What the Fuck?

Hopefully this will be my best semester yet here at Purdue. It is the first semester in which I might be able to achieve all A's. The thing is, when I think of a 4.0 semester, I think of long hours studying for finals, tons of homework throughout the semester, and tons of stress. This semester has been anything but that. I think I might be in a handicapped major. Did I miss the sign saying "people with learning disabilities only!" when I signed up? I mean I know its supposed to be easier than Engineering, but come on. I'll admit that halfway through the semester I started realizing that I could get a 4.0 so I started trying a little bit harder. I didn't take extra time to do anything extra really though. I just made sure that I did what the class required. I barley studied, just before certain tests, for maybe an hour or so. I feel almost bad that I'm leading my parents to believe that I'm doing well in school, when the problem might really be that I'm underachieving.

Generally, I like to do the best I can out of any situation. When you're in a certain major though, there comes a point of diminishing losses. I can only try so hard in the major I'm in now. There is only so much material to understand, not to mention most of it is quite simplistic and downright ridiculous that we are spending so much time on it. As an example, in my analog class, we have spent so much time on MOSFETs and BJTs, but we really haven't done much with it. Sure we learned how to make an amplifier (at the end, for 4 WEEKS), and switches, etc., but have we really learned how to THINK about this stuff? All we do is learn information about the parts and how they react to electricity, we don't do many projects that aren't hand fed. It's a false sense of knowing. I would kind of like to stay in analog, but the way its looking, there won't be much thinking involved. Digital courses on the other hand let you do the systems thinking since there isn't as much hardware to think about. I really like being able to solve the problems myself. The projects in the course are quite a bit more challenging also (EG: NOT hand fed AS much, lol). I mean you can still get help from the prof if needed, but that is probably quite common in many courses/degrees.

My main point is that I hope that taking more digital courses will be more challenging. Although having consistent high grades is seemingly nice for awhile, I would like to be disconnected from this false sense of accomplishment. It really doesn't help that the professors keep feeding me all this bullshit that "oh, we're just as needed as 'real' engineers", shit like that. It really just pisses me off. I know we aren't doing as hard of work as EE's etc, but I really do like what I'm doing. I just wish the work was more challenging/thought provoking. Be careful what you wish for, eh?