Post-College Study Habits

[curiousmechanical]

Hello,

I am a 27 year old mechanical engineer and I have been working for about 5 years. My post-college personal life is now fairly stable (finally moved out of the parent’s house, etc.) and I am beginning to focus more attention on improving my engineering skills. I design steel refining machinery for an OEM, so I have been trying to brush up on strength of materials, heat transfer, fluid mechanics, etc. My approach has been to reread (or is some cases, read) my old college text books. I am enjoying my studies, but the pace is just too slow (hour here, hour there); there’s just not enough hours in the day. I did fairly well in college, but I just don’t think the material stuck. I feel that college life was so busy that I just had to get the work done; there was no time to sit there and ponder concepts or theories. So in the end, I feel a little inadequate with my technical skills and I am trying to improve them.

So, I am curious, how do you guys stay up to date and improve your technical skills? How much of your personal time do you dedicate to studying? What do you focus your attention on (core analytical skills, new software, etc.)? Do you get time to study or play with new software at work?

I can’t wait to read your responses.

Thanks guys!

 

[casseopeia]

Check out the book store at local community colleges and universities and see if any carry work books or problem books. You might have to enlist the services of an actual student to purchase it, or just copy the ISBN and order it through any number of educational book sources. Then work through the problems over and over and over. Repetition is the key to having it stick. Try to set aside 2-3 hours a few days a week to do that.

"Gorgeous hair is the best revenge." Ivana Trump

 

[B16A2]

Whether or not you're going to take the PE, buy some of the study materials and go from there.

I hope you had a good reason to wait until you're 27 to improve your skills.

 

[rscassar]

Read through these forums and try to understand the problems of others and how they have been solved. Every time I encounter something new at work I spend all my time researching that topic. This includes reading the code, commentary and the references to the commentary. Reading textbooks and practice programming. You have a much more intuitive understanding of how the computer program works if you can program a routine yourself.

 

[IRstuff]

Trying to answer questions on this site is one avenue. There are arenas where I've had close to zero training, either in school or at work, but attempting to answer questions has led to a tolerable degree of knowledge (now, I r dangerus ;-)

As the commercials say, "Just do it." If for nothing else, it will hopefully keep dementia and Alzheimer's away.

Sometimes, it can be intimidating to attempt to post answers here, and sometimes, you'll be so far off-base that you'll get heckled. But, someone who's never been heckled or never been wrong is someone who's probably never done anything.

TTFN

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[trchambe]

Along the same lines of kikflip's advice, I like to make a program in excel or visual basic that will aid in what I am learning. It forces you to beome very familiar with different relations, refreshes your programming skills, and you're left with a handy tool for the future.

 

[curiousmechanical]

Cool tips so far! Thanks for the great feedback.

In the past, I have always read up on topics that came up at work, but now I am trying to get on a more serious studying program.

So far, it sounds like practice problem solving is a popular approach.

On average, how much time would you say that you set aside for studying each week (I am just trying to get a feel for what the norm is)?

Thank you!

 

[kacarrol]

A part of my job is presenting recent failures at monthly meetings. I read the bulletins from sites such as the TSSA and ABSA, read the reports and read up on the terms that were used and the system that failed. I don't have to go that indepth but I figure if I have the oportunity to learn something I may as well take it.

For instance I just finished doing a presentation on the pressure vessel that failed here:

http://www.absa.ca/IBIndex/Reedy Report on PV Explosion.PDF

After reading the report I went through the code and figured out how the engineer calculated the numbers, looked at the welding diagrams and referenced two different pressure vessel design text books.

I find it's easier to remember this stuff if you pretend you are going to have to teach it/present it to other people...especially if those other people are your superiors.

Hope that helps.

 

[IRstuff]

One thing that might be good, that we've done in the past, but have recently tailed off on, is to get your peers to give lunchtime seminars on work or engineering related topics. Everyone brownbags, or, in our case, the company paid for Costco pizzas. Everyone gets to learn something new, and the presenters get to practice their presentation skills.

TTFN

FAQ731-376

 

[kacarrol]

curiousmechanical,

I think I spend on average 4-6 hours per week of my own time reading up on new stuff or brushing up on old.

Hope that helps.
K

 

[KENAT]

I find it easier to study when I have a real world application for it.

In theory I'd love to sit down and spend time just studying an area I think I'm weak in but it never seems to pan out.

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[racookpe1978]

kacarrol (Mechanical)
26 Oct 10 14:54
A part of my job is presenting recent failures at monthly meetings. I read the bulletins from sites such as the TSSA and ABSA, read the reports and read up on the terms that were used and the system that failed.

Where did you hook up with those failure reports? As part of TSSA/ABSA ?

Robert

 

[bithkits]

Sign up with a publisher such as crcnetbase.com to get easy access to many engineering books. Another is springerlink

Try study a chosen topic in its entirety instead of simply reading random excerpts of introductory chapters or handbooks.

You can be a jack of many trades, but try be a master of each one before you add another topic to your knowledge base.

Adriaan.
I am an Engineer/part time student (Mechatronics) from South Africa.
Advice from lecturer: "Be warned - when you go into industry your boss will give you a thousand things to do and he wants them done yesterday!" So far he is right...

 

[magoo2]

I'd be tempted to see if there's a local ASME chapter. It opens up a whole new network of contacts, many of who can provide their ideas and suggestions.

I'm a EE so my organization of choice is the IEEE. I'd imagine the ASME would have something near you.

This gets you away from doing it all on your own.

 

[curiousmechanical]

Thank you all for your valuable feedback.

If possible, I would like to guide this discussion in a slightly different direction. I think my original post gave the impression that I am looking for studying advice (which I welcome); however, I am most interested in your preferred methods and how much time you dedicate to your professional improvement. I am curious to know what others are doing and what an average work/life balance looks like. Is it normal to hit the books 4 hrs/wk or 20 hrs/wk? Do your employers give you time for personal improvement? Do you mainly focus on core analytical (math, engineering sciences, etc.) skills, computer skills, networking, current events, or etc.? Do you take or teach classes? This was meant to be somewhat of a survey (with interesting discussion as it arises of course).

Thanks guys!

 

[KirbyWan]

I have found that The key to learning on your own is to read broadly and quickly. It's better to skim 3 textbooks and dig into one or two key sections of each then to closely read one textbook in it's entirety. Other resources I use are MIT's Open Course Ware web site to brush up on the basics at:

http://ocw.mit.edu/

I also found that for some topics a quick browse on YouTUBE can sometimes help. Especially if its for a manufacturing process. Lot's of good videos of coposite layups etc.

Finally don't forget to check out your local library. If you live in any decent sized city (>100,000) people they probably have a set of the ASME handbooks which are a wealth of information and too expensive to buy a copy for yourself.

Personally I like to dig into every problem I face in my usual course of work. After facing various problems in heat treating over the last 3 years I'm really starting to feel I have a decent (though not masterful yet) grasp on heat treating aluminum. I figure I spend about 5 to 10 hours a week reading/studying whatever topic has my attention at that time. And I bounce around topics alot.

Good luck and keep up the life long learning. That's the way to go.

-Kirby

Kirby Wilkerson

Remember, first define the problem, then solve it.

 

[IRstuff]

curiousmechanical,

All of them, depending on what the problem du jour is. Sometimes, I need to crack textbook, or buy one; sometimes, I need to dig into Google Scholar or Microsoft Academic, or CiteSeer. Other times, Wikipedia is good enuf.

One of the bad things about this digital age is that it feeds my packrattish tendencies. Used to be, every textbook and every article took up physical space that would crowd out me, or my family. Now, almost everything cane be acquired digitally, so while I got rid of almost half of my physical books, I've probably acquired 10x that number in PDFs of books, and thousands of articles. And, while it used to be that hard drive space had trouble keeping up, that's almost a thing of the past as well. I bought a 1 TB drive earlier this year, and even with several binges of article collecting, I still 531 GB free, and the 2TB drives are already out and waiting in the wings...

Having all this knowledge at your beck and call is not without perils, however, since the "beck" requires a substantial investment in catalogging and indexing, at which I'm woefully lazy.

Regardless, though, you need to find what makes you drink, after having been led to the waterhole. There are those who will touch nothing work-related outside of business hours, and then there are those that can't get enough of it. Obviously, the former may see the latter and say, "Get a life, find a hobby," and consider work to be somehow an evil necessity. I see things the other way around, "They actually pay me to do my hobby? Sweet!!"

So, I think you need to find that hobby that resembles your work, then, not only will you pursue it off-hours, but you'll actually enjoy doing it. What could be better than that?

TTFN

FAQ731-376

 

[GregLocock]

So far as organising stuff goes, you can construct your own wikipedia using wiki on a stick, with hot links into your pdfs. It all lives on the same drive.

That at least is the concept, I have to admit that I haven't actually got very far with it!



Cheers

Greg Locock


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[IRstuff]

I remember embarking on something similar a long time ago and I only got about 5% into the collection before losing interest.

TTFN

FAQ731-376

 

[kacarrol]

racookpe1978,

Are you refering to the Reedy Report link?

If so, yes that was through the ABSA. I signed up to their mailing list but you can just stop by their website once a month or so.

For the link I had posted you can go to the home page:

http://www.absa.ca/

Click on the link (under Alerts and Bulletins):
IB10-003 ALERT - Fatal Accident Involving a Truck-Mounted Water Tank

And then click on the link at the end of the first paragraph to get the report linked in my previous post.

Regards,
K