I wish to transfer to a university in Europe, to complete my engineering formation. I thought it might be the opportunity to initiate a discussion on the merits of European technical schools, given how many people here have a STEM background, and have experienced the first-hand.
Which ones do you think are best at teaching? Which provide the best starting point, professionally? Which have the most productive, idealistic mood among the studentship? If you've been to several of schools, how do they compare to each other?
The floor is yours.
They don't sound like people who worked very hard to get in the school. What was the acceptance rate for incoming students?
I don't actually know if there even are STEM schools that don't have sucky lectures and apathetic students, though. Learning the stuff involves building models in your head that are too complex to do while listening to a guy talk to a hall full of people, so you have to do most of the work by yourself with pen, paper and textbook anyway. The teaching organization is there to give you exams to give you feedback on how well you've learned things.
My current idea for the best way to deal with post-secondary education is to basically think of yourself as an autodidact and do your basic degree as fast as you can with minimal interaction with lectures and other stupid distractions for the magical piece of paper that will show the industry workplaces that you are good for serious business.
It's a bit messed up situation overall. The standard conventions for teaching undergrads are bad enough that you could just as well have the students watch lecture videos off YouTube. There are methods that work, but they are much more costly on the expensive professor labor, like one-on-one tutoring, so I guess only the students who demonstrate that they are good enough to master the undergrad stuff effortlessly without proper instruction are considered promising enough to get that. I remember reading about mathematics education in Oxford or somewhere, which was basically trying to educate people with a good chance of doing novel mathematical research, which involved lots of tutoring with a single tutor working with just one or two students and working on whatever stuff they needed to be doing.
It's very easy to get accepted, it's very hard to survuve the five official years the degree takes, which become eight on average. The dropout rate is fifty percent in the first two years, and thirty percent of what's left after that.
What's the point of making us go to a building, then?
And if the videos were well done, it would be a net improvement.
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