Dear Prospective ECE Students,

My name is Raghuveer Musty and I am a senior Electrical Engineering student specializing in Computers. I plan to graduate this coming May and work at Schneider Electric, a company that mainly focuses on power distribution. Looking back at my college career, while steps away from calling myself a Purdue graduate, I know I have come a long way and learnt a lot of valuable lessons. I would like to share one of these lessons with you and hope that it helps you as much as it helped me.

As many of you have already learnt, the class structure in college can be extremely different from a typical high school experience. Instead of being in a class of 20 to 30 students, you are thrown into lecture halls with hundreds of students around you. Homework, which used to be a breeze in high school, is all of a sudden taking more hours to complete than the hours of sleep you get every night. Do you even get a good eight hours of sleep every night?

The solution here, people, is group collaboration. Get help from others, split up the work, divide and conquer! But wait, where do you draw the line? During the first week, you and your friends assign yourselves with one homework problem each. Once each of you fully understands the concept of your designated problem, you meet as a group and help each other finish the homework. This works for a few weeks, but as the semester progresses, you get more and more swamped with work of all sorts and do not have time to do the homework. So are you allowed to ask someone to give you their homework to copy, or maybe even ask them to do it for you with a different colored pen and handwriting style? I mean, just this one time. This is how it starts. Or maybe if you ask your friends to take your iClicker. Or if you…

This is Purdue University, a university that is known to be prestigious because of the values it instills in every Boilermaker. Rendering honesty, integrity and hard work with everything that we do is our most important job at Purdue and will continue to be for the rest of our lives. Professors attempt to pack much knowledge and fun into lectures and thus students should strive to attend and participate in class. Going to class or completing homework should not be treated a chore, rather a series of stepping stones for our educational development.

Life is all about making choices. These specific choices aforementioned have a nasty way of becoming habits. As crucial as it may be to get points, asking a friend to get them for you and lying to your professor is both morally and ethically wrong, regardless of how many other students are making those same choices.

Alumni Liaison

EISL lab graduate

Mu Qiao