Comment by tempestn

Most of my engineering degree felt like that. I especially remember control systems classes where we learned all kinds of details of how to run the math to place poles and zeros blah blah, sometimes even with some incredibly simplistic example of launching a rocket and controlling its trajectory or something, but... you just never felt like you had any idea how/when/why you would use this stuff in a real work environment. (And once I graduated I discovered that almost no one does; at best they're using basic PID controllers. I doubt even the professors could have given real life examples of the more complex stuff in use.)