Chem. Engineering Education, 37(1), 30–31 (2003)
HOW TO SURVIVE ENGINEERING SCHOOL
Richard M. Felder
North Carolina State University
Dear Engineering Student,
Don’t take the title of this column literally. Despite the incomprehensible lectures,
endless homework, and impossible tests, studying engineering has rarely been fatal.
Nevertheless, things may not always go quite the way you would like—classes with absurd
amounts of work and test averages in the 50s are facts of life in engineering. I had lots of classes
like that when I was where you are now, and I complained about them just as loudly.
Unfortunately, while complaining may make you feel better, it won’t do a thing for your grades.
I’d like to propose several better ways to help yourself. First, though, let me suggest that
the real problem may not be that professor who’s making your life miserable. It is that over the
years you may have unconsciously bought into a message that goes like this: “My teachers know
everything I need to know to be an engineer. Their job is to tell it to me in lectures, and my job
is to soak it up and then repeat it on exams. If I can do that, I’ve learned it.”
Wrong! That approach may have worked in high school but it begins to fail in college,
and once you get into the plant or research lab, it stops working completely. Out there, there are
no professors, lectures, or texts with worked-out examples, and the problems don’t come neatly
packaged with all the information needed to solve them. In fact, often the hardest part of a real
problem is figuring out exactly what the problem is.
But you also need to remember this. Around the world, hundreds of thousands of
engineers—most no smarter than you, many not as smart—who once struggled with their own
confusing instructors and unreadable texts and didn’t understand entropy any better than you do,
are out there doing just fine. Every day they figure out what they need to know to solve their
problems, and then they solve them. If they could learn to do that, so can you. What I’d like to
do here is give you five simple tips to help you start learning it now. If you find yourself
struggling in classes, give the tips a try. If they work (and I’m pretty sure that they will), you’ll
have an easier time in school and hit the ground running in your first job.
Tip 1. Figure out what might make course material clearer and try to get it in class.
Do you ever find yourself expressing one of these common complaints? “I need
practical, real-world applications before I can understand something, but all we get in class is
theory.” “I want to understand how things work, but all we get are facts to memorize and
formulas to substitute into.” “I understand what I see—pictures, diagrams, demonstrations—
better than what I hear and read, but all we get are words and formulas.”
If you do, pay attention to yourself—identifying what you’re missing in a course is the
first step toward getting it. The obvious next step is to ask your professor, in or out of class, for
