Have you guys been seeing those “Be an engineer” commercials by ExxonMobil on TV lately? They never had that shit while we were growing up lol.
That’s some quixotic crap they tell to young and naive minds.
Be an engineer ads - footage of rollercoasters, the water fountains outside the Bellagio, a lab full of robots, a formula 1 wind tunnel and a submarine.
Actually being an engineer - quality assurance documents, legislation, staring at wiring diagrams and sifting through 200 lines of code for that one comma that was supposed to be a period…
I always hated math as a kid. I also had shitty math teachers. I preferred art and stuff over it. I also had shitty art teachers.
I’m just an aspiring chemist. But too bad a chemist is an almost engineer, I haven’t branched ways with the engineers yet, so I guess that’s why I’m in this thread.
My main draw to math is that numbers are able to make logical sense. The answers aren’t as important as the concepts to the answer. Like I found it cool when I learned that sliding something down a ramp, and dropping something straight down through a distant of h through the ramp(if this was possible) is the same amount of energy. Therefore, with energy, as far as a ramp problem goes, the angle doesn’t matter.
It’s small snippets like this that make me happy that I have an excuse to take physics classes with the engineers(Calc-based). I would’ve done chemical engineering but fuck that, my time is limited.
How long did it take to get your engineering degrees for those that got theirs
anyone in mining engineering here?
4.5 years
I don’t know how much difference there are between a “pure science” and an “engineering” one. Curriculum wise, at my school, half of it are classes from the chemistry department.
I hate throwing shade, but either your teacher sucks or its your attitude in there somewhere.
As an engineer it is IMO the MOST IMPORTANT CLASS EVER and DEFINES you as an engineer. Follow me.
In general an engineer does one of two things - fix a problem, or improve something that fixes a problem. It’s rarely ‘research’ from a scientific angle, and is very much rooted in real world principle - not ‘ideal situations’. Now hold that thought.
How do you study biology. You read. You memorize. You read more. You memorize more. It’s a science born from memorization.
What do you do in physics (and as its child - engineering)? You learn a principle. You extrapolate it on a scenario. You then use a priori to adjust it to figure out the situation.
So, if you want to get good at biology, you need lots of books and have lots of reading to do. If you want to be good at physics - and its children like engineering, you need to ‘understand’. Chemistry is the unholy alliance of both, its memorization and application. (holds fingers up like a cross).
Physics 1? The entire BOOK can be boiled down to F=MA. That one formula painted on different scenarios leads to all the variations. You can figure it out. And that’s what engineering is about, figuring things out - problem solving. Sure, it changes a bit the higher you go, Physics 2 is F=MA applied to particles and electricity, and particles+waves adds in the calc2 & 3 and diff EQ, for me physics 2 was much ‘funner’, but you got to like physics 1, its the building block of logic for an engineer, learning how to figure stuff you ya know?
Why don’t you like it? Every thing you cover in physics one should open up a ‘door’ of logic or thinking about real world items, even something as simple as ‘how fast you can take a turn’ It starts with F=ma, then you have to apply things like rotation/angle/momentum/friction/etc. It’s fun (conceptually).
- Unreall
I actually didn’t understand a lot of physics the first time around and my dad, also an engineer, then engineering lecturer, told me that I didn’t have to, all I had to do was accept that it worked and the rest would fall into place. I give the same advice to my apprentices now.
If you’re struggling with it, just keep hitting it, keep moving forward and once you’ve seen a grander scale of physics, the stuff you struggled with will begin to click.
Why do I need to calculate things to these damn awkward radians when I already have faster, cleaner better measurements in degrees?
You just learn it anyway, plough through, despite not understanding it and a semester later you’re tying up radians and trigonometry. Suddenly rads are great and standard degrees are clumsy, pointless numbers for idiots, why did I even like them anyway?
Don’t get caught up in understanding physics on an academic level, you wont truly get it til you’re applying it and using it with other stuff.
phyiscs was kinda hard at first for me. conceptually its always been simple and easy up to when you start learning about how light behaves through young’s double slit experiment (seriously, fuck that shit), or introductory quantum physics (It wasn’t until a year later that I realized that the whole energy barrier, energy state was talking about electron cloud orbitals and looking at it now with that visualization and relevance makes it so much easier and interesting). What’s hard, and what I’m assuming @a15kko is talking about is the problems themselves. You’re given basic principles, and then apply them to real world situation, which require some
a. experience
b. and creativity
That just takes time and practice. Unfortunately for me, I’m the type of person that usually remembers and understands it at a higher level after seeing my failure during an exam, which is really bad in real world application. But I’d rather fail hard and often in school instead of the real world, that’s what’s school for. it will make a lot more sense later and it will also be way more intuitive, at least it has for me. After all, that’s the point of engineering, it’s a learning process.
Also, the teacher does impact your impression of a particular course
That’s pretty much how you sell anything to kids and by the time you realize that it’s not what you thought it was, you’re elbow deep in the shit and just decide to plow ahead lol.
I was ankle deep in EE before I decided it wasn’t for me, sometimes I wish I would’ve just sucked it up, though.
One of the great things about these fields is that you don’t even necessarily need to go to school to be able to do it.(certification is a different story!)
Look: http://backyardmetalcasting.com/ It’s all a click away somewhere on the Internet.
Literally.
Yeah, but if you wanna get into fields like civil or chem eng, you’re gonna have to read up on a LOT before you can do it if you don’t go to school for it. Let alone try to find someone willing to hire you to draw up the plans for their buildings and facilities if they don’t have some guarantee that you know what you’re doing, like a diploma.
Also yeah about the physics thing, it’s fine and dandy if you understand exactly how the math arises from reality, but you don’t have to do that 'cause that’s the scientist’s job. The engineer’s job is application, which does get pretty tedious if you’re trying to derive it all from fundamental rules. You need to know the fundamentals (like F=ma), yeah, but it doesn’t hurt to memorize some key breakpoints along the way to spare yourself from trying to figure out difficult problems that people from the 19th or 20th century already figured out for us.
Idk though, most of what I know about engineering comes from my father and friends who are engineers. I’m a physics major so my view on engineering is probably tainted a certain way.
I can only speak for physics degrees, but the difference between pure science and engineering curriculums (curricula?) is that the pure science ones have advanced courses on abstractions, like handling manifolds and spaces. The abstractions are general in the sense that the conditions of OUR universe (nature of interactions, nature of motion, etc) are just a specific case. You can think of a universe with different conditions (for example, different definition of inner product) and you’ll learn how to handle cases like that.
I think some engineering curriculums have a bit of those classes, too, but not as many or as heavy as the ones in pure science curriculums. Also during the later years, pure science curriculums get a lot more lab time, since their job pretty much revolves around properly setting up experiments and stuff.
Yeah, you gotta have some connections/resume-worthy stuff, that’s a given, and you’re right about the reading thing.
I only said that stuff because I know via over a decade of just that, reading up on it, lol.
Graduated this year with 1.5 years of refinery internship exp. 40+ applications, 1 call back and 1 job offer (lol! thank the lord). Job market is a little tougher now. For internships, if you have no experience I would seriously consider delaying my degree a year or 2 just to get exp. Trust me, if you have no connections its a slaughterhouse out there for new grad postings. Plus employers like it if you stay for 8-16 months for internships. Good luck
How do you go about making connections?
Somebody know somebody.
The dispensary folks know “supposedly” someone from space x.
or A friend of dad may know somebody.
You could also befriend you professors. Join a club, several ones. Etc. Half the work in college from what I’ve gathered is networking. That’s why people pay 50+k for private schools with connections.
Thanks for the comments guys and yah it’s the problems. Physics 1 wasn’t bad. I’m in electricity and magnetism and my teacher is all over the place. He’s not organized and doesn’t follow through with the book. He uses different symbols for certain things sometimes. He also decides to just skip huge chunks of shit in the chapters. I’m actually starting to look up stuff on khans academy now. It’s pretty helpful