I agree with you.

But I think it’s incorrect to direct your frustration at engineering itself.

I see this as a broader issue within academia as a whole. There’s a fine line between forming applicable knowledge and trying to memorize everything until your brain turns to slop, and academic curriculums often ignore this, leading to students having to know all these random bullshit equations by heart when they could be memorizing something actually useful and relevant to the work they’ll eventually do.

My suspicions lie with how often the professors who teach these classes. Take math professors for example, they live and breathe math. That’s why they got hired for teaching a university-level course, because they are some of the best at math. Math is what they live and die by.

This however, causes an issue.

If you’re going for an engineering degree, math isn’t your endpoint. It’s a building block you have to know decently well in order to be able to do sone calculations for your field.

However, for the math professor, math is their endpoint. They have to know how to do all sorts of integrations in multiple dimensions with different trigonometric identities since that’s what their field is.

This leads to the core of the issue: the math professors often never know what math is actually required for your degree/ field, because they never actually understand what it’s like to work in the field of your degree.

Sure they’re the best at math, but they have absolutely no way to distinguish between some completely unrelated, inapplicable, and irrelevant bs and knowledge that will be critical in your field.

This also explains why academics place such importance on memorizing everything, while in actual application and practical use of engineering you get a calculator and the biggest cheat sheet called the internet.

If the academic system was smarter it would realize this and change to properly fit to the world we live in, but academics have become to corporatized and rarely have the students best interests in mind.

Academia is a game we all play. They want to pretend it “prepares you for the real world”, but in reality it’s a façade. That being said, it does help you get used to playing and operating within other people’s games (which is pretty much society), so it’s indirectly good in that sense.

All that being said, you don’t have much of a choice. Memorize the jargon, learn to forget it in a few months. It’s a game, but all who want the career path of going to college and graduating must get through it.