Which math subjects are essential?

Get a ruler in your hands. Measure things until you start to understand how a ruler works. Measure some stuff and figure out where the center is. Say you measure a book and it's 7/8" thick. You look at your ruler and see that every eighth is divided into two sixteenths, so obviously half of 7/8" is going to be 7/16". If you write that out you have 1/2 x 7/8 = 7/16. And you notice that 1/2 is divided into 2/4 and then into 4/8 and so on, so you can convert anything to anything by multiplying all the numbers on top and then all the numbers on bottom.

Other rulers are divided into 10 and 100 parts. But an inch is still an inch, so anything on one ruler can be translated to the other ruler. A half inch on one ruler is 5/10 or 50/100 on the other. An eighth inch is just 12.5 marks when you have 100 marks per inch. A metric ruler divides an inch into 25.4 parts, so a half inch would be 12.7 of those parts. Pretty simple, isn't it? Practice this a bit and people will think you went to wizard school.

I learned this in a single afternoon when I was in fifth grade, a full year before the school normally teaches fractions. The school teachers were still trying to teach fractions a year and a half later, showing the classes bits of colored paper. I learned by planning to build a box and measuring where to put the nails.

In my college days, drafting meant a table about the size of a dinette, and various appliances to force straight lines and accurate angles. If you started a drawing in the wrong place it would run off the edge of the paper and you might have to erase a large part of it to start over. So there was a strong incentive to IMAGINE the entire work before you started. That vast imagination was one identifying characteristic of all engineers in those days. I worked in electronics and I used to memorize all the connections to all the integrated circuits I used so I didn't waste time looking them up while I was working.

But the most important skill to develop in college is not math, it is speaking. Get a copy of "Dress For Success" by John Molloy and consider all his advice for students. (The book is about appropriate clothes, not expensive clothes.)
- Vocal skill will affect your earning power more than any other detail.
- Acting skill will get you a job offer even when you are not qualified for the job.
- The most important benefit you get from school is your address book.
- The difference between a successful person and a very successful person is that the latter knows hundreds more people, and knows them quite well.
- No school will teach you any of the above. They don't even teach how to do well in their school.