The points about education really resonate with me. In my engineering undergrad, it was frustrating to see in our applied math courses that the mechanical plugging and chugging of equations was the approach that most of my peers took in their studies. They got better grades than me. I wanted to understand concepts more deeply, but there was no time, and the tests rewarded those who could simply go through the motions of applying formulae to problems.
I'm a first-year engineering undergrad, last Friday I finished the last Calculus 3 exam on the semester.
I spent 2 days studying with friends just to see they would blindly memorize formulas with no regard whatsoever for what they were actually doing. "I'm not the understanding type", they said unironically.
Do you think this happens more often in engineering than other disciplines? Some people believe that applied science or mathematics means that just learning formulas is enough
I was one of those people and I regret it. However, the course load was just so great that I'm not sure how I'd done it the "slow" way. I wish I had the time to go back to school and do it right.
