If you had to design an engineering school from the ground up where the input was an 18 y/o w/ HS math + science and the output was a good engineer, it would look nothing like universities do today. Engineering is diced into its core components and those components are diced into their core components until you end up w/ a prof drawing lines and dots on a blackboard that have no connection to the lines and dots being drawn on all the other blackboards you saw that afternoon. All the while your goal is to predict what lines and dots will appear on the test in a month.

I don't deny the need for a thorough and disciplined understanding of math and physics. But... I didn't understand the need for calculus until I needed a way to go from pos/time to velocity/time. I didn't understand linear algebra until I needed to transform vertices in 3d graphics. Personally I don't understand a hammer unless I see the nail. Engineering school is all about showing you everything there is to know about a tool except what to use it for.

I think E-schools should be like obstacle courses where you have projects that REQUIRE understanding of a concept in order to complete them. Classes about said concepts are given as the NEED arises.

Most E-schools suck. Just take as many project based classes as possible (CS is decent for this) and get a degree. Universities also have lots of grants that nobody knows about where you can get money to build cool things.

Maybe this is just me, but I don't think I'm alone. And it probably explains why I failed to hang my pictures with a chainsaw.