211–220 of 429 posts
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Just wait until that teacher is your graduate advisor.
I hear so many horror stories in the sciences, I have no idea why anyone would pursue an academic career in it.
For me, it wasn't the subpar equipment, it was the subpar instruction. I will never forget trying to explain to the graduate TA leading my circuits 1 lab, that, no, you can not use a multimeter to measure impedance of an element in a circuit while the circuit is live, and that that is dumb for multiple layers of reasons. He got pissed off at me for questioning his authority, I told the class "Uh, guys, why don't we a…
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Same package. 555 is typically a DIP-8, transistor packages are available in the same. So you would have to examine the cryptic markings and compare them with the other students, and that’s only if you suspected some fuckup on the part of the knowledgeable people.
ALWAYS suspect some fuckup on the part of the knowledgeable people... especially them! Trust, but verify.
One of my Core Memories when it comes to science, science education, and education in general was in my high school physics class, where we had to do an experiment to determine the gravitational acceleration of Earth. This was done via the following mechanism: Roll a ball off of a standard classroom table. Use a 1990s wristwatch's stopwatch mechanism to start the clock when the ball rolls of the table. Stop the stopw…
This is, more or less, exactly what happened when I took Electronics I in college. The course was structured in such a way that you could not move on to the next lab assignment until you completed the one before it. You could complete the lab assignments at your own pace. If you failed the lab, you failed the class, regardless of your grade. The second or third lab had us characterize the response of a transistor in…
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That would be a very valuable lab, IF students hadn't been explicitly trained in opposite behaviour for a decade by then. I lived a very similar experience: My 4th year computer science professor in software engineering assigned us a four-phase programming assignment for the semester. My teammate and I spent several sleepless days on the first assignment, and felt some of the requirements were contradictory. Finally…
>That would be a very valuable lab, IF students hadn't been explicitly trained in opposite behaviour for a decade by then. I teach students sometimes. I briefly considered whenever I should give them such important lesson. Very briefly: my job is to teach students my specialty, not give them life lessons. Why would I deal with potentially angry students for doing something that's not obvious I'm allowed to do? Hell,…
This is generally considered a "soft skill", but it really should be a recurring part of any technical curriculum.
There are generalizations of the concept- tailoring your message to your audience in public speaking, or charitable interpretation and seeing from another's perspective in debate, but the narrow case of "interpret these requirements and identify problems with them" is a good way to demonstrate an understanding of the domain.
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Bill Gates and Oprah are both billionaires. Billionaires in general want solutions that defend capital. Privately run schools that receive government funding, in addition to tuition, while also being able to set their own curriculum free from the state is certainly within their collective class interest. Many seem to make the mistake of assuming that one’s allegiance to the US Democratic Party means that the individu…
If you think _all_ of the Overton Window is "right of center" than you are surely miscallibrated (there's even a meme floating around that describes this exact conceptual error).
One of my Core Memories when it comes to science, science education, and education in general was in my high school physics class, where we had to do an experiment to determine the gravitational acceleration of Earth. This was done via the following mechanism: Roll a ball off of a standard classroom table. Use a 1990s wristwatch's stopwatch mechanism to start the clock when the ball rolls of the table. Stop the stopw…
> Right on up to professorships, this is how science really works. Reminds me of Feynman's "Cargo Cult Science" essay[1] One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It’s a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of…
The actual history is a bit more complex and certainly is not reflected accurately in Feynmans retelling (maybe he was affected by confirmation bias?). See this stackoverflow discussion: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/44092/is-feynma...
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This is, more or less, exactly what happened when I took Electronics I in college. The course was structured in such a way that you could not move on to the next lab assignment until you completed the one before it. You could complete the lab assignments at your own pace. If you failed the lab, you failed the class, regardless of your grade. The second or third lab had us characterize the response of a transistor in…
That's a tragic story. However, I'm surprised that the transistor was supposed to come in a DIP package. Usually through-hole discrete transistors come in a three-lead package like TO-92. Of course, that would not have helped you since yours looked like every other student's except the for the markings.
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Same package. 555 is typically a DIP-8, transistor packages are available in the same. So you would have to examine the cryptic markings and compare them with the other students, and that’s only if you suspected some fuckup on the part of the knowledgeable people.
But that's the thing that both students and often the teachers forget. We don't run labs to go smoothly, we run labs because you'll have to troubleshoot. There is no learning experience in a lab that works without issues, in fact IMO if lab instructions are of the step by step type, they should always have some deliberate errors in it to get students to troubleshoot. To play devil's advocate, just imagine the previou…
They should expect that particular incident to not affect their performance evaluation, since it was very much not their fault.
In your hypothetical scenario, your hypothetical junior engineer went to the senior engineer repeatedly for advice, and the senior engineer did not do their job properly:
The lab tech was unhelpful, insisting that it must be something with how I had it wired, encouraging me to re-draw my schematic, check my wires, and so on. It could _never_ be the equipment's fault.
This is a huge failure in mentorship that wouldn't be ignored at a company that actually cares about these things.