<p>I guess I should have asked this question here....</p>
<p>I'm enrolled in a heavily-loaded schedule for the Winter Quarter at my school and will be taking Dynamics, Mechanics of Materials and 3 other courses.</p>
<p>I'm wondering what class of Statics and Dynamics you found more difficult, more stressful, etc? I'm deeply consdering dropping one of my classes because all 5 of my classes will definitely require a good amount of work. </p>
<p>I already took Statics and didn't find the class too bad, though a good amount of stress was involved. How does Dynamics compare? </p>
<p>I thought statics was pretty easy and I was able to complete the course with very little help from the solutions manual. I relied heavily on the solutions manual to figure out a lot of dynamics concepts.</p>
<p>Dynamics, to me, was harder but more interesting. Statics was fairly simple and boring, dynamics was more complicated but had more interesting problems, so on the whole I would say they were about equal for me all things considered.</p>
<p>As a student, I took statics first, and it was really my first introduction to engineering, so getting in that mindset was a little tricky.</p>
<p>I loved dynamics. I’m one of those civil engineering freaks-of-nature that really nailed dynamics to the wall, though. Everyone around here thinks I’m crazy, but I love doing pedestrian vibration analyses and trying to send my bridges into harmonic resonance, and I loved the dynamics courses that I took. All of my colleagues kind of whimper and fidget whenever anybody brings up dynamic loadings.</p>
<p>I was thinking the same thing. The entire course of statics can be summed up as sum of the forces = 0 and sum of the torques = 0. That’s every problem. No, seriously.</p>
<p>Well, yeah, but that’s true in the same way that the entire course of study of high school science can be summed up as all of your units need to match up at the end of your calculations. It’s the whole “getting there” thing that’s the tricky part.</p>
<p>But yes, more people would be well-served were they to keep in mind that in statics, the forces and torques sum to zero (and that all of their units should come out right).</p>
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<p>Twisting and buckling? Really? Most dynamics courses involve more angular momentum and linear momentum and crazy, Rube Goldberg-esque contraptions and determining their periods of oscillation. We didn’t get into failure mechanisms in dynamics, we did more of that in mechanics of materials and design courses. In my second dynamics class, it was all about vibration of systems… shock isolation, impulse excitation, vibrating systems, solving things via LaGrange’s Equation, Fourier Transforms, things like that.</p>
<p>I wonder if “Statics and Dynamics” is still the definitive text used by most undergrads… when I was an undergrad, I was fortunate enough to have Ferdinand P. Beer as my professor for those courses. I don’t believe Beer was that well know for research, but I will say he was the best educational instructor I ever had!</p>