A Talk with Campus Leaders

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GATechAE07 said:
That really depends on who you ask, what field you are in, and whether or not the student co-op'd; you should find beej's post on the issue. That said, leaving the state for different work reinforces my point about no longer filling the state's engineering needs.
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There's definitely been a shift away from practical engineering and toward theory and research, even over the years I've been around Tech (since 1988).

Anecdotally, all you have to do is look at things like Wreck Parade entries and campus pranks over the years to see that a lot of Tech students no longer really know how to DO a lot of hands-on, practical stuff. Not that they're bad engineers, and in some fields (CS, CompE) the change is probably less evident. But in fields like CE or ME where you sometimes have to put on boots and a hard hat and go DO something, there's definitely a gap in practical application of engineering.

JRjr
 
Tech finally does something to help make us more competitive and everybody big cries about their degrees. Get real with yourselves.

Sent from my DeLorean using the Flux Capacitor
 
there has been a shift. mechanical engineering spends very little time in the shop building stuff. it does sadden me.

with cs, there isn't as much emphasis on hardware and low level code as there has been in years past. also, parts of the degree are done in ways that i completely disagree with.
 
vapspwi said:
There's definitely been a shift away from practical engineering and toward theory and research, even over the years I've been around Tech (since 1988).

Anecdotally, all you have to do is look at things like Wreck Parade entries and campus pranks over the years to see that a lot of Tech students no longer really know how to DO a lot of hands-on, practical stuff. Not that they're bad engineers, and in some fields (CS, CompE) the change is probably less evident. But in fields like CE or ME where you sometimes have to put on boots and a hard hat and go DO something, there's definitely a gap in practical application of engineering.

JRjr
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Actually I think this is true going much further back. (If you look at old copies of entrance exams, some could argue we have dummied down quite a bit in many subjects (English, etc.))

I helped build a wreck but wouldn't consider myself an auto mechanic. But I left school and was immediately laughed at by new work's maintenance folks for not knowing the proper term for a tool, etc. I was hired next to a ME at Maryland (zero hands on) and a MET from Texas somewhere. The MET looked better to the maintenance folks early but work wise, I blew by him and the MD ME grad. It doesn't take much effort to learn the hands on if and when you may need it. Theory and understanding always wins in the end.

p.s. I actually sent a note back to school after six months saying something like "we should add a tad bit more hands on..." One year later I should have retracted the note and have not felt it since.
 
ScionOfSouthland said:
Tech finally does something to help make us more competitive and everybody big cries about their degrees. Get real with yourselves.

Sent from my DeLorean using the Flux Capacitor
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You need to get real. The impact that this new program has on football will be minimal. The classes will be cyptomcat's and TIA's doing geeky statistical analysis, not a bunch of jocks. How many recruits are really going to come to GT because of this degree instead of a Management degree? It will be just as difficult by the time we nerd it up. We aren't changing entrance requirements, so we're still not getting the idiots that Georgia and Alabama rely on. We're still in the ACC, not the SEC, so it is seen as a more difficult path to the NFL.

This will not be Parks and Rec. We're a real school and it will be a practical curriculum with real work required to work for a degree. Something that is not attractive to many of the top athletes.
 
midatlantech said:
Actually I think this is true going much further back. (If you look at old copies of entrance exams, some could argue we have dummied down quite a bit in many subjects (English, etc.))
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Definitely agree it goes farther back, I only meant to say that I've seen the trend just in my 20-odd years at Tech. Part of it is just the way the world and technology have evolved - much less metal and steam now, and a lot more computers and magic.

Still, I don't know that we'd have the "Ramblin' Wreck" name if today's Tech folks were stuck in the jungle and needed to cobble together transportation (going from memory on where the name came from...). To me, a big part of the pride of engineering is just knowing "how to do stuff," and we've lost a bit of that.

But I do agree that it's a lot easier to pick up the hands-on stuff after the fact than it is to pick up the technical stuff, and Tech does a good job of teaching you how to learn stuff. I still think a little bit of real-world application of what you learn can be really helpful in a lot of ways, whether it's understanding how things "really" work, or interfacing with the people that actually have to do the real work to implement your designs.

JRjr
 
GT1992 said:
You need to get real. The impact that this new program has on football will be minimal. The classes will be cyptomcat's and TIA's doing geeky statistical analysis, not a bunch of jocks. How many recruits are really going to come to GT because of this degree instead of a Management degree? It will be just as difficult by the time we nerd it up. We aren't changing entrance requirements, so we're still not getting the idiots that Georgia and Alabama rely on. We're still in the ACC, not the SEC, so it is seen as a more difficult path to the NFL.

This will not be Parks and Rec. We're a real school and it will be a practical curriculum with real work required to work for a degree. Something that is not attractive to many of the top athletes.
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Nobody is saying this is going to be parks and rec where we can hide idiots. One of the primary complaints levied by the hill/BOR conspiracists is that we don't have enough variety of offerings independent of their level of difficulty. Some thought we were losing recruits who are both good and smart because we didn't offer majors they were interested in, and this is an attempt to remedy that perceived problem.

As effective or ineffective as it will inevitably prove, it's at least a signal from the hill that they are at least somewhat interested in a strong football program. So all the continued complaining about that is a little baffling.
 
ThisIsAtlanta said:
As effective or ineffective as it will inevitably prove, it's at least a signal from the hill that they are at least somewhat interested in a strong football program. So all the continued complaining about that is a little baffling.
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From what I've heard, it has more to do with wanting to up the rigor and reduce the perception of "the M-Train" as compared to the school's other departments in order to boost the rankings. Doing so without adding another major would be a huge blow to athletics...
 
I gotta think an Education Major would do wonders to our female population and athletic department...
 
GATechAE07 said:
From what I've heard, it has more to do with wanting to up the rigor and reduce the perception of "the M-Train" as compared to the school's other departments in order to boost the rankings. Doing so without adding another major would be a huge blow to athletics...
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Even that, the bleakest interpretation I've heard from a sports perspective, is still a signal that at least the Hill doesn't want to destroy football, something with which they have been repeatedly charged by our fans who are more prone to wield pitchforks and torches.
 
vapspwi said:
There's definitely been a shift away from practical engineering and toward theory and research, even over the years I've been around Tech (since 1988).

Anecdotally, all you have to do is look at things like Wreck Parade entries and campus pranks over the years to see that a lot of Tech students no longer really know how to DO a lot of hands-on, practical stuff. Not that they're bad engineers, and in some fields (CS, CompE) the change is probably less evident. But in fields like CE or ME where you sometimes have to put on boots and a hard hat and go DO something, there's definitely a gap in practical application of engineering.

JRjr
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This.

GT is no longer the NATS. Closest thing in Georgia to that is SPSU now. GT graduates 0 people in construction now. When I was in school, there were two whole separate programs for construction project management, one in CE and one in Architecture.
 
ThisIsAtlanta said:
Nobody is saying this is going to be parks and rec where we can hide idiots. One of the primary complaints levied by the hill/BOR conspiracists is that we don't have enough variety of offerings independent of their level of difficulty. Some thought we were losing recruits who are both good and smart because we didn't offer majors they were interested in, and this is an attempt to remedy that perceived problem.

As effective or ineffective as it will inevitably prove, it's at least a signal from the hill that they are at least somewhat interested in a strong football program. So all the continued complaining about that is a little baffling.
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We have a good variety of practical majors. I just don't see a smart kid choosing GT because we have this degree instead of Management. If he's smart enough, he realizes that he needs a degree that will lead to a job. As a place to put reasonably smart kids, maybe this maintains the status quo as the Management curriculum is strengthened, but as a recruiting tool, this does very little.

Here is what people are ignoring. Players like Stephen Tuitt aren't choosing Notre Dame over us because we don't have an applied degree that has the word Sports in its' name. Just look at the Notre Dame roster and the vast majority are in the College of Arts and Letters or First Year Studies, neither of which are we likely to ever offer as majors.

Here's a link, click on their name and the very last line of the bio has their major. Jones, the other Georgia S-A, is majoring in watching movies, which happens to be the major a whole lot of their football players have. Kind of like Notre Dame's Parks and Rec.

http://www.und.com/sports/m-footbl/mtt/nd-m-footbl-mtt.html
 
GT1992 said:
We have a good variety of practical majors. I just don't see a smart kid choosing GT because we have this degree instead of Management. If he's smart enough, he realizes that he needs a degree that will lead to a job. As a place to put reasonably smart kids, maybe this maintains the status quo as the Management curriculum is strengthened, but as a recruiting tool, this does very little.

Here is what people are ignoring. Players like Stephen Tuitt aren't choosing Notre Dame over us because we don't have an applied degree that has the word Sports in its' name. Just look at the Notre Dame roster and the vast majority are in the College of Arts and Letters or First Year Studies, neither of which are we likely to ever offer as majors.

Here's a link, click on their name and the very last line of the bio has their major. Jones, the other Georgia S-A, is majoring in watching movies, which happens to be the major a whole lot of their football players have. Kind of like Notre Dame's Parks and Rec.

http://www.und.com/sports/m-footbl/mtt/nd-m-footbl-mtt.html
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To the first bolded point: There are a ton of kids who are smart enough to go to Tech who are legitimately interested in things we don't offer. Fact of life.

To the second bolded point: STAC, I think, is what the major is called for us that boils down to watching movies and other fanciful endeavors. I've taken a few of their courses as electives such as a 'survey of early Chinese film' that was an excellent semester spent watching and analyzing 1970's Shaw Brothers films like Five Deadly Venoms. Sure, not every class in the major is going to be so lax, but they aren't ever solving fourth order differential equations to derive constants to plug into other fourth order differential equations to determine exactly how much fuel to load into a rocket so the payload gets to a lagrange point. The difference in difficulty between STAC and something like AE is astounding.

But on the whole, I agree with you completely. I don't think it's the problem. I was just pointing out that other people do, vocally, think it's a problem, and the hill seems to hear them and wants to address it. Or as per my sidebar with AE, they at least don't want to completely destroy football at Tech. So that's a good sign.

:dunno:
 
isn't the ivan allen college where GT hides it's parks and rec type people?

half serious, half joking
 
ThisIsAtlanta said:
To the first bolded point: There are a ton of kids who are smart enough to go to Tech who are legitimately interested in things we don't offer. Fact of life.

To the second bolded point: STAC, I think, is what the major is called for us that boils down to watching movies and other fanciful endeavors. I've taken a few of their courses as electives such as a 'survey of early Chinese film' that was an excellent semester spent watching and analyzing 1970's Shaw Brothers films like Five Deadly Venoms. Sure, not every class in the major is going to be so lax, but they aren't ever solving fourth order differential equations to derive constants to plug into other fourth order differential equations to determine exactly how much fuel to load into a rocket so the payload gets to a lagrange point. The difference in difficulty between STAC and something like AE is astounding.

But on the whole, I agree with you completely. I don't think it's the problem. I was just pointing out that other people do, vocally, think it's a problem, and the hill seems to hear them and wants to address it. Or as per my sidebar with AE, they at least don't want to completely destroy football at Tech. So that's a good sign.

:dunno:
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I think as you suggested earlier, that this major will be much more rigorous than it sounds at the surface with stats, some engineering, and some business courses. Sure, it might be easier than management, but it won't be watching films and puppet shows as a major, which is what too many of the prospective S-A's want. This move solved two problems, a new place to stick football players and shushing of the vocal people who don't get that it isn't a solution.

Like I've pointed out before, the only attainable solution is to recruit wider. There are a few scholarship players on Notre Dame's team who have chosen Business and other majors. Those are the guys we have to target and they aren't from Georgia.
 
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