I recently read this post on Rod’s blog discussing this article. I do think this thesis is absolutely misleading and I’ll explain why. Let’s sum up the points of the article:
5. Awful Textbooks
Absolutely false…try to read a serious math book and an equivalent engineering book. Everyone will notice the difference. There should be some reason for all the jokes describing mathematicians complaining with engineers about their simplistic way of approximating complex processes in order to come up with a solution at any cost.
4. Professors are Rarely Encouraging
False in general. It significantly depends on the professors you have to do with. There are many highly qualified and much stimulating researchers among professors. Moreover laziness doesn’t only affect engineering professors.
3. Dearth of Quality Counseling
This depends on the university you attend and its management. This could be true for some situations but it’s sure that engineering is one of those universities which is more in touch with real life problems and students usually find their work some weeks after they got their degree.
2. Other Disciplines Have Inflated Grades
This is true but this doesn’t depend on the engineering but on the other universities! However there are similar situations even in the various curricula in engineering.
1. Every Assignment Feels the Same
This is probably the more absurd statement about engineering classes. Assignments are usually difficult, challenging but of course not all the same.
). Unfortunately the way bibtex works and the support it has in some relevant fields like computational biology prevents it from reaching a real spread. Some days ago I came across this tool, it’s named 