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"For many years, it seems that the objective in engineering education has been to teach courses and topics to engineering students as if all of them planned to go on to graduate school. The emphasis has been on theoretical topics, with practical applications receiving only minor attention. Actual trends show, however, that the majority of engineering graduates prefer to work as practicing engineers." - William S. Janna, Design of Thermal Fluid Systems, PWS Publishing, 1998
This theory-based course examined the broad field of finite element analysis (FEA). Short-of-the-long, everything this course covers is now easily done with computer applications - the course only provides the vague background on how the theory/programming was developed. The only lesson I learned from this course was that pre-computer-era engineers suffered long and hard to carry out iterative analyses by hand. Junior engineers in 'the old days' must have simply been human calculators toiling away for endless hours on their slide-rules. In order to give full understanding to the field of FEA, the engineering program should really dedicate 2 or 3 courses to the subject. There are several 'fluff' courses in the program which could be ditched on order to provide this. But seeing as only graduate students would benefit from this, perhaps things are good as they are. When I took this course, the midterm and the final were open book/notes. In other words, we could bring in whatever source material we liked. Depending on who teaches this course, there exists a tome of knowledge referred to as 'The 320 Bible'. This is basically a 400+ page, constantly-evolving collection of assignments, midterms, finals, notes, etc... that has been complied over the last 10 years and is constantly added-to by the current class. It's then passed on to the next year. When I photocopied it, it cost me about $40. I wrote the midterm 'solo', bringing only my class notes, and got 45%. I brought The 320 Bible to the final, and got 95%. I spent the entire final simply finding and transcribing the EXACT solutions from The 320 Bible into by exam booklet - ALL THREE HOURS! There would have been no possibility that anyone could have actually worked through the problems by hand. There seems something fundamentally wrong with this arrangement, but as I got a final grade of B+ in the end, I'm not complaining. Perhaps this course is just a hang-over from the old days and is taught simply for a university to gain 'accreditation' - more like a tradition. My only advice is to acquire The 320 Bible. Don't try to understand the material. Just repeat it. Unless you go on to grad school (which is your problem), I don't recommend spending an exorbitant amount of time worrying about this course. |
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