The oppression of EE majors
Kind of a weird start to the semester. Still have yet to purchase a single book … in fact, I don’t even have any notebook, save my single IEEE pad. Had three classes yesterday, and all of a sudden I get the feeling that this semester isn’t exactly going to be an easy one.
So I got into the senior design class late in the evening, and the introduction of projects began. And it went on and on, one Mechanical Engineering project after the other. There are at least 3 times as many EE majors as ME or IE majors in that class, and yet there was almost one ME project per ME student. And we EE’s get to pick up the scraps, or become apprentices to the ME students. A total of 3 EE project choices to choose from, and one of them is an Access database. This is colossal crap. Of course, now we have a problem, because we have all the EE majors trying to enter the Robotics competition (which is almost the only real EE project left), and since the projects have to be “interdisciplinary”, there’s a major shortage of ME/IEs to join these teams.
This is WRONG, VERY WRONG. Looking in my inbox, I see yet another email from 3 EE students looking for an ME student to join their team. And the project? A hotplate for an etching system. I cannot believe that a group of EE students is forced to work on an ME project and can’t even find an ME student to help them out. I think EE students at the University of Houston need to get together and draft a formal complaint to the department. We need a separate senior design course for EE students, independent of other departments. Until that happens, this course will remain nothing but a waste of time to students who have spent years laboring to get their well-deserved degrees.
