Thinking about the relationship between pieces was an exercise in frustration, a continual feeling that the solution was just out of reach, as concentrating on one part would push some other critical piece of knowledge out of my head. ​ Why do we leave material out of classes and then fail students who can't figure out that material for themselves? Why do we make the first couple years of an engineering major some kind of hazing ritual, instead of simply teaching people what they need to know to be good engineers? For all the high-level talk about how we need to plug the leaks in our STEM education pipeline, not only are we not plugging the holes, we're proud of how fast the pipeline is leaking.