Student Survival Guide

This booklet was taken from one of the latest versions of our series on Introduction to Engineering Design. These books are written for the first-year engineering students at several universities in the U. S. We recommend that students considering enrolling an Engineering program or other technical program carefully study this content in this booklet. A Student Survival Guide provides a systematic approach to successfully completing your studies, graduating in a reasonable time and with good grades. The author has taught engineering courses at the undergraduate and graduate level for 40 years at four different and one military academy. Over those years I have interacted with more than 1000 students. Most students are serious and usually will move through their program and graduate in four of five years. However, some students are not diligent and will miss class or miss assignments. Many of those students drop out or fail out of their program. It is a serious waste of time and money. More serious is the fact that some students never completely recover from this failure early in their lives.Many people consider the engineering curriculum difficult. It is not. However, it is demanding and a moderate level of skill in Mathematics is required. Success in an engineering or non-technical any program requires student to apply themselves. Students should attend class. That requirement seems obvious, but many students decide to skip class. After teaching an 8:00 AM class I note that a significant numbers of students skipped class. I assumed they preferred to sleep in. I decided to teach class at 9:00 AM and the situation improved; however, there were still many students absent. I finally decided that 10:00 AM start time was the new normal.