Geezer Chestnuts
With all of the recent discussion about education some memories have come back.
In the 1960’s when I went off to a university-
The most feared course for science and engineering students wasn’t calculus, it was English Composition and Literature.
If students had full time summer jobs, they could pay for most or all of their four years of education at a state school. When I graduated, I owed $300.
There was no university in the US offering a BS in Surveying.
Many, if not most BS Civil Engineering programs were five years, including twenty or more hours of surveying courses and a surveying summer camp. The Vietnam war killed that concept when the CE programs were cut to four years per the deferment. Guess what was cut?
Engineering schools with a variety of engineering disciplines had a pecking order. Civil Engineering was always at the bottom. Today, if an engineering school has a surveying degree program, it is now at the bottom.
Computers cost millions and were the size of buildings. Submit punch cards, wait a day or so, and hope the printout you got back showed that your program ran.
If you ran into the President of the university, it was likely that he would stop and talk to you about how things were going.
- 6 Replies
> With all of the recent discussion about education some memories have come back.
>
> In the 1960’s when I went off to a university-
>
> The most feared course for science and engineering students wasn’t calculus, it was English Composition and Literature.
>
> If students had full time summer jobs, they could pay for most or all of their four years of education at a state school. When I graduated, I owed $300.
>
> There was no university in the US offering a BS in Surveying.
>
> Many, if not most BS Civil Engineering programs were five years, including twenty or more hours of surveying courses and a surveying summer camp. The Vietnam war killed that concept when the CE programs were cut to four years per the deferment. Guess what was cut?
>
> Engineering schools with a variety of engineering disciplines had a pecking order. Civil Engineering was always at the bottom. Today, if an engineering school has a surveying degree program, it is now at the bottom.
>
> Computers cost millions and were the size of buildings. Submit punch cards, wait a day or so, and hope the printout you got back showed that your program ran.
>
> If you ran into the President of the university, it was likely that he would stop and talk to you about how things were going.Those were certainly Halcyon Days!:-)
I remember those days of submitting a huge stack of punch cards secured by numerous rubber bands to the window at the Computing Center. Go back the next day to find out if it had even been put in yet. Too many times a simple, yet fatal, error would be found somewhere in the first few cards. Repeat the process. Then discover a different problem part way thru the stack of cards. Repeat…again! Get results, but, their wrong. Oh, crud! A parentheses in the wrong place in one of the magic formulae. Start all over. Each time, a day or more is lost.
As for meeting the President of the University. Students were welcome to stop by and try to catch him in. Truly a nice fellow. The Dean of the Engineering College socialized with most of the upperclassmen regularly. He and his wife sponsored a support group for spouses (99 percent wives) of engineering students. When he retired, he was put on the BOR.
“Get results, but, their wrong.”
Oh my goodness. You can’t even depend on Hole Digger anymore! 😉
English:
I’ll agree about English Composition. I got some of my lower grades in that sequence of classes. The problem was that it wasn’t just about writing clearly, but about coming up with ideas that the teacher liked and then expressing them in a convincing manner. If it had been a Technical Writing course, I’d have done well.Computers:
I punched a lot of “IBM cards” as an undergrad. Before I graduated, I had a part-time job in a department that had a PDP-11 minicomputer. Instead of cards, it used punched tape, but you actually had your hands on it and could get fast results. What would nowadays be the boot record on the hard disk was a set of about a dozen machine code numbers that you had to toggle in by hand on some switches, to make the machine smart enough to read the paper tape that held the loader program, that in turn loaded the BASIC interpreter, that in turn read your program and data..English Composition, 8 AM Satruday Morning
When I started at Lehigh they still had Saturday morning classes for freshmen. That allowed them to put all freshmen classes on a very regular 3 day schedule, MWF or TuThS, 8, 9, 10 & 11. Freshman labs were in the afternoons 1-4.
I had a creative writing course TuThS at 8 AM and of course the writing assignments were due at the end of the week. It was pretty normal to come home drunk and in those early Saturday morning hours I could be very creative.
I was a commuting student so I was up early at home, had a breakfast and drove 14 miles to campus. Since almost everything was graded on the curve, I signed up for an 8 AM class any time I could. Being wide awake gave me a distinct advantage over the typical Lehigh students who would roll out of bed and tumble down The Hill to classes.
One of the most dreaded things though were the 4 o’clock quizzes. Twice each semester a week was set aside for 1 hour quizzes for the lecture plus section courses at 4 PM. That way a single set of quiz questions could be given to hundreds of students at one time. I believe mine was the first freshman class to exceed 800 students. Some quizzes were in multiple classrooms but others were in larger areas where one could hear thousands of teeth gnashing and continuous groans of despair.
Lehigh required a minimum of 136 credits to graduate, which meant an average of 17 credits a semester. With a minimum of 3 freshman lab courses at 3 lab hours per credit and required freshmen Physical Education, 2 semesters of 2 hours a week and no credits for your time, the weeks were very long. after freshman year a good majority were retaking a course or two and if you wanted to try and stay on track you were looking at 18-21 credits a semester.
Still they were some of the greatest yaers of my life.
Paul in PA
Perhaps I resemble that comment about fearing English Comp I.
Good catch.
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