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Engineering Students’ Challenges

Being a student in college is a tough task, but it is even tougher when you are an engineering student. The degree is one of the most sought after around the world, and a lot of high school students desire to join the profession, so they enroll in prominent universities and colleges. Life in this colleges may not be as smooth as they expect, and the students are met by their share of challenges, associated with either academic issues, implementation of projects, and even faculty members. At times these challenges may be psychological, inability to complete given tasks and more. We are going to analyze these challenges and how students and the school can overcome them.

One of the challenges is poor student-teacher faculty ratio, which is the relationship between the university’s number of students and the number of full-time lecturers who are employed by the department. For example, a ratio of ten students to one professor. This ratio is used when measuring the workload on teachers and how resources in the school are going to be utilized. It also affects the amount of attention a student in the class is going to get. Overall this ratio depicts the general quality of the faculty and the school in general. This becomes an issue if students are not getting enough quality education to enhance their engineering skills. Technical courses such as engineering require maximum student-teacher participation, so schools should ensure the lowest ratio possible is available in classes. Also, ensure the number of resources provided for a course is adequate (Felder & Brent p.269).

An outdated syllabus is also another challenge. When engineering students are in college their primary aim is to develop skills that they can use to solve engineering problems. Most of what is being used to teach may become obsolete due to the fast pace of technical and technological change. The curriculum needs to change to reflect the student’s information needs and reflect the requirement for future skills. How tutors implement their curriculum should also change, with emphasis on practical skills, by modifying their coursework and keeping track of industry change in tools. Access to journals on engineering should also be given to students to keep them up-to-date.

Lack of Internship and training facilities. Students in engineering have a challenge when trying to look for companies to intern at, most companies do not want to take up extra training costs the students will accrue, so they end up missing out on training opportunities. As a result, the connection between their coursework and employment become lost on them, which in the long run affects their career as prerequisite experience from practical training is not available. What universities should do is promote cooperation with engineering companies which can take up a percentage of students and offer training to the students, they can also create additional training centers where the focus would be students’ projects alone (Felder & Brent p.270).

Students attitude towards the learning process is also a hindrance to their development. Some students do not have a clear vision of why they want to become engineers. It takes a very comprehensive approach from a student to engage successfully in the process of becoming an engineer. But along the way the student may feel the coursework is too difficult, they may lack motivation, while their study habits may not be the best, making them fail in examinations.

Universities should ensure that tutors can recognize such issues in class, to motivate the students or identify the source of their demotivation.

All the above challenges can be catered to make the students’ lives better and ensure maximum returns on their educational investments which will make them better engineers in future.

Works Cited.

Felder, Richard M., and Rebecca Brent. “The Intellectual Development of Science and Engineering Students. Part 1: Models and Challenges.” Journal of Engineering Education, vol. 93, no. 4, Dec. 2004, pp. 269–277., doi:10.1002/j.2168-9830.2004.tb00816.x.