…Can’t take anymore abuse…

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could download information straight into your head ala The Matrix or Chuck? I could really use that right about now. I’ve been studying several hours a night for the last month. Why you ask?

As part of my Master’s degree, I’m required to take a final “capstone” test. This test will cover all of my core courses and will be followed by a 2 hour oral section in which I sit in front of my professors and try to not let them out wit me. If I pass, I get to graduate, if not… well… I’d rather not think about that.

To prepare I’ve spent the last few weeks going back over every old test, handout, and piece of homework I’ve had over the past two years. Two thoughts keep running through my head:

1. Wow, even when I try to be, I’m not that organized
2. I probably won’t ever use this at work

Funny thing is, I never used much of what I learned from my bachelor’s degree at work either. This isn’t news to anyone, heck, this isn’t even unique to engineering. Most information we use/need on a day to day basis we didn’t learn from school.

This is usually the point in posts where I put forward a few reasons for this, provide some startling facts, and call everyone into action and urge them to go out and push for reforming the system. But my brain is a little fried from memorizing so lets take a different route:

What do you wish they would have taught you in school?

How to code in FORTRAN? More technical writing? Let’s hear it, be it selfish or silly, I’m interested in knowing!

Here’s mine: Limits. Before we could even look at an integral sign, we were made to do calculus using limits. I suppose it wouldn’t have been quite so bad if using the limit method didn’t take ten times longer. Books and books of tables were created for solving these problems, when 99.99% of the time we could simply integrate and be done with it. The really sad part is that once you got past all that, calculus really wasn’t that bad.

So there’s mine, what was something you had to learn in school that hasn’t helped you one bit out in the working world?

Post script: Passed my test!