It took me 15 years to graduate with my BSEE. I had 6 years in the Navy (Vietnam Vet), started and ran a large electronics company taking care of the tuna fleet until Jimmy Carter chased it overseas, and raising a family. One of the happiest days of my life was receiving that diploma.
As an older student, I can't tell you about happiness in school. School was work that I did between job and family. It was tough. But it made my life what it is.
I don't give a wiff whether or not a student is happy. Get over it. Find something you like, put in the time and sacrifice, and build a life around it. That is the way to get happy!
The article claimed that many professors don't care about teaching. That is largely true. As in business, employee actions come down to incentives and controls. At most universities there is no benefit for a professor to focus on education. When they are rated on teaching is often from student reviews which gives a strong incentive to give "easy A's", a rampant problem at ivy league schools.
Engineering professors are rated almost solely on their research, specifically how much money they bring to the school in contracts. I was a Phd engineering student for 4 years at a well-known university and infamous "research mill". One person was hired as a "full professor" after retiring from a government lab where he had strong funding connections. He had only a bachelor's degree but could bring in $$$ research money.
Re the problem of few engineering professors with good command of English, in my Phd program there were never more than 2 or 3 U.S. citizens out of almost 100 Phd students. The chairman made recruiting trips to India. One U.S. citizen visited the chairman after finishing his M.S. to ask about pursuing a Phd. He said the chairman cussed him out and threw him out of the office, saying they didn't need him. I was locked out of the lab after 4 years and told by my junior professor that a senior professor decided he didn't like me and they were assigning an Indian post-doc to finish my experimental project (which they botched). I wouldn't advise any U.S. citizen to pursue a Phd if they have any other offers, since I doubt the situation has changed in the 26 yrs since.
I would be interested in seeing how the "happiness rating" compares across programs. For example, how does one of these engineering schools compare with the engineering program at, say, a larger liberal arts university with a number of non-technical majors. That might also help point to the actual cause. For example, I got my undergrad in electrical engineering at Marquette University. Therefore, there was plenty of interaction, classes, etc. across the educatational spectrum. Also, it was a lot easier for those who found engineering might not be quite right for them to pop into something else.
I had a some of my best times being a tech student at URI and MIT. Clearly URI was much friendlier, but also less stressfull. It all depends on hw you establish yourself. Do not be a jerk. Try to find nice and reliable friends to study with and keep some time for relaxation. Make sure you take classes from other departments to learn other things in addition to numbers and formulas.
I got involved in robotics and had the best time in the lab.
Clearly that engineering is not easy, but I did not see too many unhappy students.
I think that engineering is one of the most interesting professions.
Dave: What a coincidence. My Alma matter is also IIT. Was I happy?, Sure from the point of view of education and instructional benefits I received while at IIT. Worked hard in just about 2.5 years, after my master, I got my Ph.D. in mechanical. I could be happier, if the professors were not so strict. But then there is this trade-off. You got to make compromises if you want a good education. I have seen few, who did not put enough time has had difficulties in finding good jobs. It pays to work hard. It pays to be little unhappy. At the end it is you, who needs to decide “why are you are there”?; “what you want to achieve in your life?” It is that balance that makes the difference.
I see that student life at my alma matter (Illinois Institute of Technology) is improving. When I was a student there, we were number six on the list of least happy students. Now we're only number nine. Things must be getting better!
Seriously, I had a great time as an engineering student. In fact, it was one of the happiest times of my life. Sure, I worked hard - but if I didn't want to work hard, I wouldn't have gone into engineering in the first place.
On the other hand, my college experience was definitely non-traditional. For one thing, I was a little older than the typical student - I was 23 when I transferred into IIT from a community college. By this point in life, I had a little more maturity and a stronger sense of purpose. I didn't have any illusions that I was going to college to party.
Also, I lived off campus with my family, so I never set foot in a dormitory or ate in a cafeteria, never had roomates (other than my parents and my niece), etc. Having a stable environment, surrounded with people who wanted to see me succeed, was very important. Also, having to balance schoolwork with family responsibilities helped to keep me grounded.
My social life was also mainly off campus. For the most part, the friends I hung out with on the weekend (when I had time to hang out on the weekends!) were old friends from my high school days. Like my family, my friends were a big support to me.
Finally, and maybe most importantly, I worked full-time off campus as a technician in a failure analysis lab, so I was constantly exposed to "real world" engineering. My co-workers were another source of encouragement and support, as well as professional mentoring and practical advice. And every day I saw how the things I was learning in school could be applied.
So maybe the problem is not with engineering schools themselves, but with the traditional conception of the college experience and the expectations created by popular culture. Anyone who goes to engineering school expecting to party all the time is going to be very disappointed, or else flunk out in the first two years. But if that's your idea of happiness, maybe your shouldn't be in engineering.
I would have concurred with the Princeton survey when I was in engineering school simply by comparing demands on my time as compared to others around me. A desire to excel in Engineering left little time for "fun". Hearing about the great times people were having while I was buried in a book was disheartening.
In my professional life I have found that I am generally more satisfied with my work than my colleagues from other departments.I suspect if the Princeton survey followed its subjects into the working world the happiness result would be flipped.
I took Mechanical Engineering at the University of BC in Vancouver many years ago. No, it wasn't fun. I was a hick from the sticks in a university that didn't know a thing about the industrial engine that drove the Province that in turn fed the university--Forestry and Mining. I couldn't understand why all my classmates seemed hell-bent on getting into designing gas turbine blades for P&W on the other side of the continent while my professors were more interested in what they were going to do on their summer holidays. There were only 3 or 4 kids in my year of over 60 ME students who even knew what sawmills and pulpmills where all about. Zero work on BC-related industrial issues. I had many conversations with the ME dean about this lack of local connectivity...maybe it helped; in my last year they had hired a new prof who was interested in analyzing bandsaw blade dynamics...finally something that related to what we did in BC! Industry donated him a brand new 5' bandmill to set up in his lab.
There were some minor attempts at getting the real world into the classroom. In our last year, the course I enjoyed the most was was an engineering design course that focussed less on the math and science behind a project and more on how sucessful the end result was. Which, of course, is real life. It was a huge eye opener for me in terms of who was sucessful in this course. Usually the class brains fell FLAT on their face in this class. It was my turn to excel for a change.
I think the issue boils back to the course material that the school has chosen to present. We, as many other schools, spent way too much time with advanced calculus and other courses that were forgotten once the final exam was over. As kids in school, most of us were not so dumb that we didn't know the material was a waste of time. Does jumping through administratively pontificated mind-numbing hoops make anyone happy?
I always said, the best thing about university was to "have the sheepskin in your hand and the university in your rear view mirror." I never even went back to attend graduation ceremonies.
For challenging curriculums like engineering, it can be easy to lose sight of the goal. When you're going from semester to semester, the goal is not to earn high grades on the final. The goal is to learn. That's a pretty diffuse reward for four years of hard work, which was preceded by 12 years of the same sort of effort.
In going through four years of engineering school, I can understand how engineering schools can be on the top of unhappiest students. Spending weekends in the computer lab to get projects done can be tiresome. On the other side, this was something that was enjoyed by my fellow students and I.
As for real world application of engineering principles. This was not seen or emphasised until the final senior project, and this was really a canned project. I learned almost as much my first year on the job as I learned in four years in college.
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