When I got to the IME library this morning there were already people there studying. And as I sat and read the paper and studied, more and more people kept coming in. It turns out there was a test in the Lean Manufacturing class, and people were getting their last-minute studying done. In the course of their many conversations, I picked up that for whatever reason they may have been required to memorize some stuff. That got me to thinking. When was the last time I had to sit down and memorize a list for something at school? Like, not very often, and certainly not in engineering classes. That's one thing that's very nice about engineering. We're talking concept and application of concept, NOT rote memorization of anything, including formulas. I still remember that kind of stuff in school. Not fun.

It's funny, in my Econ class we're learning basic stuff about loans and bonds that my dad could probably do in his sleep. The fancy formulas they come up with to generalize the stuff might give him some problems, but he could reason it out no problem.

I talked to my IE367 TA today about a homework problem involving Capacity Resource Planning (basically, we were calculating how many labor-hours and machine-hours a certain forecast required), and once again I'm reminded about how much students gripe about teachers and how often it's totally undeserved. I even saw a profanity about this particular TA, along with sundry other comments about how hard he grades. And in the interest of full disclosure, I chimed in with affirmations of his grading toughness. Hopefully I didn't complain. But it turns out that he is simply trying to mimic the teacher's grading policy. So the TA's trying his level best to do what the professor wants him to and as a result he gets the class thinking he's some sort of fiend. Doesn't make you really want to go into teaching at that level does it?

But he's a PHD student who's research interest is Operations Research. This is something I'd definitely be interested in looking into. He said that Information Systems is what the industry around here wants, so there's not much OR at the undergraduate level. I need to talk to Dr. Billo about whether doing the IS option will crimp my desire to explore OR. And I need to talk to Dr. Arthur over in Statistics about what exactly OR is and what curriculum is available.

I've heard that OR is just a bunch of crusty mathematics, very dusty and boring. But this is from a Manufacturing Engineering major who's really interested in the nuts and bolts of manufacturing as opposed to trying to improve it from a mathematical and theoretical perspective.

Yay for theory!

This is called perpetuating a personal stereotype.

But I'm running my mouth before I really know what OR is. For all I know it could be a lot more directly applicable than what I'm implying.