Princess Shelby

I honestly never thought that I would ever admit this, but I hate being in classes with non engineering majors.

Let me get this said right out of the gate, I’m not implying that non engineering majors are any less intelligent or degrading them in any way.

I’m saying is that there is a big difference in the way that other science and technical majors think compared to engineers. There’s this thing that we learn freshman year, its called not being allowed to memorize things.

Today, my Chem teacher told the class that we had to have this table memorized. She then asked the class a question pertaining to the table, and everyone just knew the answer off of the top of their head. I looked to my friend, who is also an engineering major, to see that he was just as confused as I was. We then came to find that we were sitting in a class full of health science, chemistry, and biology majors, who had already memorized the table without being told to do so. I’m not saying that these people are any less smart than I am, because obviously all of them just outsmarted me. I’m saying that we have two completely different ways of thinking and solving problems. These majors are taught from the first moment they step into a college classroom, maybe even sooner, that they need to know all of this information off of the top of their head, without fault, or they’re going to end up bums or hookers walking on Central. We’re told that we should never, and I mean never, memorize anything.

Dr. Fields, my physics professor was talking about problem solving today, and he told us that if he wanted to just have numbers plugged into an equations, he would just go hand them to someone at Intel or the Albuquerque Zoo (lol). We’re in school to learn how to solve real world problems. To see a situation and think, okay this is what’s wrong and this is how I need to be and then apply concepts to the problems that will provide a desirable output.

I think that parts of the scientific community have forgotten that the actual process of solving the problem, not the answer, is most important. This is where they’re going wrong, because science is about innovation, not copy and paste. 

There’s also the small fact that these other majors look at you like you have the west nile virus when you don’t know something right off of the top of your head, or you start to draw a diagram. They think that if you don’t know something off of automatic recall that you’re stupid, and they’re always really obnoxious about it when they “know” more than you.

If there’s one thing they can do, its memorize. And they’re lucky. But there are things we can do better. The only reason why any of us can do pretty much any math out of our head whether its balancing an equation, knowing that when you integrate sin^2(x)dx, you always get tan(x), or if its finding the force of someone who commits suicide by jumping off of the roof of a building is because we were forced to learn them from repetitiveness. We only know things off of the top of our head simply because we have done countless problems with a pencil and paper before we were allowed to even think about doing something in our head. We didn’t memorize it, we practiced it.

We can solve problems. So when these people are sitting in a hospital cleaning up people’s problems, I’ll be sitting in a lab coming up with ways to do every single thing that they do more efficiently. Someone has to be the innovative one, and that’s why my degree matters.