Every four moths, new co-op shows up in our company. I don’t know whether is that I am getting old or it is really a fact. I found that the standard of engineering students are getting worse and worse.
The first clue is the minimum grade in school to get a engineering school admission. In the old days, you have to get over 90% in order to getting into the engineering school. I heard that the admission average of engineering school is drop to 70% in the past few years. It seems all the bright kids are flocked to study fiance and accounting.
The second clue comes in the computer knowledge of our co-ops students. Newspaper says computer literancy is improving in Canada, but more people know how to use computer does mean they don’t how to use the computer better. Many student only know how to use computer to surf the net, basic word processing and merely as a mean of communication and entertainment. The general grow up with GUI seems totally clueless about the command prompt. In the past, only those who loves into computer study computer, we know everything about the computer inside out. Back then we don’t have computer classes, we just learn on our own by reading the manual. Kids today are so used to spoon-fed computer knowledge, it seems reading the manual to learn has became a lost art.
好難想像加拿大人原來不很懂得用電腦woh。
The kids know how to use computer, but no the same way we used to “use” computer. Take an analogy, in the past everyone who drive knows how to maintain his own car, we used to just pick up a car and figure how to drive on our own. Now they just know how to drive and they have to learn driving from a driving school.
I can think of another analogy. Many people reads car magazines and know inside out which model is which and their specs such as horsepower, torque, top speed, 0-100km/h acceleration. But they know nothing about the car mechanics. They can’t fix cars, and they can’t design auto components. Car is a tool to get from point A to point B.
In the old days, you either get a computer from IBM if you are rich enough, or you buy your own parts to assemble one yourself. Nowadays, buying from Dell likely costs less than assembling it yourself. Computer becomes a off-the-shelf merchandize, like a car. You don’t need to know anything about the inside of a computer, unless you want to do upgrade, for a larger harddrive, more memory, etc. This is like someone who upgrades their cars for better suspension and exhaust.
One thing I find about the kids these days is the deteriorating personal communications skills. They communicate with each other using MSN and SMS. They don’t even talk on the phone. I think it is going to be a problem. Things a lot less interactive physically these days.