<p>Ill be starting my junior year of ME at UMKC this fall and I hear junior year is the toughest. I just need some advice from ME seniors and grads for which classes to watch for, what classes to review etc. My schedule this semester is 319Eng Statistics, 351FLuid mechanics, 324Eng Materials,360Thermal system design, 352Instments and measurements.
My current Gpa is 3.04 and im want to bring it up to 3.2 by the end of the semester. And also get and internship, Thanks</p>
<p>Junior year IS the hardest, but it isn’t really because of how difficult the classes are, IMO. Really, I think it is because that is where you hit the meat of your degree program, so it takes a bit of getting used to, and some people stumble a little when they get hit with the heavier technical work load. I don’t know how each class is taught at UMKC (it differs from university to university) but Fluid Mechanics is one of the pillars of ME, and will probably be a very in-depth course, so it is one to pay extra attention to. Same thing goes for Materials. I am not sure what is taught in “thermal system design” or “instruments and measures” as UIUC did not have any classes called that, but I would imagine that they wouldn’t be as difficult as the two previously mentioned classes.</p>
<p>As for what to review, you probably don’t need to do much since there will probably be a review during the first week of class, but here are some guidelines.</p>
<p>Materials will draw heavily from your solid mechanics course (or whatever UMKC calls it). Fluids will draw about equally from thermodynamics and physics (mechanics). Just make sure you are decently comfortable with those and you are fine. Of course, that goes for basically any class in ME, so that probably isn’t much help.</p>
<p>I struggled a lot with Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics. A lot of the material overlaps, but is taught from “different perspectives” in each course. I had to take them during the same semester.</p>
<p>Those two classes (and upper level classes in general) can be a real headache, depending on which professor you get, because some professors really get into the derivations of the formulas. My thermodynamics professor used to give us quizzes and tests using variables instead of numbers, and he used to ask us to derive formulas. He was more interested in the derivations than anything else. (Also, using variables instead of numbers makes people angry).</p>
<p>The statistics class shouldn’t be that hard. Its calculus based so that makes it more fun :)</p>
<p>Materials, in some ways, is an extension of statics & dynamics and the introductory material science course. In the spring you will probably take Heat Transfer, which is related to thermodynamics and fluid mechanics as well. </p>
<p>I found that Junior year was where you really started studying engineering. Most of the courses leading up to Junior year where more science based. At my school Senior year was where we started learning about design and how all of the stuff we had learned fits together.</p>