What mechanical engineering skills do you have, that you wish you gained in college? 9

[frusso110]

Hello everyone.

I'm working on a project to develop a new curriculum for freshmen level Mechanical Engineering students. The focus of the introductory (design?) course is to teach students skills that are required in the "real world". Personally, I have come up with pages of things that I learned at my first job that I wish I learned in college.

What mechanical engineering skills do you have, that you wish you gained in college?

Any responses will be greatly appreciated! If you have a project in mind to teach said skill, please feel free to mention it.

Thanks,
-FR

 

[Jboggs]

There is one LARGE lesson that ALL successful engineers learn, and if they don't learn it they don't become successful. The harder this lesson is the better it is learned. It is this: the ultimate law of the universe is Murphy's. It is an absolute maxim: if you left any room for a mistake, or a misinterpretation, or a misunderstanding, it WILL happen. Not might, will. There should be at least one course, or at least a seminar or two, in every semester of engineering school on the importance of anticipating the unexpected and taking steps to prevent it.

 

[EnergyMix]

Thanks for moving this thread. As you can see, this is a much better forum for it. In regard to your query, two items that I believe need to be taught are: UNITS and SIGNIFICANT DIGITS. I think half the problems on Eng Tips would be solved if people understood these two fundamental items. Ok, maybe I exaggerate, but only a bit.

 

[frusso110]

AMEN joboggs.

David: Really good stuff there. I really like the idea of having the questions throughout the entire course be answered in the appropriate number of significant digits. That is definitely going to make it into my presentation.

 

[JohnRBaker]

A bit of trivia: I used to work for the same company as 'Murphy' (this is absolutely true). Never met him, but they had a write-up in the group newspaper when he retired.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[urgross]

Occam's Razor should be taught.

 

[Gymmeh]

A lot of the young guys I work with could use a lesson in "English for Engineers."

Poor English is fine in internet forums...
Poor English can be worked with if its a US person reading a document from a US person.
Poor English can cause big problems/losses between, US and Quebec English, UK and US, US and German English, etc... it only gets worse.

The world has be getting more global.

 

[Jboggs]

AMEN!!!!!!!
I have told several young engineers that they should leave their "texting" habits at the door. If you want to communicate with professionals and be seen as one yourself, you will not ignore the rules of grammar, spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure. I recently received an email from a very sharp young man that I have been helping with some drawings. There were three sentences in his message, one capital letter, one period, and four misspellings. I gave him what I owed to him - a strongly worded response that he is crippling his own advancement.

 

[Terminus0]

I've always been quite gifted with words both in written and spoken forms for an Engineer. So I've never had trouble with that issue.

The things I've had problems with 4 months into my career is handling office issues and knowing what work prioritize when my boss keeps dumping things on me that he says are all urgent. I'm not so sure that these things can be taught except through actual experience.

 

[frusso110]

Terminus are you me? =p

IMO many engineers shouldn't be managers.

As time management relates to the point of this thread... teaching good time management based on actual realistic due dates is something that we will teach in the course. Imagine if I assigned everything to the students on day 1 and said "everything needs to be done asap"?

 

[Terminus0]

Yes it is I!

I am you from an indeterminate amount of time in the Past!

I am here to warn you about things that have already happened and you are very much aware of!

 

[zdas04]

I would assign 3 years of work on day 1 and set a deadline of the following Monday. Then I'd have a discussion in class of how people prioritized their outrageous assignments. On Day 2 of my 5-Day class I assign two homework problems that each take about 8 hours to do in Excel if you go back to first principles. If you use the techniques from the class and MathCad they each take a half hour. The morning of Day 3 I step them through the way I expected it to be solved and there is always a couple of students that spent most of the night on one or the other problem and didn't start the second. That leads to a discussion of understanding goals, using tools, and "good enough" answers. The discussion is always lively and there are always a few of the students that finally "get it".

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

"Belief" is the acceptance of an hypotheses in the absence of data.
"Prejudice" is having an opinion not supported by the preponderance of the data.
"Knowledge" is only found through the accumulation and analysis of data.

 

[berkshire]

I would assign 3 years of work on day 1 and set a deadline of the following Monday.

That sounds like a normal work day in the real world.
B.E.

"A free people ought not only be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government."
-George Washington, President of the United States----

 

[freshco]

@handleman

v1/v2 = d1/d2

=>630*48/40=756

 

[SomptingGuy]

The real-world application of differential calculus. It is engineering.

- Steve

 

[zdas04]

I had a conversation last week with a new Engineer who was a bit bitter about how his university education was irrelevant to his job. No one ever explained to him that most of the curriculum was focused on giving him a basis to build upon. While he would probably never solve an ODE in real life, it was important for him to know that the arithmetic that he would use in real life had a theoretical basis and had not been delivered intact by a benign deity. That is the real risk in an Engineering education--that the graduates will blindly accept a set of processes and equations without question. When Engineers stop questioning they become worse than worthless (and more than a little dangerous).

I teach this by going through common empirical equations and explain where they came from and what were the assumptions and boundary conditions. That might be a useful introductory exercise (since most of the ones in Fluids came from Bernoulli and experiments, not much higher math involved they really lend themselves to this discussion) to write out an equation like the Isothermal Gas Flow Equation and show the term that must be solved iteratively. We pick out the parts that are identifiable to have come from closed-form equations and what parts are empirical fudge factors or the result of narrowing the scope. This segues into looking at the AGA Fully Turbulent Dry Gas Equation and that requires introducing the Moody Diagram and Reynolds Numbers (and Reynolds Numbers are a perfect place to introduce unit analysis, if all the units don't cancel then you did it wrong) a couple of semesters early, but that is one of those things that should be presented several times. This sequence takes about 3 hours to do right so it would be a week in college terms.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

"Belief" is the acceptance of an hypotheses in the absence of data.
"Prejudice" is having an opinion not supported by the preponderance of the data.
"Knowledge" is only found through the accumulation and analysis of data.

 

[cry22]

problem solving education starts early, in kindergarden, not in college.
I recall my kids in kindergarden being taught how to add coins, nickels and dimes to get qaurters, except they did not know how to carry he 1 in the addition yet (they only knew how to count till 10), it was all memory.
They were being taught how to tell time, before they knew how to count to 60 so they could not define 60 seconds, 60 minutes, and make the relationship. It was all memory.

Most engineering schools around the world offer a 5-year degree, not a 4-year degree.

 

[cjccmc]

"Mechanical" engineering covers such a wide field of applications and many of those get ever more sophisticated and specialized. This would seem to make it ever more necessary to graduate with a solid grasp of all the basic principles. From there you can build a further understanding in different specialties. That said, I find that 98% of my time on the job only requires concepts that I covered in high school, but having that extra depth for the other 2% makes a huge difference in what I can competently produce.

 

[KM]

First, I heartily endorse the call above for good writing skills. Young engineers need to know that they will be part of a whole team of people, some technical and others not. The ability to transmit technical information to a non-technical audience is critical. But good technical writing requires more than just the ability to spell and punctuate properly. Also critical is the ability to see, assess, evaluate, and transmit the *implications* of various technical options and transmit those to a non-technical audience. Cost implications of course--very important in the real world and barely if ever mentioned in school--but also things like health and safety implications, staff training implications, and so forth. When proposing a particular path for a decision-maker, one has to be able to fully, logically, and properly describe how the selection of Option A over Options B, C, and D was done.

Second, engineering school is all trees and no forest; real life doesn't come at you in little discrete self-contained pieces like it does in school. You have to sort through the muddy confused problem in real life before you can start solving it. I found (and still find) "where do I start" to be the most difficult part of any project. I suppose this kind of thing is supposed to be taught as part of "design project" courses in 3rd and 4th year. In my experience, however, these artificial little "design" scenarios were just as fake as a textbook problem in terms of all the needed data being handed to you on a platter. So maybe how to teach this would be to get in speakers to give presentations on real-live case studies of projects?

 

[frusso110]

The problem that i'm running into now is that I have 25 years of material to fit into a single semester. These are really things to focus on in every course the students take in the MEC department throughout their four years in school.

In order to do this kind of a thing, you would need a department head that spent his time in industry prior to getting a PHD. Who knows, maybe i'll get there one day.

For now, I'm thinking i'll be just introducing many concepts in the course. Since this is a 100 level course, I think that's where we need to be heading.

Many people have brought up the open-ended question topic. I'm planning on providing something like a "open ended question of the day" in which students are to come up with the additional pieces of information that they need to solve a problem. The point of the exercise would merely be to get the students thinking a little more out side the box. I 'll be starting a new thread in which I get everyone's ideas for simple open ended questions.

 

[JohnRBaker]

Frusso110, please keep us updated on how it goes with your classroom changes, OK?

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.