Stereotypically geeky, engineering students dedicate themselves in their 4+ years at UCD taking classes that (for the most part) have been planned out for them for their whole undergraduate career. There is little room for exploration into other majors as engineering majors are generally 180 units (compared to 90 units for most L&S majors, with some loser majors weighing in at 60 units), the first chunk of which are math (21A, B, C, D) and science (CHE 2A, B, C and PHY 9A, B, C, D) classes. There is a good amount of competition as well as camaraderie in the classes and labs, as many students practically live in Kemper Hall. Many do not survive the weeder classes and switch to other majors. Of those that do, many expect to make lots of money to "make up" for the lost time and social life.
Engineers—and, by extension—engineering students—actually communicate quite well, but only with other engineers. Many people do not expect engineering students to be able to communicate effectively to non-engineers. Because of this, engineering students are forced to take a communications class. After taking the Communications 3, some engineering students are convinced that the Communications Department is a load of crap and teaches people that they don't need logic or truth, only that they need to keep people happy with tact and bullshit. Communication students and engineering students may very well be natural enemies: the engineering student disdains the communications curriculum as lacking in intellectual rigor and/or usefulness (while secretly envying the comm student's freedom to take the tractor driving class), while the comm student sneers at the engineering student's perceived intellectual snobbishness and/or ivory tower elitism (while secretly envying the respect accorded to students in perceived "smart" majors).
As an aside, California Aggie columnist Anna Ritner wrote a column about enginerds during the 2005-2006 school year. The column champions enginerds as "awesome", but readers are entitled to their own opinions about whether this generalization is, in all seriousness, fair.
Women
There are more of them than you think. They tend not to draw attention to themselves. Geeky women like having their intelligence appreciated but loathe reactions like "ZOMFG UR A GIRL!!! IN ENGINEERING!!!!!!! DATE ME PLZ?!?" Also, if you are in a class group with only one woman, don't expect her to be the secretary.
I never took a lower division communications class (I transferred to UCD and must have satisfied it some other way). But I did end up taking a couple communications classes to fulfill my upper division GE requirements. I found them to be some of the easiest classes I'd taken at UCD. Stay awake in class 'OR' read the text and get an easy A. I did find the lack of rigorous logic interesting. There was no right or wrong... just a bunch of experiments and opinions. -JevanGray
See also: College of Engineering
