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Thermodynamics is the subject I most wish I retained more of from college. Studied just enough to pass, then promptly forgot most of it. And since it’s a subject that basically never comes up afterwards unless you’re doing pretty specialized work, it’s pretty much all gone.
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On a scale of 1-10, 10 being highest, here’s my ranking of engineering subjects based on philosophical profundity: Shop class: 10 Materials science: 9.5 Thermodynamics: 9 Information theory: 9 Controls: 8 Computational complexity: 7 Design: 6* OR: 5 Optimization: 4 * any genre
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This is my ranking in 2021. If you’d asked me right after graduation in 1997, my ranking would have been way different.
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Shop class tops the list not because it’s difficult to pass or because of glorification of working with hands. It tops the list because it calibrates your sense of just how much detail reality has, which then becomes your measure of the contentfullness of everything else.
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The 2-course freshman humanities (literature, psych/soc) track is gone but there’s a humanities environment class 🧐 CAD has gone from 2 to 1 Fluid mechanics also from 2 to 1 Energy/power plant stuff is gone I should really dig up my transcript and do a proper diff.
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But basically, more hands-on lab courses, more computing, less of all traditional mechanical engineering, humanities/social sciences killed off except for economics, and new elements on environmental stuff and biology I like that they’ve kept room for electives as wide as before
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Same, I wish I could remember stuff well enough to use accurate metaphors. In addition to your concept candidates here, Brownian motion has some solid potential for discourse metaphors/frameworks imo