<p>Well I’m a ChemE and I took statics, dynamics, mechanics of materials, stress & elasticity. Is aerodynamics similar to advanced fluid dynamics? Although I never had mechanical vibrations.</p>
<p>My school is very small and there’s usually only one section per course, and the course is usually offered only once a year. I’m not 100% certain about approvals because people rarely take courses across majors since the schedules simply wouldn’t allow for it. Too many conflicts between required courses and electives outside of your major.</p>
<p>As for prereqs, I’m not sure if it’s just something that’s on paper or something that’s actually enforced.</p>
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Sounds like your school has a much larger general curriculum. At my school, people started taking courses specific to their major during their first semester of sophomore year.</p>
<p>Not sure if aerodynamics is similar to advanced fluids. I never took a mechanical engineering course.</p>
<p>hey, i guess every major in engineering has its skills, studies, and important.
if we take a look to chem E. it cares about how we can make the natural materials useful and using in each kind of industry, and for example how to make the oil more useful to environment by decrease the noxious materials from it…
chemical engineering is a group of math, chemistry, physics, and computer sciences. so what do you think guys.</p>
<p>AND In my school we must take a list of subjects before enter any department like: (introduction to engineering design(201,202), statics, engineering drawing, computers programming, work shop basics, and engineering economy…)</p>
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<p>Well, the easy way to get around that is to simply not go to certain classes. That’s what my brother did at Caltech - he just didn’t attend many of his classes. </p>
<p>{It’s not because there was a problem with him, as he was a full merit scholarship student who ended up graduating with honors and going to a PhD program at Stanford. The reason is that there is actually a problem with Caltech. Caltech is notorious for bad teaching - and has been recently named by Princeton Review as having the worst teaching in the country - such that many students like my brother conclude that they are better off in not going to lecture but rather by just spending their time reading the book. Hence, it is considered to be quite acceptable within the Caltech culture for classes to be sparsely attended.} </p>
<p>Similarly, I know some students at MIT who rarely showed up to certain classes. For example, I know one guy who had 2 classes at exactly the same time. Hence, he never showed up to one of them, except on exam day. (He had the funny incident that he actually showed up to the exam late because he got lost looking for the classroom because he had never actually attended class.) Yet he still pulled top grades. </p>
<p>I actually think that it’s not uncommon, at least among the engineeering student body at many schools, for some students to simply not go to some classes. Often times, you don’t really need to. Just get the lecture notes - which are usually available online - read the book, do the assignments, go to office hours if you have some serious problems, and that’s often times good enough. That’s what my brother did, and it clearly worked out very well for him.</p>
<p>There are some chemical engineering firms. Kellogg Brown and Root is one of them. KBR is very well respected and does a lot of work in process technology. They are also multidisciplinary so they will employ really all types of engineers as well as scientists and technicians etc. </p>
<p>One thing you may not appreciate about plant design or process engineering, and certainly was never explained by my loafer-in-the-cloud profs is that these things do not happen overnight. There are tremendous legal, political and business hurdles to go through before plant design can begin. Environmental assessments have to be done, permits have to be issued, financing has to be in place etc. This can take 3 to 5 years or more. Management will probably want several studies done on the economics from different sources under different assumptions. Communities will be divided on environment vs. employment. Town hall meetings will occur. </p>
<p>In reality, there is no longer the volume of business in new plant design or major rebuilds that these happen on a regular basis. Most of my time in consulting engineering (90%+) was spend on studies or proposals. For example, a chemical company will commission a study to look at new piping materials or pumps. </p>
<p>Not really the design I had in mind when I graduated! In Canada Dow closed 3 plants in 2007. Many others have been shut down as well. </p>
<p>One senior engineer told me later (i.e. too late) that you are LUCKY if in your career you will design ONE greenfield chemical plant. I went into chemical engineering to design plants. I never did anything of the sort nor did I come remotely close. </p>
<p>Imagine training as a brain surgeon and never doing surgery - instead you explain the feasibility of surgery or propose your services to people in need. Doesn’t make sense does it? At the end of day, I did not go to school to spend all my time doing proposals and studies that in the end, don’t matter anyway.</p>
<p>sounds like toronto_guy captured my chemical engineering experience also.</p>
<p>sakky, are you an MIT chemical engineer? If so, which classes did you deem unnecessary to go to? I’m curious because you’re right - I have a few ChemE friends at Princeton, and they told me the same thing about going to classes. Which I also found interesting, since Pton isn’t a tech school, so I had assumed the teaching to be better.</p>
<p>A huge reason a lot of classes are sparsely attended at Caltech is that, well, nobody is awake in the morning. There are definitely many well-taught classes here, it’s just that most people have been awake around the clock working and wouldn’t get anything out of lecture on 2 hours of sleep.</p>
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<p>Well, in fairness, this is what true of almost all undergrad majors: what you learn is not what you end up doing. This is clearly true in the case of the liberal arts. Let’s face it. Most history majors do not become historians. Most poli-sci majors do not become political scientists. Most English majors do not become literary critiques. {For example, English classes teach you how to deconstruct themes in various works of literature, but how many people actually do that for a living?} </p>
<p>Even in the case of professional degrees of which engineering belongs, you learn plenty that you will probably never really use. Aerospace engineering students may design a new kind of (simple) aircraft for their final project, but honestly, how many aerospace engineers actually get to design an entirely new aircraft for their actual job? There aren’t exactly a whole lot of new aircraft designs being created. The vast majority of aerospace engineers end up maintaining, or perhaps incrementally improving, existing aircraft designs. Boeing, for example, still manufactures the B52 bomber: an aircraft that is more than 55 years old. {Again, the B52 has obviously been continually improved, but that’s clearly not the same thing as designing an entirely new bomber.}</p>
<p>Or take computer science. The truth is, most software engineers do not build new, cool, sexy applications. Most of them end up working on one small module of some existing large project. For example, just imagine being the guy who is on the team to maintain and quash bugs for an existing printer driver. Note, you’re not even creating a new printer driver (which is already pretty boring); all you’re doing is maintaining an existing print driver. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t be champing at the bit to take that kind of job. But clearly somebody out there is doing those kinds of jobs. </p>
<p>The point is this. Not everybody gets a cool and interesting job. In fact, most people won’t. Most people, including most engineers, end up in jobs that are rather mind-numbing. That’s why the Dilbert cartoon strip is so popular: because it speaks to reality.</p>
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<p>Then that begs the question - why even hold classes in the morning?</p>
<p>Seriously. Caltech is a tech school and hence steeped in the tech culture. Let’s be honest. Most techies don’t like to get up in the morning, and are most productive at night. Heck, I know quite a few engineering professors who don’t like getting up before noon. So, why not hold classes at night? Why not even at midnight? After all, that’s when most geek/techies are up. Granted, older profs with families probably wouldn’t want to do this, but I can certainly think of a lot of unmarried and unattached assistant professors in engineering/science/math who would love to teach classes late at night, if it meant they wouldn’t have to get up in the morning.</p>
<p>Now, obviously this probably wouldn’t work well at most other schools. But we’re not talking about most other schools. We’re talking about Caltech here. Caltech is a highly specialized technical school, (in)famous for its geek/techie culture.</p>
<p>I think that’s why you’ll find lots of office hours and recitations held late in the day and not early. I’m TAing two labs and both of the times that people chose to take were the latest slots in the day. I imagine if professors were willing to stay later and not ever see their families, then Caltech wouldn’t mind pushing classes later in the day.</p>
<p>Well sakky, then the engineering department should not give the wrong impression because that is what they conveyed to me nad obviously others. That is misrepresentation. Unfortunately, I suppressed my common sense and chose not to do more investigations.</p>
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<p>I don’t think it’s a matter of professor preference. Let’s face it - a lot of the younger assistant profs don’t even have families. Many of them - especially those in CS or math - are steeped in the techie geek culture and hence hate getting up in morning just like the students do. </p>
<p>I strongly suspect that the real problem is institutional. Even the geekier departments have older, tenured faculty who want to hold departmental meetings and faculty seminars in the mornings, and so the junior faculty are pressured - if perhaps only for political reasons - to also have to be around during the morning. Academia is highly political, and hence face time is important. </p>
<p>But of course the real problem is simple: Caltech, like other research universities, doesn’t really care about teaching. It doesn’t really care about its students, especially its undergrads. It is first and foremost a research institution, and hence it structures itself to serve its faculty. If the students are not well served, the school doesn’t really care, because the school doesn’t really have much of an incentive to improve its student services. That is why you end up with so many sparsely attended and poorly taught courses at Caltech. It’s not as if Caltech doesn’t know that its teaching is poor; of course it does. It just doesn’t care. </p>
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<p>Well, I don’t know what happened with you at UofT, but I would say that there’s plenty of ‘misrepresentation’ going on in other departments at other schools too. I can think of numerous liberal arts professors who truly believe that employers truly value what students learn in their classes, when I think we all know that they really don’t. Somebody with basic IT or computer programming skills that they could have picked up in high school can make more without even going to college at all than will somebody with a liberal arts degree.</p>
<p>In general Mechanical Enginneering is easier than Chemical Engineering. Just pick whatever more interesting to you. </p>
<p>I am a junior chemical Engineering major and so far I really enjoy studying chemical Engineering although sometimes I have to stay up till 3am to finish up the homework or study for the midterms.</p>
<p>ChE graduates also tend to get paid more among all undergrad majors in college :)</p>
<p>Actually, looking at the CMU course scheduling time for CS classes this semester, there are none scheduled before 10:30, and most start at noon or later (though there are a few early morning recitations offered for those students interested). CS at Caltech is also not offering any classes before 10:30, which I think is a pretty reasonable time, even for myself who is definitely a “later riser.”</p>
<p>I do wish more faculty would adopt the practice that a lot of CS people at CMU did, which was videotaping lectures and posting them online. That way, if you miss something or a 2 PM class is too early for you, you can watch at your leisure and go back and forth over the parts you didn’t quite get.</p>
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<p>Then shouldn’t it structure itself partially towards some of those young guns that do their best work late at night?</p>