Starting junior year of ME

carnelian
Wed, 22 Jul 2009 07:59:23 +0000

I struggled a lot with Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics. A lot of the material overlaps, but is taught from “different perspectives” in each course. I had to take them during the same semester.

Those two classes (and upper level classes in general) can be a real headache, depending on which professor you get, because some professors really get into the derivations of the formulas. My thermodynamics professor used to give us quizzes and tests using variables instead of numbers, and he used to ask us to derive formulas. He was more interested in the derivations than anything else. (Also, using variables instead of numbers makes people angry).

The statistics class shouldn’t be that hard. Its calculus based so that makes it more fun :)

Materials, in some ways, is an extension of statics & dynamics and the introductory material science course. In the spring you will probably take Heat Transfer, which is related to thermodynamics and fluid mechanics as well.

I found that Junior year was where you really started studying engineering. Most of the courses leading up to Junior year where more science based. At my school Senior year was where we started learning about design and how all of the stuff we had learned fits together.