This entry is good enough, right?

A friend of mine who just recently finished her Master’s degree told me that in the last class she took, her teacher gave her special instructions for an assignment. She was to do the minimum amount of work required to complete the project, and that was it. No delving into anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary.

I found this fascinating, because no teacher of mine would tell me to do that. They wouldn’t have to. That’s how I operate. Oh, I think that maybe in high school I worked harder than necessary, but once I got to college everything changed. I think it’s because I no longer had time to put that extra special something on homework assignments. Sure, I would probably have learned more if I actually read the chapter before doing the problem set instead of using the time-honored technique of randomly flipping through the chapter to find the right equation to solve it. But I would only have learned more in one of my classes because I would have flunked out of my other classes thanks to not finishing any of the problem sets.

See, engineering is hard. I say this not to put down other disciplines. In no way am I trying to compare the challenges of earning an engineering degree with those of other degree programs. I never had to read fifteen books a week for a comparative literature class for example, and neither did I have to pass an oral exam in a foreign language. So I can only draw from my own experience and say that the course load and work required for an engineering degree can be quite overwhelming, and the only way I could get through it was by doing only what was required of me, and no extra.

But, hey, you could argue that that is the whole philosophy of engineering anyway. Who but an engineer would model a horse as a sphere with four cylinders in order to estimate the volume?