I would suggest taking a "real" ME course.
Take "Mechanics I." It should not be a killer, but it should be relatively boring compared to junior and senior level courses. In other words, if you can hack that, you can hack any of them. They all, IMHO, get more interesting as you move up the food chain.
The BSME was the best th>>With engineering or many technical degrees, you would be far enough out of
Hi K
Sorry abt late reply....
You make a very god point abt not being up on MatLab or Maple coming from a junior college
Are these two apps something I can play with and learn on my on while in a two yr college? BEFORE I get to the
4 yr college?MatLab costs money. octave is free, under GNU licensing and is pretty close to being 100% compatible. Learn one, you've learned the other.
Historically, octave's supporting group have answered my questions within an hour.
Depending on your computer acumen, there are several forms for you.
Thanks so much Robert!!
I will check it out!
hey, I didn't know about that either. Thanks! I had er...'picked up' a Matlab for my home system, but there were no help files available (beggars can't be choosers, and all). I'm going to check out octave right now, it sounds like a good deal. I can't stress enough to someone thinking about eng. education how much computer skills figure into it! I never thought I would need much programming, and I do(for school anyway, I hope I don't need it too much afterwards b/c I really don't care for it over much). I thought AutoCAD was more for architects, but have found that the complicated (to me) solid modeling programs and CFD, FEA etc. are powerful tools that I am expected to be fairly comfortable with. At least, it looks that way when I browse job postings.
Re. the going back to school at 47, though- I don't think the age thing is a barrier, really. I am biased- eng. degree for me is a change of career(I'm 36).
Actually, I believe I have MORE to offer a prospective emmployer than a
20-something fresh out of college who has never worked in anything but teenage jobs for the most part. I have been a manager, a small-business owner, and a team member/team leader- I've been in office politics and understand how that world works. Plus, I'm settled in my life, my family and marriage- while employers aren't "allowed" to consider that, I know that some of them, sometimes do. I've hired, and sat in on hiring/promotion selections, enough times to see that in action.-k wallace
Thanks for advice above
I'm already comfortable with solid modeling tools as that's what I'm doing now (CAD work).
I use Mechanical Desktop and Inventor. Don't do any FEA tho. And what is CFD?
But what I'm NOT experienced in at all is programming or something like MatLab or Octave
CFD = computational fluid dynamics
What platform do you use?
Did you check out octave?
Just thought of something. Start at 21 and work 'til you're 75. At 47, you're one year short of half way through your career.
Now, consider increasing returns to scale, which means each year, as skills accumulate, you are able to produce more than you could the year before. But, alas, brain cells keep dying off destroying that increasing productivity. Your peak productive years won't occur until you're more like 68 to 70
Don't forget the origin of retirement at 65 was not the result of industry learning when people lost productivity, but started years ago when some a**hole chairman of the board simply wanted an easy way to get rid of his president.
- Robert -
Yes I did
have not downloaded it yet tho... but will
Good point
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