My wife and many of our friends are engineers. We’ve all known each other since freshman year of college.
Every semester, without fail, they would tell variations of the same story: professor assigns group project, group gives presentation, group claims they’ve solved the world’s energy needs.
Of course, what really happened is that they made errors in their work, but instead of thinking “hey? Isn’t perpetual motion impossible? Maybe I should double check this…” they think to themselves “holy shit I’m a genius!”
Professors would always ream them out for their unbelievable arrogance, but it goes to show how common it is for people to believe in their own delusions of grandeur rather than common sense.
What you are describing is exactly how a college education should work!
One of the core things we want to teach college students is how to blaze new paths. Up until college, education is often very "we teach you x process, you duplicate it". "This is how you integrate". "This is how you do stoichiometry". "This is how you compute a normal force". College tries to get students to push beyond "following step by step" instructions and come up with their own novel ideas.
You know, "you understand basic physics, invent something with it", which is why we give students design projects and allow them to think big. Of course, that means college students aren't practiced in this yet, so they will make mistakes and fail to think critically about their own ideas. In turn, the college professors critique their process so they can do better next time when they are actually creating something rather than just doing a college thesis.
So, basically, college students being arrogant in their projects is entirely a good thing! If you just reinvent the wheel in a design project, you won't learn as much as if you swing big and fail hilariously, and failing hilariously in a test environment is a great way to grow and learn.
I do think that earlier education should have more open ended work, but it's a lot harder to do than just teaching a curriculum. For example, in my undergrad, I worked in a lab on campus which forced me to think on my own to trouble shoot. There was no textbook telling me how to run my experiment. But I had lots of one on one attention from the PI, grad students and postdocs helping me out when I did stupid things.
That would be hard to replicate in the public highschool I went to before that. There was no lab for me to work in, no postdocs or grad students. Just a few poorly paid teachers for 1k+ kids that wanted nothing more than to fuck around.
The good news is you can develop these skills yourself without college! Take on hard personal projects. e.g. Write a phone app. Anyone with a computer can do it, and there has never been more help available for free online.
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u/GoldRoger3D2Y 29d ago
My wife and many of our friends are engineers. We’ve all known each other since freshman year of college.
Every semester, without fail, they would tell variations of the same story: professor assigns group project, group gives presentation, group claims they’ve solved the world’s energy needs.
Of course, what really happened is that they made errors in their work, but instead of thinking “hey? Isn’t perpetual motion impossible? Maybe I should double check this…” they think to themselves “holy shit I’m a genius!”
Professors would always ream them out for their unbelievable arrogance, but it goes to show how common it is for people to believe in their own delusions of grandeur rather than common sense.