College sure isn't what I remember

[CS1983]

texting, twitter & FC are a serious problem when you have the latest generation raised on social media. Can they SM 1/2 dozen people in 2 minutes, sure. can they have a coherent verbal conversation with co-workers and or the entire dept. Some can, some cannot break the bubble and understand there's more to life than cell ph or tablet.

I think it's more that code monkeys are just weird.

[babarsac]

Can you believe I had to work during college to pay for it.

[Dave_L]

texting, twitter & FC are a serious problem when you have the latest generation raised on social media. Can they SM 1/2 dozen people in 2 minutes, sure. can they have a coherent verbal conversation with co-workers and or the entire dept. Some can, some cannot break the bubble and understand there's more to life than cell ph or tablet.

We had a temporary employee that was young (18). She chuckled that we didn't have a dual monitor set up yet she didn't know how to address an envelope or give directions to our location. Yeah...

[Irving]

One of my college buddies couldn't properly address an envelope to save his life. He once mailed his portion of the rent to himself. I was over at their place once and he asked me to check his envelope for correctness. At first I thought he was joking but then all of his other roommates told me all the stories of his previous failures.

[Rumline]

The problem that I had in the engineering program hat I used to attend was that it was so disconnected from industry. Learning hand calculations are good to a point, but we never learned how to do it any other way.

You explained what I was trying to say much better than I did.

From Fr. Leonard Feeney's Magazine The Point, July 1952:
"But one night he took a room in a Boston hotel, wrote a note telling of his pique at the state of the world, and then stepped from his twelfth floor window."

Thanks for posting that. I quoted this passage because I love how the author turned that phrase. I feel like today a) nobody writes that well and b) even if they did, editors would change it for being "too flowery".

[Rumline]

Speaking of people having no life skills, when I was in the dorms I did laundry for people who didn't know how. I don't remember what I charged but I think it was around $2-3 per load.

[Martinjmpr]

For some reason this seems appropriate:

[Rucker61]

For some reason this seems appropriate:

How'd you get that photo to post?

[hatidua]

Speaking of people having no life skills, when I was in the dorms I did laundry for people who didn't know how. I don't remember what I charged but I think it was around $2-3 per load.

I worked in the school laundry for all four years of high school....some parents never seem to teach their children basic hygiene.

[MarkCO]

Re: relying on PCs and Mathcad, if I'm paying [not cheap amounts of money] for a college degree, I would expect to learn higher-level thought processes than how to manually calculate something a computer can do in 0.1 seconds. In the real world, nobody gives a **** if you can manually compute a Fourier transform.

I hope that at some point you learn that understanding how to organize and manually calculate something a computer can do in 0.1 seconds IS learning higher-level thought processes. Regardless of if you have a technology degree or a professional degree, if you are in a factory, a lab, or a job site, you must know both these days to be at the top. I make a living telling other people where someone else screwed up and when it is design and engineering, it is almost always a young hotshot who thinks exactly the way mentioned in your quote...and people die because of many of those mistakes. YES, I do care if an engineer knows how to do the manual calculations. I care even more than they can do orders of magnitude approximations on the fly and that they know if a program output is consistent with what a limited parameter calculation would produce.

One of the things I have done professionally is to sit in on interviews for high level engineering positions, as a consultant for a professional head hunter who fills such positions. I always ask candidates to do order of magnitude calculations without any support. Those who can almost always get hired. Those who can't get a rejection letter.

If you want to be average, skip the manual stuff. If you want to be exceptional, it is required.