What I Miss About Engineering

I’ve been taking biology and chemistry for about a year now, thanks to this newfound inspiration to go into medicine after initially pursuing electrical engineering. On top of that, I finished my electrical engineering classes last semester, so this semester has been a new experience entirely. I feel like a freshman majoring in business and premed. As I take these classes, I’ve been having to seriously reconsider if I am called to medicine as the study methods for the prerequisites for medical school stray far from the study methods of engineering. I’ve found that I’m still wired to study for engineering, whether I feel a calling or not and here’s what I’ve found and what I miss about engineering.

Freshman year, I entered USC with the mindset of seeing if hardware, like circuits and wireless signals, was right for me. I was seriously considering computer science, but I wanted to try out one of the hardest majors in engineering first. I was not disappointed as the classes proved difficult, but I enjoyed myself so much in them that I had to come back for more. I was learning about digital logic and hardware algorithms, all of which quickly made sense to me, despite being foreign to me the class before. I could quickly grasp the concepts and the practice done in class and through the homework allowed me to apply the same concepts to other, more difficult problems on tests and projects. It all made sense and the textbook served as a supplement to the material taught in class, helping to better understand topics that were a bit fuzzy from class and helping to figure out new topics.

As I began biology and chemistry, the study methods changed. The teaching methods changed. Everything became denser. Literally, the only way to do well was the study the material outside of class on your own. The class length was the same, perhaps even longer than engineering classes, and yet the material was not covered as thoroughly as engineering. It didn’t make sense. Of course, the material being covered was quite different, one being about how to apply concepts to improve systems and the other being about how organisms and systems work, but that still didn’t explain it. The difference in study methods clearly suggests that there is some central difference in the way the material is learned. In biology, the professor would go through as much material as he or she could in the lecture period and the student would be responsible for memorizing ALL of the information, only to be asked about a few of the concepts. The same applied for much of chemistry.

The difference between these two majors is immense. Engineering focuses on a few topics, which are dense, and then has the student apply them to as many concepts as possible. Natural sciences focus more on studying as many concepts as possible and making sure that students are able to regurgitate the information back to the professor in tests. Illogical, in my opinion, but perhaps its necessary since there needs to be some sort of buffer to keep everyone from trying to become a doctor and making the field similar to engineering, finance, and all the normal undergrad fields. Then again, perhaps I'm just complaining because I'm having trouble and I feel like I shouldn't be having trouble.

-Sam Rho