24% of High School Student Athletes Want to be Engineers, Scientists

Re:24% of High School Student Athletes Want to be Engineers,... by dmoy on Wednesday February 01, 2012 @05:32PM (#3540394)

Keep in mind that ~35% of ALL students want to be engineers or scientists (as of 2006: http://www.heri.ucla.edu/nih/downloads/2010%20-%20Hurtado,%2...).

Also 60% of them drop out (or switch) within 5 years.

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Re:24% of High School Student Athletes Want to be Engineers,... by vsprabhakara1 on Wednesday February 01, 2012 @05:42PM (#3540434)

That's great background information. I wonder what the primary driver of switching out is

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Re:24% of High School Student Athletes Want to be Engineers,... by dxbydt on Wednesday February 01, 2012 @06:48PM (#3540699)

Two of my classmates dropped out of a math graduate program. One of them actually quit right in the middle of class, saying "This is not fun anymore!". It was a Group Theory class on Galois Fields. She became a real estate agent. The other flunked his qualifiers & decided to quit the program and become a pilot (!!) instead of retaking the exams.My prof said attrition rates in math were super high.Its just not everybody's cup of tea, I guess. Among undergrads, sometimes people switch because profs demean you. Once when I was a TA, the Algorithms prof wrote an email calling a student "bozo" because he couldn't figure out shell sort ( its a stable sort algo ). Unfortunately the student was cc'ed in the email & took it badly & switched.

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Re:24% of High School Student Athletes Want to be Engineers,... by wisty on Thursday February 02, 2012 @03:52AM (#3542001)

Galois Fields was when I realized I just didn't want to be a mathematician. I like math, but you can only be a professional mathematician (as opposed to a numerical modeller or some other applied mathematician) if you tackle the stuff that's so hard no other mathematician in the world can do it, or esoteric enough that only a few other mathematicians have bothered trying.

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Re:24% of High School Student Athletes Want to be Engineers,... by waldrews on Thursday February 02, 2012 @12:42AM (#3541613)

wait, shell sort is stable?

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Re:24% of High School Student Athletes Want to be Engineers,... by psykotic on Thursday February 02, 2012 @01:51PM (#3543955)

No, it is unstable. The striding means that two equal elements can easily be reordered. For example, after 2-sorting [(2,a), (1,b), (1,c)] by the first component you get [(1,c), (1,b), (2,a)].

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Re:24% of High School Student Athletes Want to be Engineers,... by onryo on Wednesday February 01, 2012 @05:44PM (#3540446)

Calculus II is my guess.

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Re:24% of High School Student Athletes Want to be Engineers,... by learc83 on Wednesday February 01, 2012 @06:14PM (#3540565)

I think it's the lack of basic algebra mastery in high school that makes college math so frustrating.

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Re:24% of High School Student Athletes Want to be Engineers,... by cantbecool on Thursday February 02, 2012 @12:00AM (#3541499)

I'm 100% with you on that one. That was my biggest stumbling block in college, simply remembering basic algebra. The online resources were more effectual than my professors on teaching a subject.

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Re:24% of High School Student Athletes Want to be Engineers,... by dmoy on Wednesday February 01, 2012 @08:40PM (#3541041)

There were some earlier news articles & spinoff discussions in the recent past (NYTimes, etc).

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/why-scien...

Wish I had the link to discussions about it, they were better than the actual article.

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Re:24% of High School Student Athletes Want to be Engineers,... by duck on Wednesday February 01, 2012 @10:08PM (#3541255)

Here you go:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3196377

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3239815

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