Sadly this seems unrealistic given the constraints placed on student athletes and the time consuming nature of engineering studies. It's really hard to find blocks of time to work on CS projects when you're spending 6+ hours a day outside of classes training for any given sport.
24% of High School Student Athletes Want to be Engineers, Scientists
11–20 of 38 posts
Re: 24% of High School Student Athletes Want to be Engineers, Scientists
#12Keep in mind that ~35% of ALL students want to be engineers or scientists (as of 2006: http://www.heri.ucla.edu/nih/downloads/2010%20-%20Hurtado,%2... ). Also 60% of them drop out (or switch) within 5 years.
That's great background information. I wonder what the primary driver of switching out is
Two of my classmates dropped out of a math graduate program. One of them actually quit right in the middle of class, saying "This is not fun anymore!". It was a Group Theory class on Galois Fields. She became a real estate agent. The other flunked his qualifiers & decided to quit the program and become a pilot (!!) instead of retaking the exams.My prof said attrition rates in math were super high.Its just not everybody's cup of tea, I guess.
Among undergrads, sometimes people switch because profs demean you. Once when I was a TA, the Algorithms prof wrote an email calling a student "bozo" because he couldn't figure out shell sort ( its a stable sort algo ). Unfortunately the student was cc'ed in the email & took it badly & switched.
Re: 24% of High School Student Athletes Want to be Engineers, Scientists
#13Based on my (perhaps limited) understanding of where they get their data set, isn't it possible that the percentage of athletes interested in engineering be overrepresented by the source? I would imagine an online social network for recruiting student athletes would be just sort of thing that would skew towards people who had computer access and savvy?
Wouldn't someone like the NCAA be a better place to derive this sort of representative data as far as what incoming high school students are interested in majoring in? Presuming of course that the NCAA was the only game in town as far as collegiate athletics was concerned (is it?).
Re: 24% of High School Student Athletes Want to be Engineers, Scientists
#14Why is this surprising at all?
Re: 24% of High School Student Athletes Want to be Engineers, Scientists
#15Sadly this seems unrealistic given the constraints placed on student athletes and the time consuming nature of engineering studies. It's really hard to find blocks of time to work on CS projects when you're spending 6+ hours a day outside of classes training for any given sport.
My impression at a state university in the US was that CS was one of the least demanding majors in terms of time spent on coursework outside of class. Sadly I do not have any data about this.
Re: 24% of High School Student Athletes Want to be Engineers, Scientists
#16Sadly this seems unrealistic given the constraints placed on student athletes and the time consuming nature of engineering studies. It's really hard to find blocks of time to work on CS projects when you're spending 6+ hours a day outside of classes training for any given sport.
My impression at a state university in the US was that CS was one of the least demanding majors in terms of time spent on coursework outside of class. Sadly I do not have any data about this.
Perhaps that is due to the curriculum at that particular university.
Re: 24% of High School Student Athletes Want to be Engineers, Scientists
#17Keep in mind that ~35% of ALL students want to be engineers or scientists (as of 2006: http://www.heri.ucla.edu/nih/downloads/2010%20-%20Hurtado,%2... ). Also 60% of them drop out (or switch) within 5 years.
That's great background information. I wonder what the primary driver of switching out is
There were some earlier news articles & spinoff discussions in the recent past (NYTimes, etc).
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/why-scien...
Wish I had the link to discussions about it, they were better than the actual article.
Re: 24% of High School Student Athletes Want to be Engineers, Scientists
#18I can't tell if this is supposed to be surprisingly high or surprisingly low. Either way, it is worth pointing out (perhaps to the choir) that the stereotypes of dumb jocks and fat nerds are not realistic, if they ever were. Strong minds correlate with strong bodies. Which reminds me, I need to get back in my routine, and go out there and run today after work. :)
...it is worth pointing out (perhaps to the choir) that the stereotypes of dumb jocks and fat nerds are not realistic...
Within a given college, it is likely to be realistic. Take U-Mich, for example (since they are the only school to reveal their point system) - being a student athlete is worth +1.0 on GPA. I.e., a student athlete with a 2.5 is on equal footing with a non-athlete having a 3.5. This means that the intellectual average of student athletes is highly likely to be lower than the average of non-athletes.
Re: 24% of High School Student Athletes Want to be Engineers, Scientists
#19Sadly this seems unrealistic given the constraints placed on student athletes and the time consuming nature of engineering studies. It's really hard to find blocks of time to work on CS projects when you're spending 6+ hours a day outside of classes training for any given sport.
My impression at a state university in the US was that CS was one of the least demanding majors in terms of time spent on coursework outside of class. Sadly I do not have any data about this.
CS was likely the most demanding major at my university in terms of workload outside of class. Depended on what classes you took, but the toughest demanded ~30hrs per week of problem sets + coding assignments each. Made being a D1 athlete in a top national program very tough to pull off.
Re: 24% of High School Student Athletes Want to be Engineers, Scientists
#20Sadly this seems unrealistic given the constraints placed on student athletes and the time consuming nature of engineering studies. It's really hard to find blocks of time to work on CS projects when you're spending 6+ hours a day outside of classes training for any given sport.
I was a CS major / D1 athlete and I'd have to say it's not entirely unrealistic -- while there is the dumb jock stereotype, a lot of college athletes have a pretty good work ethic due to a good training ethic. Though some end up with just a party ethic
Just before my senior year, I was able to help co-found a startup as well (which is now 4 years running), while competing at a national level
But yes, there were only 4 or 5 engineers among ~50 guys. I think it's more that a lot of the people who lean towards engineering in high school are usually not the athletic type -- though I suppose this article is more about the athletic types interested in engineering