P
Phil Hobbs
Guest
Joerg wrote:
In an honest system, bad grades mean that the student either didn\'t do
the work, or was unable or unwilling to do it well. There can be lots
of reasons for that, such as being unavoidably too busy, but that\'s not
the usual case.
The result is wasted time and money, and usually a skill set that\'s full
of holes and harder to build on later. It sounds like you were sort of
making up your own enrichment curriculum as you went on, which is a bit
different, of course.
I knew some very smart folks whose grades were poor, but they were
mostly unmotivated or undisciplined. One guy (a math genius) was in my
grad school study group for awhile, but was way too handsome for his own
good--he spent his time playing soccer and chasing women, and tried to
skate by on talent as he\'d always done. Eventually it stopped working.
If you go far enough, it always does.
That\'s the real benefit of weed-out courses--not that many people flunk,
but that the ones who succeed have to learn to learn mental discipline
in the process. That\'ll stand you in good stead for a lifetime.
(Flunking isn\'t the worst thing that can happen to you. I got fired from
my first job, which was very beneficial overall.)
Students sometimes ask me for advice, and I always tell them three
things: first, in every field, make sure you have the fundamentals down
cold; second, concentrate your course work on things that are hard to
pick up on your own, especially math; and third, join a research group
where you can do a lot of stuff on your own. (The ideal is to have an
interesting smallish project, where you have to do everything, and a
bunch of smart and supportive colleagues.)
That\'s the most direct path to wizardhood that I know about.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
http://electrooptical.net
http://hobbs-eo.com
On 1/2/23 5:57 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 2 Jan 2023 11:00:52 -0800, Joerg <news@analogconsultants.com
wrote:
On 1/1/23 11:08 PM, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Sun, 01 Jan 2023 20:04:49 -0800) it happened
John Larkin <jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote in
mrl4rhhtkup3sn9t4an65r9buogjtk9er1@4ax.com>:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/18/electrical_engineers_extinction/?td=rt-9cp
 >>>> I\'ve been thinking for some time now that EE schools don\'t
turn out
people who like electricity, but maker culture might.
It\'s almost always been that way. Except in the last century it
was ham radio. I learned way more useful stuff that way that in
years at the university.
I think that electrical instincts should be acquired young. Then the
 college courses add the theory. That\'s why the lego/maker/Raspberry
Pi thing is interesting.
I agree. As a young teenage hobbyist with little guidance, I went
through about four years of frustration at not being able to design my
own circuits. I\'d salvaged all these tubes and things from a couple of
old TVs that my folks were chucking out, but didn\'t really know how they
worked. (Transistors were too expensive, and IC prices were just moving
down from the stratosphere.)
That bottled-up frustration gave me a fire in the belly to figure it all
out, which eventually I mostly did. (Never got round to using anything
from that Motorola MNOS nonvolatile memory book they sent me, though.)
I started building my own stuff very early on. PRoblem was, I took what
I had learned in physics class literally. Well, initially. Like that
capacitors are ideal components. Until one fine day the fluorescent
lights in my room dimmed and I new they weren\'t dimmable. What the heck?
Huh? ... *POP* .. WHOOOSHÂ ... hisssss
That was one of the electrolytics that had turned itself into a missile
and whizzed by inches from my left eye. Whew! I learned about ESR the
hard way. It took some plaster out of the ceiling and after return to
earth melted an ugly splotch into the carpet.
At IBM, I was occasionally asked to interview candidates, and one of
the things I always asked them was whether they had any hobby
background in electronics or physical science. ...
Bingo! Exactly what I did.
                        ... Almost all the best designers I know
started out as hobbyists, which ISTM says more about the fire in the
belly than the expertise so acquired.
Now if you\'d just get off your duff and write that \"Electronics From
Scratch\" book you used to talk about, we might have a few more.
In the EE school I was in it was known that only \'hobbyists\' would
pass the final exams. The dropout in the first year was very very
very high.
At my university the drop-out rate (start to degree) was at times 83%.
Too many kids selected an EE degree based on some high school
counselor\'s advice, or dreams of a tidy income. Too late.
I dunno. Washing out of a hard program isn\'t the worst thing that can
happen to a young person. It\'s not nearly as bad as hanging on by the
skin of your teeth and then failing over a decade or so in the industry.
The old saying, \"C\'s get degrees\" has caused a lot of misery of that
sort.
I had pretty bad grades because I worked a lot on the side, did
\"pre-degree consulting\" and stuff like that. Bad grades are ok.
In an honest system, bad grades mean that the student either didn\'t do
the work, or was unable or unwilling to do it well. There can be lots
of reasons for that, such as being unavoidably too busy, but that\'s not
the usual case.
The result is wasted time and money, and usually a skill set that\'s full
of holes and harder to build on later. It sounds like you were sort of
making up your own enrichment curriculum as you went on, which is a bit
different, of course.
I knew some very smart folks whose grades were poor, but they were
mostly unmotivated or undisciplined. One guy (a math genius) was in my
grad school study group for awhile, but was way too handsome for his own
good--he spent his time playing soccer and chasing women, and tried to
skate by on talent as he\'d always done. Eventually it stopped working.
If you go far enough, it always does.
That\'s the real benefit of weed-out courses--not that many people flunk,
but that the ones who succeed have to learn to learn mental discipline
in the process. That\'ll stand you in good stead for a lifetime.
(Flunking isn\'t the worst thing that can happen to you. I got fired from
my first job, which was very beneficial overall.)
Students sometimes ask me for advice, and I always tell them three
things: first, in every field, make sure you have the fundamentals down
cold; second, concentrate your course work on things that are hard to
pick up on your own, especially math; and third, join a research group
where you can do a lot of stuff on your own. (The ideal is to have an
interesting smallish project, where you have to do everything, and a
bunch of smart and supportive colleagues.)
That\'s the most direct path to wizardhood that I know about.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
http://electrooptical.net
http://hobbs-eo.com