re: Competition for College Admissions in Texas is unreal

wait

you went through an engineering program where the department picked your specific classes for electives?

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wait

you went through an engineering program where the department picked your specific classes for electives?

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Yes

You had elective buckets that pertained to Humanities, History, etc. the EE department had handpicked courses from those buckets and gave you around three options to fulfill your degree plan requirement.

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that's really odd unless you go to a super small school.

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UoTexas School System EE degree plan.

Edit: Just checked, 2017-2018 degree plan is 128 hours with

6 elective classes needed through the approved EE list.

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that is utter insanity. and i mean that seriously

i can't believe that department is accredited. was this some hand holding thing?

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Losing ABET for humanities electives? WHAT?

The Technical Elective list is 30 deep. No one gives a shite about liberal arts.

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If you definitely worked much harder in high school to get the same results as college, you went to a subpar college.

Just throwing out there that you did well in college means nothing to me. Some zoo animals could get a college degree in this day and age

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I graduated from Duke. And I had way more free time in college than in high school. And I definitely worked much more in college than my friends who went to flagship state schools like Ohio State, LSU, Texas, and Florida. Those guys coasted. Probably because they went up against a lot of people who attended really easy public schools or evangelical schools that were just interested in taking their parents' money, and once in a good college, they felt like they were all of a sudden in a shark tank.


And across the board, everyone thought MBAs and Masters degrees were easier than college undergrad courses, regardless of whether they went to a liberal arts school, private university, or public university.

I think the main thing you are overlooking is how much work is required to get into a top college. It requires you to really bust your arse to do unbelievably well in high school. And while my high school is considered the best in the city (on threads here, for example, or attempts at doing national and state rankings like Niche), it's not as if everyone was studying non-stop. A lot of people who weren't interested in going to a school like Duke, Rice, UVA, or an Ivy would get 3.2s. This was obviously more work than going to a regular Louisiana public school, but I am sure that some of them had an adjustment in college.

But there were also kids who studied really hard, didn't do well enough to get into the aforementioned schools but went to places like LSU Honors, Tulane, Florida, A&M, etc and across the board, they did much better in terms of class rank than in high school.

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I graduated from Duke.

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i was waiting for this

i'm just more blown away by how universities have sabotaged themselves and dissolved any credibility they had over the past few decades

I didn't mention it in the first post because I was tired and ready to go to bed and didn't want to get into a discussion of whether Duke is somehow the lone cakewalk school in the top 10

That's why I added the part about my friends at other colleges in the second post. I actually got the impression that the hardest ones were Chicago and MIT/CalTech and after that, it's pretty much the same across the board for a while.

One thing that really surprised me was how easy of a time in high school my freshman roommate had. He went to a top public high school in Ohio and it sounded like he had never really studied more than an hour for a test at any point. Otherwise, damn near everyone worked very hard in high school unless they were amazing at New England sports or something.

I think Chicago really is the place where fun goes to die. No one seems to speak fondly about their time there.

Fwiw, I took two classes as a high schooler at LSU. They are considered two of the hardest non engineering classes at LSU apparently. People talk about the classes here about how to avoid them, and they weren't that tough. Engineering might be a different animal altogether though.

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My daughter goes to one of the best high schools in Texas. I believe in the last two years they had 34+ national merit scholars. That is insane.About half her class is in national honors society. It is crazy the amount of work she has in the ap classes. Large Indian presence, they find where the good public schools are located. I don't know if the pressure is worth the reward for being in high school. Most of her classes will be harder then college courses. The kids that do well academically around here have no time for part time jobs like I had in south LA. Everything here is ultra competitive, these kids have stressful childhoods. It will pay off in the future but damn it's nuts.

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And they will end up in the same place(MD, JD, DDS, DVM) as a bunch of solid students in LA who didn't do a crazy amount of work and stress themselves ridiculously.