A friend of mine (Andrew Ferguson) posted some reasons he thought it sucked to be an engineering student.
Yes, sometimes it’s difficult, but I think we often have a head start on our counterparts in a lot of ways by engineering.
Some of my favorite professors have been from computer science. Granted, that is what I study, but even from high school, many of my favorites were in math / science. My high school calculus teacher motivated me very much, and would spend hours with me after school talking about various proof-projects we had going on (yes, I’m apparently that kid).
Textbooks can be rough, I’ll give him that, but I think that’s in large part symptomatic of the information engineering textbooks must contain. They have to catalog a lot of things, and for my money, I think they generally do a pretty reasonable job.
While other disciplines may have inflated grades, I haven’t been denied opportunities because of my grades. I don’t have quite the GPA I’d like, but people know how difficult sciences are and appreciate it when considering you for positions.
Sometime the beatings the assignments put us through do tend to blend together; I don’t know about Andrew’s coursework, but this semester I’ve had some of the most exhilarating assignments I’ve ever had. We wrote our own shell, we downloaded and parsed RSS feeds using only shell (unfortunately not our own). For Scientific Computing, I admit there was a lot of work, but they were assignments that kept me up at night, out of pure curiosity.
This doesn’t even include the job market situation. Other engineering disciplines don’t feature the growth that computer science has seen in recent years, I admit, but Mines certainly has fantastic job placement. Of my closest high school friends, I have two in international relations, three in linguistics, one in liberal arts, and one in chemical engineering. The engineers enjoy the jealousy of the others with respect to the prospect of work.
All things considered, I’ve really my collegiate career up to this point, and I imagine I will continue to.