>>Hmm, that's completely different from my experience in mechanical engineering school. We were always complaining we were taking more math than we needed to know to get the job done. But our profs said we needed to understand how the formulas were arrived at, so we would have faith in them - in many cases lives are at stake.
>
>It could be just the professors there going for quantity instead of quality, i.e. stuffing more material than they have the time for. And then I've accidentally leafed through some of their math books, which is where I got that impression. They did have some places where logic was skipped, approximations were used without a proper explanation (which I hated in the physics course - just how can they replace sin(x) with x in a pendulum, out of the blue?).
>
>>One summer job, shortly after spring exams I was working at a semi-remote fishing resort. This was 1979, no Internet, no TV nor VCR/videotapes. One day, someone idly wondered how much the 500m hill behind the resort weighed. Everyone looked at me, I said "No problem, it's roughly coned-shaped, I'll just use the formula for the volume of a cone". Except I couldn't remember that formula.
>
>Some guys on that mechanical engineering sat a whole day to calculate the amount of work required for pressing an h on a mechanical typewriter.

Those ME guys, they're more fun than a barrel of monkeys ;-)

One of my college roommates, and one of the few college friends I am still in touch with, was an ME major. He graduated from Northwestern by the skin of his teeth, with a GPA barely over the required 2.0. (Too much time with the bong, too little time in the library). But when he graduated he had job offers up the ying yang. He went to work for Hughes Aviation in L.A. in the radar missile systems group, literally a rocket scientist. His career has been checkered, mainly because he has an abiding resistance to any kind of authority. If he had a boss who he thought was a jagov (one of his favorite words, along with bogus) he would tell him to his face he was a jagov. Not the route to climbing the ladder in corporate America.