What's Trip and T'Pol's specialty?

[dialee]

Elessar:
I think that's a good point... Today's education system is so totally inefficient time-wise.

I agree but I also think that after going through the trauma of a WWIII that the world government would have emphasized the subject areas that would have rejuvenated and rebuilt the planet ASAP. This would have meant the sciences. Government emphasis on the sciences in school may have forced the compressed what we consider today's normal school curriculum into shorter time periods.

What I mean is that the school curriculum for grades 1-3 may be done in a year or 1.5 years of school so that by the time of the last two years of high school, maybe they're doing the first 2-3 years of undergraduate degree work. College then becomes specialization into specific scientific/technical areas of study.

[Alelou]

This isn't unreasonable. One of the things about the academic curriculum in this country is that kids basically just review everything over and over and over especially in middle school. The textbooks are so long they can't get through them because they review EVERY CONCEPT every year unless they get into some advanced track. Supposedly they're also transitioning them from being kids that are spoonfed everything to being able to do stuff on their own.

That's the theory. When I taught high school I didn't notice a whole lot of that coming naturally. And when I taught freshman English at UNH I was pretty amused by students who would write in their journals things like, "Oh my God, they actually expect us to read the textbooks now! In high school we just covered them and put them in our lockers and carried them around!"

[justTripn]

I didn't read the whole thing but I agree with Michelle and whoever said that university education is currently inefficient. WAY inefficient. Why does everyone need to get up and gather for lectures in lecture halls in the new information age? They can save time by working online, downloading lectures or anything they need anything, using "wikepedia" to answer questions. They don't need to go home for Summer. (That is a holdover from when schools needed to let kids go back home to work on the farm for the summer.) There are alot of senseless university traditions that have no other purpose other than that's how we've always done it. Including a lot of useless courses and requirements. I think Trip joined Starfleet Training at a very young age, like 17 in my back story and was recognized for his talent and got every class he needed and none he didn't. So I have no problem with the comment in the abomination except that Hoshi said it so condescendingly, which she shouldn't have.

[CX]

Uh, I still do go home over summer, because that's my only opportunity to make some decent income. Though one can take summer courses If anything is inefficient about the university system, it's that they try to cram too much material into not enough time.

[blacknblue]

He has a point. The class scheduling is inefficient. Either you are working your ass off and trying to do too much too fast, or you have a semester where you are coasting along and vegetating half the time. I mean, taking calculus and organic chem the same semester is a BAD IDEA. But it happens to a lot of people. That's just wrong.

[Lady Rainbow]

I can actually see Trip as being a gifted child, esp. w/mechanical things and problem solving. His parents could have encouraged him and worked with him to develop that talent, so maybe by the time the 22nd equiv. of high school/secondary school came around, he was pretty grounded in mechanical/electrical theory. He probably also did things like work summer jobs related to it or maybe even an internship or two. And/Or taken extra classes (or maybe the equiv. of AP classes in physics and calculus).

He could have easily majored in something like aeronautical or aerospace engineering with design labs included. At the same time, maybe was in something like the Starfleet equiv. of ROTC. (Reserve Officer's Training Corps). A "normal" engineering degree (according to my hubby, who's a computer engineer) is 5-7 years, depending if you're just for your BS or Masters/PhD on top of it. So assuming he was 17/18 when he entered college, and assuming the earlier length of study, he would have been 23 at graduation.

Plus at graduation, he would've been commissioned at least an Ensign, but maybe even jumped to a Lt., depending on how he did in school and what kind of experience he had. Okay, a 7 year gap between Lt. and Commander is stretching crediblity a bit, but it's still doable.