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Life at Cornell, part 1
Or "How Cornell is messing with me, and taking my money too."
I still remember talking to a professor when I visited Cornell during my senior year of high school. He asked me what I wanted to major in and I told him that I was interested in Computer Science but I didn't think I was prepared enough so I was going for Electrical & Computer Engineering. He told me, in his infinite wisdom, that I shouldn't think I would be unable to handle a major like CS just because I was inexperienced, because majors at Cornell are designed such that no prior experience is needed… but I didn't listen. And in a way, I made the right choice; it was hard to compete with child prodigies who had written compilers when they were 8 years old in the two Java classes that I did take. Besides, they didn't offer ISST (the information science companion to CS) until I had already affilated with ECE… and I would have liked ISST a lot. But ECE turned out to be a lot harder than I expected.
It isn't that I don't like ECE. I like digital design a lot, and occasionally analog design too. I enjoyed designing a five-stage MIPS processor last year… I would do that for a living. I just don't understand why ECE has to be so hard. Even in the things I am really good at, I can't seem to manage better than an A-, and if it's something I don't like, such as signal processing or semiconductors, then I struggle to get a B (or maybe a C). Why do I even have to take courses in things I don't like? I don't know. Apparently they are required as part of the ECE curriculum, but that doesn't explain why they have to be so hard. The point is that if I'm really good at digital design and I can't get an internship at Intel this summer, then I must have been wasting my time. I don't know what recruiters are thinking when they see a 3.2 on my resumé, but I have an idea: not good enough.
Not good enough.
Then there's the myth of the well rounded education. I read it in the brochures; Cornell is a big Ivy League institution that provides world class education in all fields, so that I can get a good foundation of Liberal Arts aside from my dull Engineering curriculum. As if. Someone should have told me that doesn't apply to electrical engineers. Someone should have, but that would have been honest advertising. Do you know how much time I have for anything outside of my engineering curriculum? I'm taking courses in web development and German, but I don't even have time to focus on either one lately. I'm barely surviving in German because I don't have time to study for it beyond the required assignments we get every day, and if it wasn't for the fact that PHP and SQL programming are very easy for me, I wouldn't be able to take web development courses at all.
But that isn't even the worst part. Forget not having time for electives… I don't have time for anything else. I don't go to hockey games or visit the Cornell Plantations. I sure as well don't visit New York City or Niagara Falls… hotspots that are supposed to make the Ithaca campus a great location. I've never even been to either of those places in my life. Lately I spend my weekends studying, and when I finish all my work I don't get a break, because the next round of work has already started. It's ridiculous.
So I'm ranting. I'm ranting because I don't know what to think. Did I make the right decision in coming to Cornell? That might not be the right question. I was going to go to the Naval Academy, and I'm definitely happier to be here than I would have been there. I'll never know if I would have been better off at a place like Rensselaer or Worcester, but it's not something I want to think about, because I have made friendships here at Cornell that I wouldn't want to devalue… and who knows whether those schools would have been any better. What I do know is that I would have preferred to know a little more in advance of what ECE would be like. I would have liked to know that it's boring before I signed up. I would have liked to know that the only class I would have been on the edge of my seat for this semester would have been INFO 230.
I would have liked to know a lot of things; but really all I want to know now is where I am headed. I don't have an internship yet and along with that, I don't know what I'll do when I graduate. I was thinking that maybe my dream job in a dream location could drop out of the sky so I could stop worrying about it, but in the likelihood that it won't happen, I will probably keep worrying. I don't even know what graduation will feel like. I want to finish in four years… whatever I do, just finish. But I won't have a rewarding college experience behind me. I don't know what I will call it, but I won't be pleased with it. I'll just be done. Graduating however I manage with a sigh of relief and a big hole in my pocket. If I get a job I like then it will all be worth it… but that's the big "if." In the end I will know what to say when I get a call from Cornell asking me to give money in support of my Alma Mater: no.
I'm a dissatisfied customer in the making. This is the first of a few rants.
1 Trackbacks/Pingbacks
- Trackback: Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog on August 13, 2006
ah, yeah; not knowing what you're doing can be a real bummer, sometimes.
But think of it like this: The situation that you're in is in a spectrum of possible outcomes, and certainly not the worst:
(from worst to best):
- Knowing what you're going to do, and knowing you'll hate it
- Blindly trying to do what you know you can't
- Not knowing what you're going to do (seems you're here)
- Knowing what you want to do, being able to attain it.
So, I guess what I'm getting at is that it could be a lot worse. Keep up with it, and you'll make out alright in the end!
Thanks for the encouragement. I hope you find your dream job too!
Great blog Christian. I've seen you post on the WD list so thought I'd say hey. You are wasting your time with PHP, learn CF. Its easier, better and can do much more. It'll save your sanity.
Great site by the way. Keep it up.
damn yo… i am sorry to hear you aren't having the best time. I was thinking about Cornell and their infoscience program. What is making ECE so hard for you? (I am not challenging your comment, I truly want to know). What interests you about ISST?
Leo: ECE is all about the math. The math is intense. We go beyond a lot of other majors in the complicated math that we do, and it has a physical application that is very difficult to visualize. Circuits never cease to surprise you with their complex behavior.
However I wrote this while taken ECE 315 and that class had more fault in the way it was taught and the overload of information. I have a lot of other ECE classes I enjoy (320, 314, 230, and maybe 488) and I'm definitely doing better this semester than last.
I do prefer ISST a lot, it's just more fun, more interesting material too. I much prefer developing websites and talking about user interaction over building circuits. But I gotta stick with ECE if I want to finish in 4 years, so here I am.
ECE 315 was/is kind of a rite of passage for Cornell ECE - I remember one ECE 315 course (FA2003) that dropped from ~100 to ~30 enrolled students by the first prelim
Ohhh I'm going to WPI next year and I think I might major in either CS/EE/Math. Do you have any advice?
Devin: You just gotta figure out which one you like. If you like programming then CS is for you. If you get into math you will probably end up programming a lot anyway. EE has some programming of it's own in the areas of digital hardware, which you might like (it's my favorite area), but I imagine WPI doesn't cover as much digital stuff in their EE major (Cornell has true ECE). Take the intro courses and pick one.
And EE would definitely be the hardest one. CS and math are a little easier.