That although there are many wonderful professors, the average professor does not know their ass from a hole in the ground.
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If you were to put a big fan on a sailboat and point it at the sail, it would move the sailboat in a similar way as if the wind was pushing the sail.
Which actually makes sense if you understand it’s not the wind pushing but the generated updraft at the sail.
(also not point at, but sideways)
😁
Even if you are sailing directly downwind, it works. That was actually the professor’s demonstration. He said that at the time it was accepted as a physical phenomenon, there were many physicists who said it wasn’t possible, but it was being actively used by some engineers to make jets go in reverse.
Cool stuff!
(I am not in aerospace or sailing, so I was guesstimating)
Bit too busy with the ole undiagnosed adhd and a hankering for world of Warcraft
You can tell from my transcript the exact week Elder Scrolls Oblivion came out.
For me it was might and magic III, yes I’m very old…
My roommate, RA for the dorm, and I played for 3 months straight on my computer. It was never turned off 24/7 …
I learned women actually don’t have the same access to higher education as men. That misogyny and rape culture is real and heavily affect people’s lives in present day. And that it’s about isolated incidents with bad apples, but about the structures around bad incidents, and how they systematically facilitate bad situations, don’t help or silence victims.
I genuinely believed it was safe to give my peers the benefit of the doubt and assume that their ironically bigoted jokes weren’t their actual views. And it was heartbreaking to realize that that is not an assumption you can make. You don’t know people’s values unless they tell you, seriously and genuinely, straight from the heart. You cannot infer values from ironic jokes, and you cannot assume that the nice people around you share your core values, that you’d otherwise take for granted that everyone but lunatics agree with. You don’t know before you ask.
I learned that humor isn’t always innocent. That not everyone who hears you make an “ironically bigoted” joke laughs because of its absurdity - they laugh because they agree. They think you agree with their bigoted views and values, and your joke further cements their worldview, that everyone thinks like them, everyone else is just too scared to say it openly. That jokes can be used as a weapon to create a culture where i.e. overt “ironic” racism is considered normal, and genuine conversations about real racism is taboo.
None of this was in the curriculum. It came from experiencing the social setting and viewing the effects of a broken administrative system at an “elite” engineering college.
I was not a feminist when I walked into my STEM education, and I was when I left.
I learned women actually don’t have the same access to higher education as men.
You’re right - women have significantly better access to higher education than men, and have demonstrably better education outcomes as a result.
For example, women are significantly more likely to receive scholarships and grants than men in undergrad.
Partially as a result of this lack of access, men have dropped to almost 40% of undergrad students, while women make up nearly 60%. Women also receive more doctorates than men, and almost twice as many Master’s degrees as men.
I’m not trying to minimize the bigotry that you observed (or faced), but it’s objectively false to claim that women have worse access to higher education than men.
OP didn’t indicate their gender.
Thanks, good point. I’ve edited my comment.
My highschool friends weren’t really friends, just people who’d been temporarily thrown into the same unfortunate position as me.
Relevant: https://youtu.be/rGDBTLT9__s
(if I’m honest, this is not his finest work. his videos are usually way funnier than this)
That if you’re an international student at a small, struggling school, you can miss half your classes and bullshit your way through most assignments and they’ll still give you a degree.
In other words: I learned nothing.
I know people’s experience varies on this but I absolutely hated high school, and only discovered that I enjoyed learning as a process because of uni. And I’d probably still be small minded and somewhat bigoted if I hadn’t gone. Simply because it forced me to critically evaluate my own views and also exposed me to a number of types of people I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise.
It’s a shame it’s so expensive in some countries, because I think it’s important to have a well-educated society more broadly.
That when actually challenged I couldn’t justify eating meat. It was just a part of a long conversation with another meat eating woman in completely unrelated majors.
Honestly that sort of thing is one of the most valuable parts of college imo. I was in a place dedicated to learning and thinking, surrounded by people also dedicated to it and it meant that I had a lot of deep intellectual conversations. Those years didn’t just give me a career, they molded me into someone genuinely educated
How completely stupid a professor can be. My parting words to him were basically “You have no idea what you are talking about.” And everyone in the room but the professor knew I was right.
That a diploma doesn’t mean shit beside someone being able to say what their teacher want them to say… but that was not really new, it was just a lot more sad to experiment as naive me was hoping for something more.
I think this depends entirely on the subject.
I was in a STEM degree and I learned a lot of technical skills. (Super early internet, no YouTube) In the extra classes like marketing, English Lit, I basically learned how to deal with people because of the professors like you describe, group projects, and trying to see the perspectives that didn’t make sense to be initially so I could pass the damn class.
It seemed incredibly stupid at times, but making you think in ways that challenge you in ways you hate and think are stupid is actually excellent training for dealing with the myriad of brain-breaking people on this planet.
High School did this too, but less in your interest. High School was “shut up and do it this way, because that’s how it’s done.” This benefits the Institution.
College was “sure, argue, but here’s why you’re wrong, or if not wrong, you need to be able to see this differing perspective, understand, and navigate it. The world is fucked, there is so much that is morally gray, that you need to learn flexibility. Show me you understand by explaining back to me what I’m teaching you. Don’t just entrench your whole being in what you’ve been taught before coming here.”
High School is just busy work to keep you off the streets until you’re ready for a job or college.
Unfortunately, that’s becoming more and more true, and the quality of college classes has to adapt to a student population that is more and more divided depending on the quality of their high schools.
Students coming from good high schools have already internalized effective studying mechanisms, and often the basics of many topics in the first years of college, while others coming from worst high schools have no clue how to organize themselves to be successful. Often, they lock themselves up and spend unreasonable amount of time trying to make sense of things they don’t have the perquisite for. A good read in this direction is Whistling Vivaldi. Obviously, high school quality is very connected with the whiteness and affluence of their location, putting poorer and minority students at a disadvantage even before the starting block.
For real? A lot of high school subjects were pre requisites for enrolling in my degree here and it’d be quite tough to get through the degree without the foundation laid in those subjects. At the very least they’d have to extend the university course by probably a year or so.
And the first thing they teach you in college is “High School was bullshit, here’s the real way to do it…”
That’s really interesting. It must be very much dependent on where you are because my first class at uni they literally said the opposite. “Everyone who didn’t take xyz class in high school take this sheet with a bunch of extra shit you need to learn before next week. Good luck.”
@jordanlund apparently didn’t take xyz class.
Yeah not seeing how you could go into any form of STEM and lesson 1 is matrix math, but you flunked math 300 and don’t know what a quadratic equation is.
Probably varies largely on where you’re talking about, and even then, which university program you’re looking at enrolling in. If you go and look at universities in the UK, for example, a BA studying a foreign language generally seems to assume that this is a language you’ve already been studying for several years in secondary education. You’re meant to be entering the program with roughly a B1 level in the language, and allegedly develop up to C1 over the course of 3 years of study. Meanwhile, in the US, you can rock up to a university and be a Japanese language major with nothing more than “Well, he says he likes anime and his grades are okay.” and the degree program will start you off in a 100-level class that expects negligible prior knowledge, if any.
Then again, having attempted university in the US, and now doing it at a UK school, university education is pretty drastically different. The US schools take 4 years to grant the same degree, and you spend almost the whole of the first year and a good chunk of the second just doing general education requirements that are, at best, only tangentially relevant to your chosen field of study. If I were doing my current degree program for a BA in French and Spanish as a first time student in the US, unless I did a bunch of AP courses or took night classes at a community college on the side, I’d need to do a general English composition class, a few math classes, probably get to pick between a biology or chemistry course, something to do with world cultures or music and the arts, and a handful of other electives I’m forgetting about. For that degree in the UK, from start to finish over the course of 3 years, I exactly 2 modules that aren’t either French or Spanish, with one being the “Hey, we need to make sure you can actually write in English competently, too” module, and the other being a free choice of an introductory language module for something else.
I’d also assume the US’ lack of a national curriculum also plays into how things work out with universities here, as well. Since things can be so variable at a regional and local level, not only in terms of the established curriculum, but what courses your particular secondary school has the funding to offer, universities can’t really assume much of incoming students’ education. You can have a kid from one state whose school was a Spanish language immersion school offering bilingual education from day 1 of Kindergarten, and later offering French, German, Japanese and Arabic as a third language for the final 4 years of compulsory education sat side-by-side with another from a different part of the country who only had the chance to take 2 years of Spanish classes. Even for subjects with a better baseline, someone whose studies covered all the available math classes up to geometry and algebra is going to have a totally different starting point from another whose school partnered with a local college to offer college level courses in calculus and statistics in high school.
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The Twin Paradox (special relativity). Every time I wrap my head around the idea I lose it a few weeks later an it’s a mystery all over again.
Twin Paradox TL;DR: Identical twins—one stays on Earth, the other rockets off near light speed and returns. Relativity says time slows for the traveler, so they age less (e.g., returns 20 while sib is 50). “Paradox” cuz from traveler’s view, Earth seems to move, but acceleration/turnaround breaks the symmetry, so no real contradiction. Mind-bendy Einstein stuff. 🚀
We are all pretty much screwed
Shale tastes like mud, yes, but it has the consistency of a chocolate bar if you eat a little.
Honestly not bad. Great experience.
That I had to study.
Making a counter which scoud count up to 10 and loop back just with soma cables and electricity.
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