re: Engineers/Construction Workers?

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All those bridges and rockets and elevators and skyscrapers-just throw that crap up there, it'll stay

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I'd have to say that one of the most valuable things I've gotten out of my engineering degree is an appreciation for what it takes to make shite work. Even what seems to be the most mundane thing like a tire has so many man hours in it that the average man's brain would melt just looking at the cover of the design proposal.

foreign engineers are the worst

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I plan on mumbling something and then fake passing out. Hopefully that'll get them to move to the next question

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To be fair, every time I've interviewed for a job where there was no GPA requirement they've asked what my GPA was. Every time I told them with a straight face exactly what it was, they wrote it down, and went to the next question. They know by the end of it if they need to be concerned about your GPA or not.

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Really good internships and co-ops

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Not to take away from the importance of internships or say that you don't have any "experience", but an internship is just to show that you can work well with people and learn. I had internships and have had interns work for the company I work at. I've never really seen an intern do anything that I would consider important, nor do I think it's enough time to learn anything about a company or a career in general. The 3 months you spend in an internship over the summer is the amount of time I spent working in one of our shops learning one type of tool. And that only taught me how it works, not the situational circumstances that can cause it to fail. I'm not trying to tear your experience down at all, it's just an example. But thinking that internships somehow give you more experience may just be the very thing that annoys people with experience.

(And I'm not trying to take the experienced old guy side, because those people annoy the crap out of me even more)

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Just like the OP said, a lot of them are just flat out missing things like common sense and just general knowledge.

I worked with some 4.0 students building a specialized tool, and if I asked for a flathead, they'd hand me a hammer. Ask them again in 30 minutes, and you could see them trying to remember which tool it was. They stripped/snapped small bolts all of the time, crimped copper pipes, and generally had no idea what was going on. It was like teaching a baby to walk. We had a schedule, and I could only teach them so much while still getting done what I needed to for the week

That made them much more of a hindrance than anything, and my boss made them stay inside most of the time because of it

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Engineers shouldn't be professional craftsman, hell they would get greivanced in a lot of places for trying to use tools. They are not there to work on shite, they are there to make sure shite gets done to the design and is done to code. You do the work, but show him why you are doing it and why it is the correct way to install whatever it is you are installing.

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foreign engineers are the worst

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They were all Indian.


With the job I got after my first degree, I worked with the boss one day, and that was basically it. We had joint efforts on big money deals, but I dealt with the rest. It was pretty humbling that after the first two weeks, I had 3 or 4 different crews with problems that I had to figure out how to solve every single day. Not saying that I didn't mess up, but throwing me to the wolves worked well in that situation.

After going through my first three semesters of engineering at LSU, I feel comfortable saying that none of the students would be able to handle situations where they had to deal with managing people or problems.

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You do the work, but show him why you are doing it and why it is the correct way to install whatever it is you are installing

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My point was that a lot of them don't have any common sense at all, or experience doing anything

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After going through my first three semesters of engineering at LSU, I feel comfortable saying that none of the students would be able to handle situations where they had to deal with managing people or problems.

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There are some heavy hitters coming out of LSU.

So they are supposed to be engineers after taking chemistry and calculus?


They're still 19 years old after 3 semesters

There are mcdonalds fry cooks with more real world knowledge than some of them

I've always said you should have to be a mechanic for your first internship.

ETA: Some people aren't exposed to that stuff coming up and it's not their fault. Senior design is about as much exposure as you get in school if you don't fall into an internship that requires you to get hands-on.

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So they are supposed to be engineers after taking chemistry and calculus?

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This.

Hammertime, you really need to keep things in perspective. There is no way to know which students you share a class with right now will be great engineers or great managers. Yall are all students now. They shouldn't impress you as managers or engineers because they are still kids for all intents and purposes.