UM Football Recruiting - by WM Wolverine

[Rocky Bleier]

Here's an earlier interview that gives some insight into Chris Barnett:

http://touchthebanner.blogspot.com/2011/07/getting-to-know-chris-barnett.html

[Jamie H]

Engineering at Michigan can be a b****. Of course it depends on what engin program you are in, but if you are an upper-level electrical engineering student, spending 6 hours in TA office hours twice a week (or more) just getting your homework done isn't that uncommon. Not to mention some of the projects that can take days and days of lab work to complete.

I know Bernie Legette was a EE major.

The way to do it would be to take as few credits in the fall as possible (12 or 13) and then load up with 17 or 18 credits in the spring. Of course, football is year round now, so I don't know if that would help as much as it seems like it would, and doing 18 credits in a semester means some classes pretty much get completely ignored outside of exam days.

Doing engineering AND football is definitely challenging.

[Mackenzie]

Sounds like a five year plan.

[Jamie H]

For the most part it was. I got through in 4.5, which I think was close to the average. I know they were trying to shorten it near the end of the time I was there because so many people were taking 5 years to get through--dunno if they ever did that.

[Hannibal]

What a shame that out of that five years, well less than 50% of it is useful. I think that you could make most engineering degrees three year programs and not miss any useful information at all.

[hack]

Really? Is engineering part of some liberal-arts faculty now?

[jack_crancer]

It took me 5 years to get through chemical engineering at Michigan Tech. Those are some hard classes.

[Jamie H]

I'm not sure which 50% of my college stuff wasn't useful. Maybe the small amount of required LSA electives weren't useful. And I'll admit that reletavistic physics probably isn't something I've made use of. But most of the EE stuff would have been very relevant if I had actually gone into Electrical Engineering. I ended up going into Computer Science because in my CS electives I realized I was way better at CS and was enjoying the classes that the actual CS majors hated.

[hack]

Knowing nothing about that, and knowing plenty about how much fluff there is in a liberal arts degree, I would have imagined that every course counts in that faculty. That's not the case? Surprising.

[Hannibal]

I'm not sure which 50% of my college stuff wasn't useful. Maybe the small amount of required LSA electives weren't useful. And I'll admit that reletavistic physics probably isn't something I've made use of. But most of the EE stuff would have been very relevant if I had actually gone into Electrical Engineering. I ended up going into Computer Science because in my CS electives I realized I was way better at CS and was enjoying the classes that the actual CS majors hated.

The basic engineering subject matter is useful, but how they teach it sucks. Most of what you learn beyond the first few weeks is so mathematical and inane that less than 1% of the people in the class will ever use it. And then there's those group projects that take dozens of hours per semester and have little value, other than to painfully demonstrate the concept of Social Loafing.

[Jamie H]

Heh, well when you do the group projects for everyone in the group, you actually learn quite a bit.

I actually found almost all of my CS classes super useful towards my eventual profession. But I can't really comment on my EE classes.

[DennisT]

I always viewed my engineering classes as a mechanism to thin out the herd. Tons of math. An awful lot of what I learned, I never applied. But those who were able to learn the material and jump through the hoops, so to speak, were those who were likely to be able to handle whatever was thrown at them once out of school.

[Hannibal]

I always viewed my engineering classes as a mechanism to thin out the herd.

You'll get no argument from me on that.

[hodgkal]

I have 3 family members in engineering, most recently my youngest grandson who just enrolled in Purdue but was accepted at UM and several other top tier schools. He did a lot of research and came to realize that there are basically two approaches. At UM he concluded it is a far more research oriented institution and tends to prepare the students for academic careers. Another grandson recently graduated from Purdue after turning down offers from UM and several others and is now in a PhD program at Northwestern. My middle son finished at UM in mechanical engineering in the early 80s and also got his masters, and that education was a tremendous boost to his career. He now works at ITT aerospace.

All these kids had one thing in common, math whizzes. Me? I stunk at math and actually took a lot of liberal arts stuff before later switching to pre-med.

My point is that there is apparently a separation in engineering schools between the more practical (traditional?) approach and the theoretical and more academic approach emphasized at UM. Although I don't know much about this I would suspect this is the approach taken at places like MIT and Caltech. I know this same differentiation is now evolving among medical schools around the country.

[SeanB]

That's a very interesting post, Doc. I'd love to chat with you about it some time. I don't want to stray too far off thread, but this is of great interest to me. As major institutions continue to chase the almighty dollar, meaning the research grant, clinical (in my and your field) skills are sacrificed, as I expect practical skills are sacrificed in the technical programs like electrical engineering, biomedical engineering (my sister's field) and the like.

If schools continue to whore themselves out to the research grant, they lose their ability to hold on to the best clinical instructors, and our faculties get replaced with people who know how to write a good grant proposal, but suck at developing good clinicians, technicians, practitioners, etc.

That's not good, in my humble, and very inexperienced opinion.