Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

It’s too small a statistic to be called a trend, so right now it’s still an anomaly.

I’m talking about two students (and their parents) so far who have bucked the migration abroad, signing all the leave of absence papers and such, only to return a year later.

Strangely enough, both of them were engineering majors when they left, even though the older of them – technically on his fifth year – shifted to computer science when he returned.

That’s another trend: in that batch so far there have been three students who have shifted from engineering to CS, not wanting to move to the extremely less technical business administration or communication arts. Two of them were already irregulars, and found out that they could graduate earlier if they shifted, not counting the teachers who always assigned projects under which they do not actually learn anything – that I’ll talk about some other time.

On the other hand there have been two students so far that I know who have shifted from CS to engineering, again one in his fifth year and the other an incoming third year.

This, I believe, is better than those who, even though their brains apparently cannot handle it, are sticking it out in the engineering program because of parental pressure to follow in daddy’s footsteps, no matter how much it costs.

Of these there are too many to mention, but roughly a dozen that I’ve heard, spanning different batches.

And there’s the advent of the new course: Industrial Engineering. This is being touted as the CA or more accurately the BA of the school of engineering.

These students do not have as many math subjects as the other engineering majors, and have some management courses. So now there’s another step for those who find themselves troubled by the early math subjects of ECE or Computer Engineering, they could shift to IE first and still be able to call themselves engineers, before deciding if they want to leave all that math entirely and focus either on money matters or their creativity.

Will that change the school dynamic that we have so far, all this divisiveness that the student leaders were bewailing during our recent camp, or will it just add another group to be outcast in the ongoing tension?

Session 1623 wants the perks of being called an engineer without that much of the effort. Class dismissed.