few psychology and anthropology majors, those degrees were relatively cream-puff at the undergraduate level, along with most of the liberal arts degrees.
You didn’t see political science or english majors cranking out massive group projects for weeks on end, nor did they have to do the level of labwork that we did. On top of that, their degree plans (at least when I was in school) were around 120 hours, while ours were in the 135 range, which made ours an extra semester right there.
Awesome. I’m planning on taking the 3/2 engineering course at my liberal arts college (3 years of physics followed by 2 years of engineering for a BA and BS degree), and this thread is just filling me with optimism.
Looking over Wesleyan University’s course catalog, it does seem that most classes end at concepts that were pretty well defined 50 years ago (relativity and quantum mechanics).
I wish people would stop using liberal arts when they mean humanities. Liberal arts in the modern sense refers to a style of education that includes broad exposure to natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. I went to a liberal arts school for undergrad that had an excellent biology program and a very good physics program, and those students received an education in the liberal arts just as much as (and arguably more so than) an English or History major. Degrees in the liberal arts, such a Master of Liberal Studies or a BA in Liberal Arts, are interdisciplinary and generally cover natural and social science as well as humanities, though there is a natural tendency for students and faulty to either focus on humanities and social sciences or to approach natural science from a social sciences or humanities perspective (through courses such as “Evolution and Culture” or “Social Responses to Global Warming”) because there is only so much physics you can do without specialization. In the classical sense, the Liberal Arts included not just mathematics but astronomy, which is about as “hard” as science got back then outside of medicine.
In my experience, a degree called “Liberal Arts” isn’t generally so much interdisciplinary, but unfocused: Sort of a “college major in nothing in particular” option. Interdisciplinary would suggest to me that the student is going into enough detail in at least two different fields to find ways to tie them together.
Something to think about when you compare the rigor of science vs. soft science or humanities courses is the sheer amount of work required. A light week for me as a comp lit major was 1,000 pages. I might have 200–500 pages per class assigned, as well as papers. Yes, that means that 5 classes would net you 2,500 pages a week at times. I read faster than just about anyone I know and it would still take me hours to do the minimum required reading. And when you get to higher levels, skimming it just won’t cut it. You need to have understood and analyzed the text.
I started out as an engineering major (and regret not staying with it) so I do have some understanding of the requirements. With sciences, it’s often a matter of getting it or not getting it, of having the kind of mind that understands the concepts and the math or not. In that sense, yeah, it’s harder. I actually think that it’s not just harder, but almost impossible for someone who doesn’t have a natural bent for that kind of thinking.
On the other hand, I’ve also got some extreme engineer/math/science oriented friends who couldn’t read literature to save their lives. One guy I knew was abso-fucking-lutely brilliant with any left-brained stuff. He was, however, so left-brained that it took him an hour to write a semi-coherent paragraph. He asked me to write the manuals for a database package he put together for a local business because it was horribly difficult for him to do it in the first place, and when he came to me for help with cleaning it up I often ended up rewriting it after clarifying what he wanted to say.
While engineering and the hard sciences don’t have the same amount of reading assignments as literature or history, you end up having to reread over and over, and then work large problem sets, in order to both grasp the basic concepts and and be able to apply them across a wide domain of problems, including understanding when basic assumptions apply and when they don’t. So it’s not just the volume of information to intake, but how it has to be comprehended. And even the most brilliant tech types don’t just “get it”; some may grasp the idea faster than others, but all of the Real Genius types I know are brilliant because they are wonks and spend idle hours pouring over physics texts, solving partial differential equations for fun, and tooling with obscure computer operating systems.
Your statement about natural inclination is on point; for someone who has an affinity for math or mental visualization, these skills come more easily. While I think that with the right approach most people can “get” math through geometry and calculus, there are definitely some who are much better than others, and the ability to see objects in your head and be able to rotate them or disassemble them is, IMHO, pretty much an innate talent. I would agree that many (but by no means all) science and engineering folk have no small difficulty with written communication skills that are imperative for studies in the humanities and soft sciences.
There was talk of engineering before. For our program, it was for 4 years just like every other major at the school, but the average credit load was 2-3 per semester more than a liberal arts degree. Over four years, that worked out to 18-20 credits more, which is a whole semester more.
In the UK science courses have often become 4 years rather than the previous 3.
Partially it’s because students no longer arrive with a grasp of basic mathematics due to a fundamental mismatch between what schools teach of a syllabus stripped of ‘harder’ stuff and what you need at degree level to do serious science or maths.