Students finding their direction June 23, 2012
Posted by mareserinitatis in education, engineering, geology, geophysics, physics, research, teaching.Tags: engineering, geophysics, majors, math, physics, students
trackback
The younger son’s birthday was this week, and we opted to host a pool party at a local hotel. (IMO, pool parties are the best for the elementary school age group: they keep themselves busy and then go home exhausted.) I was checking in when I noticed a young man standing at the other end of the counter. He looked familiar, so I asked if I knew him.
“I took your class last fall.”
“Oh great! How did the rest of the school year go for you?”
“Great. I actually switched to business and am really liking it.”
“Really? Why did you switch?”
“I just figured I liked business a lot better.”
“That’s why they have you take those early major classes – so that you find out you don’t like it before you get too far into it.”
I think the poor kid thought I would be mad that he had switched. But I wasn’t mad at all. If he feels like he’d be better off in a different major, then he ought to go for it. And that is part of what I’m trying to set out in the class – this is what engineers do. If it doesn’t look fun, then you ought to think about a different major. That’s a perfectly valid choice, and no one should judge a student for it.
(Yeah, I know…I sit here and wring my hands because older son gets these obnoxiously high scores in math and science but wants to be a writer…I’m one to talk.)
But seriously, I actually think it’s sort of silly to make students choose a major really early on in school. I think it’s a good idea to try to take a lot of classes in different fields before you really choose. I say this as someone who major hopped a lot during undergrad. I spent some time in physics, chemistry, journalism, and graphic arts. I finally decided that I liked physics after all, but what got me excited was geophysics. I happened to take a geology class when I was at Caltech because I had to take a lab course, and everyone told me geology was the easiest. Turns out, I really liked it and did very well in the course. (Of course, later on, I found that geology feels too qualitative and prefer geophysics, so it all worked out. On the other hand, I think I would’ve liked geology better if it had all been field courses.) :-)
I have run into people who got upset with me for this type of thing. I was doing research with a professor in undergrad, but I felt like the research wasn’t going well and got sort of excited about a math project that I’d seen a professor give a talk about. I talked to that professor to see if he’d be interested in having me as a student, which he was. When I told the other professor that I was going to work with the math professor, all hell broke loose. (I still think I made the right choice, though, especially since the first project really never did go anywhere.) I have yet to figure out why the first professor got upset, though, and did some petty stuff, like kicking me out of the student office (despite no one needing a spot) and having the secretary take away my mailbox. (This was silly, BTW, as I was president of the Society of Physics Students, so she ended up giving it back to me a month later so I could get SPS mail.)
And what did this do? Certainly reinforced that I didn’t want to work with this person, but I could also see it making a student feel like this person is representative of a particular field. Wouldn’t you wonder if a student would not want to go into a major because of the way the professors treat him or her? I can (and did!), and it just shows how ridiculous the whole thing was.
No, students need some time to explore their interests and getting mad at them for not doing what you think they should do is silly. They are the ones who have to deal with the consequences of their choices, and if a student takes my class and decides they don’t want to spend the next five to ten years of their life studying engineering, then I think they’ve learned something very important and just as valid as anything else I have to teach them.
I also blog at Engineer Blogs, home away from home to some of the best engineering blogs.
Comments»
No comments yet — be the first.