Watching seth Godin’s ted talk, I was kinda torn by his views. On one side he makes good points when it comes memorization, obedience, and giving the baseball example, on the other side he takes it to such an extreme that it is very hard to agree with him. First of all, in my own extremely biased opinion, online class are a very bad way to learn (especially engineering). Maybe if students were brought up on online class that might make a difference, but from what i have encountered online classes are far inferior to actual classes. Second, when people talk about memorization they treat people as robots who have no clue or any understanding of what they memorize. Although that might be the case sometimes, the majority of the time it is not. For every equation you memorize in engineering classes, there is a couple of pages of derivation that the professor spends hours on to make students understand before they memorize. What actually happens with most students is that they opt out of the explanation because it takes so much time and effort to understand (requires critical thinking) and instead just memorize the equation.

As an undergraduate engineer, I always kept asking myself the question of why am i memorizing all these equations, when will I ever use this in real life, we should be learning practical life skills. Had i not chosen to pursue a Ph.D, i think most of my questions would have gone unanswered. However, now that I learned all the basics, I have the necessary tool to innovate in my Ph.D work.
Since most students are unlikely to pursue a Ph.D, I can see the importance of integrating classes that engage critical thinking during undergraduate education. However, I also understand the need to make students learn other people’s work since you need to have this information before you can provide your own contribution.

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I really love your idea that “Americans love to seem busy”. I think that is especially true in grad school, where students often feel pressured to work ridiculous hours constantly at the expense of their physical and mental well being. I am lucky that my advisor is a wonderfully understanding person, but I have been less lucky in the past. I agree that putting more emphasis on emotional intelligence, for both us and out students is very important.

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I definitely agree with your point that we are magically expected to be creative upon graduation in STEM. I noticed it a lot when I first started my master’s degree. I went from being told EXACTLY what I needed to know and what to do for an “experiment” in a lab class to being in charge of the direction of my learning and being asked to develop a research question and design an experiment for it. Talk about academic whiplash. STEM requires the humanities in order to be effective. Humanities is needed when considering what research is important, the ethics of research, how to write and communicate, and probably for a lot of things in between. I think it falls a lot on the STEM instructors to emphasize the importance of humanities in STEM.

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I do agree with the point that information should be available online. Often professors avoid putting slides on Canvas to encourage students to attend lectures. However, this ends up punishing students who miss lectures for perfectly valid reasons. Putting resources and information online gives students autonomy over their education. However, I don’t think that means every course needs to be online only. Labs are a really important component in STEM education. It gives students a different way of learning, because it’s hands on experience.that is difficult to get online.

What an incredible experience getting to speak candidly with someone who crafts their college’s mission statement. It’s cool to hear that they are not hollow recruiting pitches based out of obligations, but are actual representations of the goals and aspirations of the school.

Hey Seungbee,
Many thanks for stopping by. You are right that architecture includes both the sciences and the humanities. I think for the most part, the knowledge is created cumulatively using class material and drawing upon experiences from unlimited sources elsewhere beyond the classroom. The lectures provide the basic building blocks of knowledge with which, then, the student is set free to explore further without much inhibition, and come back with higher level synthesized knowledge blocks that are more complex than before. And this usually begins right in the first year of study. Perhaps this is why when we see the work of those who have undergone architectural education, as you noted, we get to see a great deal of innovation in it. Of course, combining the sciences and the humanities can be a nightmare for the students as these two areas require different sets of skills and the students find themselves constantly swinging back and forth.

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Hi Amos,
I agree with your opinions. And I have a question for you. Your major includes many things like science, engineering, humanities, and so on. How do you and people in your department get knowledge about them? Just in class? I ask you because I think there has been an innovation in the education of architecture.

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Agreed, there has to be a way to combine them. This class has definitely gotten me thinking about ways to do that too.

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Thank you! I agree with you but there is one thing that I want to emphasize: A New Professional maybe very expensive. It would be great if the education is customizable, but it also means that we need more instructors and devices. To develop varied study approaches for different students, the instructors have to spend more time with the students individually. Of course, I hope every school can take the way you mentioned, but we must pay attention to the equity since the education should be a public good.