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in response to this statement from jaafgie:
The fact that less than 20% of the initial block makes it to grad day means that there’s either something wrong with the selection process, the curriculum, or the quality of education and teaching.
Probably the problem is with selection and the program.
I read somewhere that in Harvard they had a projected grade that few people deviate from. You probably had to be someone who couldn’t take the pressure and ultimately failed or someone like bill gates who just had to conquer the world (In a way.)
In another interview I read that the head of an Ivy League institution alumni fund raising head probably Princeton or Yale commissioned a research on donors. He wanted to know what were the profiles of the students who donated money later on.
What they found out was very interesting, it wasn’t the ones with the highest grades or the best in everything that were the most likely to donate 20 million later on in life. The people who donated the most were the were jst good enough to get through the selection wall and had other skills. They were the ones who were presiednt of an organization, already doing nonprofit volunteer work, people who had what they call soft skills (leadership, management, communication).
The thing is if you graduate from eee of up, you went through a very challenging set of hoops, and (specifically for someone) you are one of the smartest people anyone of us would probably know personally. The problem is that I feel that the “future donors to the department” are somewhat being turned away because the hoops are more apt to produce college professors (Nothing wrong with this i love my professors) rather than future stewards of industry. Think of it this way, circuit and erg consistently place at the top 6 of the freshman orientation rankings, and those two organizations are not pushovers in the engineering week overall championships. We have some of the best if not the best students in our department, but we seem to not let them fly. We burden them with stuff that they probably would be forgetting a semester removed. I read something from a professor I think a canadian school, he said “Joy First Theory Second”. And forgive me for saying this but in eee its, “Theory First, Your lucky if you find Joy”
If I were to regret something, it was that if I graduated on time I would probably never have found the time to love science, engineering , technology and research. If i graduated on time I would have been lacking most of the soft skill that I believe I now possess. The course was hard enough to really limit interactions and joy of work.
The thing is Ideally I shouldn’t have had to graduate 2 years later than expected to just have a full college experience.
