<p>I'm really interested in the work load you have to do, everyone tells me it's going to be hard but that tells me nothing, difficulty is nothing if you enjoy it. I want to know what you do in college; interesting classes you've taken; projects you've done; what do you study at night; how is an average class day for you; also what you plan or did upon graduating. You know anything to do with everyday life, I'm curious.
Thanks much!</p>
<p>I was a mechy for a year. It was the most work intensive of my majors (compared to physics, civil, and math). The labs were absolutely brutal. It was easy to keep a handle on things as long as any labs or projects weren't due for awhile. On the average day, I'd have class from 10:00-1:00, work on my research for a few hours, spend a few hours on homework, and then have the night off. There was usually one night a week I had to stay up very late to finish work. There's not a lot of reading, which is nice. Understanding comes from doing the homework.</p>
<p>What kind of research and homework are we talking about? Any of them really interesting or hard?</p>
<p>Well you can choose who you do research with. I worked in optics. I dealt mostly with electronics. Mechanical is a broad field, and allows you freedom to pursue a variety of topics. Homework usually consisted of 5 or so problems from the text. Usually the subject is interesting, but when you get into it, engineering is not all fun and games. In fact, there are 0 games, and only a small quantity of fun</p>
<p>I'm interested in specifics too, how were these problems? I bet it's difficult, I was in the engineering computer lab and some guy was sleeping at the computer working on some sort of mechanical arm in CAD, I thought it was funny but a little scary because it could be me.</p>
<p>The problems actually aren't that bad. but they require a clear head and good night's rest. If you want specifics:</p>
<p>Materials science: derive equations for stress for certain geometries of material, figure out the lifetime of an aluminum specimen repeatedly bent, describe methods of strengthening metals</p>
<p>heat Transfer: We used charts and tables to provide constants which would be plugged into empirical relations for heat transfer in various situations (natural convection, forced convection, conduction, combined systems, radiation)</p>
<p>Fuel Cells: using physics and chemistry to approximate outputs of a fuel cell configuration. worked with diffusion, mass transport, charge transport, reactions at the electrode.</p>
<p>Advanced thermodynamics: derived thermodynamic relationship, and evaluated thermodynamic properties in systems such as HVAC , power plants, chemical process plants, etc.</p>
<p>Yeah I could imagine that being pretty difficult, of course I'm not at that level so I wouldn't know where to start. I'm interested in aerodynamics and designing cars, you know being able to design the next Lambo (one can dream!) I really like the creative aspect of engineering and applying it to every day stuff, making the design for the latest cellphone, I heard mechanical engineering gears me up for that.</p>
<p>After my first semester of thermodynamics, the mechanical engineering classes were no longer that conceptually challenging, but rather horrendously tedious. You'll start off with a basic foundation in physical mechanics, move onto basic thermodynamics, solid mechanics, fluid mechanics, and heat transfer. Then they usually finish up with analysis of mechanical systems (modeling and design). There's typically also some lab stuff and controls theory in there too.</p>
<p>I appreciate the comments!Keep em coming if you want</p>
<p>Brendank </p>
<p>Do those 2nd/3rd year courses really get that tedious? Looking at my school's curriculum the degree plan seems quite repetitive up until 2nd semester of 3rd year.</p>
<p>It's not the subjects that gets tedious, its the work.</p>
<p>i.e. when you're on your thousandth line of matlab code, or your lab report hits 50 pages</p>
<p>Most of the conceptual theory stops at your junior year, where you "capstone" classes come into play. The hardest thing about MechE was that before you looked at different aspects such as thermo, fluids or solids, on their own and that was rather simple. </p>
<p>In your upper division classes you will put them ALL together and you will have to remember all of those forgotten equations/concepts. On top of that you might visit more advanced topics that were glossed over in basic classes--i.e we studied non-compressible flow in Thermal Fluids Systems but not in Fluids.</p>
<p>Some classes such as Dynamic Systems and Controls involve heavy math and since I took it late my senior year, I wasn't used to Laplace transformations and so forth.</p>
<p>Labs could be absolutely brutal since something ALWAYS went wrong or you would never be able to get your results, but I guess that is common to all majors.</p>
<p>I think so. The process used to solve problems in nearly all the courses are exactly the same. The only difference is the physical and constitutive models used (stress-strain vs. heat transfer vs. fluid flow equations ect). </p>
<p>Once you can do one problem set, you can do them all by just using a different physical model. And once you learn how to make assumptions for one physical model, you can easily do the same for others as well. Controls theory, mathematical modeling, and the lab classes are I think more interesting because they often use different process to solve the problems.</p>
<p>At the graduate level, there are classes that generalize some of the subjects like continuum mechanics which generalizes thermal-fluids, solid mechanics, (and relativity if you really want also) into a single set of equations.</p>
<p>My 2 cents.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Some classes such as Dynamic Systems and Controls involve heavy math and since I took it late my senior year, I wasn't used to Laplace transformations and so forth.
[/quote]
I'd like to know more about this class, as it's similar to our school's course (Dynamics Systems). I was told that the course at our school required MATLAB to do some tasks in the class. Why would that be used, for cranking out simulation values?</p>
<p>Also, I hear that Laplace transform, convolution, and other methods to solve ODEs are used. True?</p>
<p>As I see it, Dynamic Systems and Controls is pretty much an advanced differential equation class for engineers. </p>
<p>The math concepts are typically much more abstract and is like an advanced EE class. In my class, we first learned how to derive Laplace transformations and then covered the various ways to solve ODEs--from simple first order to complex non-linear variants. DSC involves making circuit analogs to any physical system and designing input/outputs to control the system and find out time variant properties.</p>
<p>I used both MATLAB (for Simulink) and LabView during DSC--you'll need it to make block diagrams that simulate your models.</p>