Engineering is hard because as an engineer you're very likely to have a project down the road where peoples lives will depend on the quality of your work and therefore greater things are expected of you than other majors. The courses are designed to weed out wannabees from the willbees for that exact reason. If you cant hack it, you do not deserve the title of engineer and the responsibility that goes with it. It is a reason that it is one of the few professions where you cannot be considered a professional engineer until you have years of experience practicing under another professional engineer and then pass a very difficult exam proving you are worthy of the title. This is one of the reasons I disdain the title of Software Engineer as it is a perversion of what engineering is. Until Software Engineers go through the same rigor, they are just mislabeled Lead Software Developers.

Sorry to get a bit preachy, but engineering is more than just a title.

Im not saying that schools should stop making it challenging, but they shouldnt make it bone-crushingly hard, where you pretty much lose your whole life for the next 5-6 years

I have friends in similar engineering programs who party 5 nights a week, show up to class hung-over, and still run an A average. Any major is hard if you have either (a) poor study habits, or (b) no aptitude for the subject (those same friends have been known to do very poorly in humanities courses).

I don't mean to come across elitist here, but some people just aren't cut out for particular majors. If engineering is hard enough for you, that you will have to sacrifice 5-6 years of your life to it, then you'd better be damn sure that the piece of paper at the end of it is worth it to you.

I don't mean to come across elitist here, but some people just aren't cut out for particular majors.

Fun story. So my university forces computer science students to take a mastery test after the second class. If you fail it 3 times you're kicked out the CS program. I had a friend I talked to who took it and failed it and was kicked out. He did a finance major instead. My department is very serious about weeding out people that aren't fit for the major. I think other majors at my university do similar things.

There's no reason for you to assume that your school's teaching methods are perfect, and you are at fault. What's more likely to be true is the converse, or somewhere in between. If school doesn't seem like the path that will get you where you're going, then your only other options are to quit, or find another way. The most typical "other way" is by doing your own thing, starting your own projects, and getting concrete, provable experience through your own efforts. In many cases, if you've got a personal portfolio that's good enough, whether or not you've got a degree will be irrelevant.

There are plenty of examples of the non-degree path to a career in programming/software engineering. But most importantly, you should probably be questioning your interest in this path at this point. If you changed your major and career path, would you still be programming as much as you do now? Could you imagine going through the rest of your life without ever working on another project, personal or otherwise?

If you think you'd program a lot less in your free time if it wasn't your major, maybe you love programming but it doesn't actually drive you, per se. There's a difference between something you love and something that is one of the main reasons you can feel glad you woke up this morning. A passion is something that feels inextricably tied to who you are, beyond a superficial level. If this is how you feel about programming (or just creating in general, which is obviously strongly correlated to programming), then a degree isn't going to be the difference maker in whether or not you make a career of this. You'll keep trying at it anyway. If not, there are many other things in life you might be passionate about.

Why is engineering hard? Why do they weed out the lesser students?

So that when I walk across a bridge, I can be reasonably confident that it's not going to snap in two pieces or collapse in on itself. And when they bridge does collapse, I wouldn't want to be the institution that gave them a diploma.

There's no reason for you to assume that your school's teaching methods are perfect, and you are at fault. What's more likely to be true is the converse, or somewhere in between. If school doesn't seem like the path that will get you where you're going, then your only other options are to quit, or find another way. The most typical "other way" is by doing your own thing, starting your own projects, and getting concrete, provable experience through your own efforts. In many cases, if you've got a personal portfolio that's good enough, whether or not you've got a degree will be irrelevant.

There are plenty of examples of the non-degree path to a career in programming/software engineering. But most importantly, you should probably be questioning your interest in this path at this point. If you changed your major and career path, would you still be programming as much as you do now? Could you imagine going through the rest of your life without ever working on another project, personal or otherwise?

If you think you'd program a lot less in your free time if it wasn't your major, maybe you love programming but it doesn't actually drive you, per se. There's a difference between something you love and something that is one of the main reasons you can feel glad you woke up this morning. A passion is something that feels inextricably tied to who you are, beyond a superficial level. If this is how you feel about programming (or just creating in general, which is obviously strongly correlated to programming), then a degree isn't going to be the difference maker in whether or not you make a career of this. You'll keep trying at it anyway. If not, there are many other things in life you might be passionate about.

I like programming, but I like to take it at my own pace. I was taking a c++ class and the professor was going so fast i couldnt abosorb the material properly. I dropped and started learning on my own using books and onlinetutorials. Guess What? I learned more that I couldve had I been rushed.I actually programmed this summer more than I ever did in my entire life, this was when I had no school. Incidently I also got my gamedev account during this time period . Its like the computer scientist in me has roared haha. Its just that I get nervous in the classroom and have paranoid feeling about failing, which came from my calculus class. What is another slap into my face is the impacted campuses in california. Its like everyone and there mother wants to go to school now. Just to get into my local state school I have to have a 3.4gpa to be considered or I can travel half way across the state to some remote school. I mean getting a 3.4gpa in cs/engineering is beyond me. Its like faith has shut all its doors on me. Alas I'll never fulfill my dream of becoming a computer scientist. Hearthbreaking but sometimes life is what life is. Atleast its a good hobby

Why is engineering hard? Why do they weed out the lesser students?

So that when I walk across a bridge, I can be reasonably confident that it's not going to snap in two pieces or collapse in on itself. And when they bridge does collapse, I wouldn't want to be the institution that gave them a diploma.

Some of the best engineers worked on the apollo shuttle in 2003, yet it failed and blew up during its entry in orbit. Honestly I think theres more to it than a persons ability to regurgitate

Yes, it's always a risk. But you try to minimize it. What happened during any previous engineering disaster is not a reason or excuse to take it easier on new students.

[quote name='swiftcoder' timestamp='1348190692' post='4982213']
I don't mean to come across elitist here, but some people just aren't cut out for particular majors.

Fun story. So my university forces computer science students to take a mastery test after the second class. If you fail it 3 times you're kicked out the CS program. I had a friend I talked to who took it and failed it and was kicked out. He did a finance major instead. My department is very serious about weeding out people that aren't fit for the major. I think other majors at my university do similar things.
[/quote]

I have a childhood friend who did not pass one single test the very first year in a CS program(he was kicked out). He came back again and ended up with the highest score for his Bachelor project and is now doing his master(he was even offered a paid position in a department for science at that university). Be careful who we deem not fit we should for he/she may come back stronger and more hungry for success...

Everybody has their mental blocks. For my dad, like many here, it was calculus. He struggled through and went on to be an engineer anyway.

I had little trouble with calculus. I was in Computer Engineering and was one of those people that never studied and still got A's and B's. I picked up a Computer Science double major because it was essentially no effort - the coursework was trivial and the projects were fun things that I would have been doing in my spare time anyway. And then came statistics. I took the hard version (meant for math and physics majors) because "hey, why not", and it kicked my ass so hard I dropped out for the reminder of the quarter (it was to late to just drop the one class). I went back later and took the basic probability for dummies course instead and still struggled but at least got through it.

It's interesting. Students always complain about how hard their classes are and how it's unfair that there's such a thing as "weeding out". I do a lot of interviewing nowadays. Virtually everybody I talk to has a degree in either engineering or CS. Yet the amount of people who are complete failures at basic technical skills is staggering. We'll go through ~60 people (i.e. people who at least seem qualified based on thier resume) to fill a single entry-level position.