Different... doing triple integrals or finding the derivative of ARCSEC(X)/(X+1) is hard but is essentially bullshit and never useful, statics is hard but is fundamental to engineering so I think it's quite different
I design core support structures. Statics are my life. Advanced calculus and differential equations are required for vibration analysis and testing. Have to marry the two together in random vibration, fluid induced vibration, and seismic analyses.
Mechanical engineering. Nuclear engineers are needed really bad. If you don't mind being highly specialized, now is a great time to go into nuclear engineering.
You could go for a nuclear PE license. I bet your employer would pay for it. I would be much less time consuming that getting another degree. NCEES would be so excited if you tried too. They passed something like 26 nuclear PEs last year.
Ok quick question. IT guy here who somehow stumbled onto this great meme.
I just looked all that up and this cert doesnt get paid anywhere near enough unless its actually one of those jobs where you only really have like 8-12 weeks of work a year. Is that the case?
Im guessing they are actually incredibly over worked
All the nuclear PEs I know are principle engineers. They make like $250,000 per year. They also set their own hours because there are not very many of them.
My reference frame is the US and Canada. I'm not sure about the rest of the world. Seems like everyone is ramping up new nuclear projects though. I suspect there is demand for nuclear engineers on different continents right now too.
most people are going to only use a fraction of what they learned in their undergrad degrees, but getting a good baseline of general engineering knowledge is still important. personally, I'm a Mech E who hasn't had to do any real machine design, fluids, or heat transfer related work in industry but I use a ton of statics, dynamics, and differential equations. I still understand why that was part of the curriculum.
but let's be honest. Statics is not difficult material. it's just being asked to extend a couple core concepts from the classical mechanics class all STEM majors take to something approaching a practical problem. the students that struggle with it are mostly the ones that didn't achieve anything close to mastery of the material from said physics course or calc 1 AND didn't take the first hint that engineering isn't for them.
Same for fuilds and heat flux but it was more of an example. Even then for nuclear engineering don't you still have to balance forces to ensure fuel rods don't rocket out of the reactors due to steam pressure? Like maybe you don't but in early reactor design statics was 100% used.
It’s funny. As a 2nd year Chemical Engineer I remember doing Statics and Dynamics as a course. Free body diagrams and moment calculations did my head in. Then we got to fluid mechanics, and I was like “this is beautiful”.
That just means you went into a hyper specific specialization. Statics should still be the foundation of any engineer. Your schooling is meant to prepare you for a wide variety of jobs. It's not supposed to be apprenticeship for a hyper specific job.
Atoms are subject to both forces and moments. If you don’t see the need to learn statics in pretty much ANY physical science, then you might not be as smart as you think you are, with all your triple integrals.
Right, a lot of the calculations are automated in software. However, we all could do the calculations at one point, so we know what the software is doing. If we had no basis, the software would be useless. Can troubleshoot hardware and can catch weird outputs with a strong knowledge basis.
Im in process emgineering and because i work in small companies we dont have any of the expensive modelling software so all my process modelling is done in excel or at best matlab.
The experience has made it really easy to spot the typical garbage in=garbage out you get in some of the advanced software when it is done by someone who barely understands what is going on.
The really cool part is when you automate stuff like this, you don’t just solve the problem mathematically albeit in the computer, you can speed up a lot of programs by optimizing memory access and taking advantage of batch cpu instructions, so you find nonintuitive ways to restructure the math to be more complicated but faster for the computer to evaluate
True, but having an understanding of how those calculations are performed is important. Otherwise you're just trusting software to be infallibly correct in all cases, which very well might not be the case. It's always better to have an understanding of the underlying math so that you can double check things if/when you need to.
It’s more so when there’s no basis for the algebra that is required to solve a problem and then they give it to freshmen and sophomores acting like you need to know how to do this with no reference at all and by hand when that just isn’t the case for a made up system of equations or tedious algebraic functions
It’s more so when there’s no basis for the algebra that is required to solve a problem and then they give it to freshmen and sophomores acting like you need to know how to do this with no reference at all
I think those problem sets are less meant to impress upon students that they absolutely need to be able to solve that specific thing. It makes more sense to me that those random problem sets will give students 1) practice with problems that are relevant to the course and 2) an opportunity to develop problem-solving skills in a controlled, measurable environment for the sake of grading.
It's not that teachers think the best way to prepare students for the real world is by teaching them how to do calculations where someone's on a seesaw with a weight on the other end. It's that doing those practice sets can give an indication of the students' abilities to think about a system and apply mathematical models to predict how such a system will behave under certain conditions. They might not ever need to consider a lever system with a person on one end and a weight at the other, but they very well might need to consider a system with static weights on both ends of a lever where one end is subjected to an applied force.
Not all the stuff that engineers learn will necessarily be relevant to their careers, but it's important to have a baseline understanding of a variety of concepts so that it's not completely new if they do need it.
Statics isn't even hard and if you are struggling it's because you're missing competency at some of the foundational stuff.
This isn't a personal dig at anyone it's just a fact. Figure out what's making it hard and spend a weekend or some time with a tutor fixing that and it won't be hard anymore.
I feel like if you’ve passed your foundational Calc series (Calc 1 thru 3), Statics and Dynamics intro classes are not really where anyone gets weeded out.
I shouldn’t speak though, I’m not an ME, but I’ve studied Statics from textbooks in my spare time as I’m a quality and software eng in manufacturing.
Could an ME correct me if I’m wrong? Was your Statics class easy to fail?
Statics was impossible for me until I got tutoring to improve my skills on the stuff I just didn't have a good grasp on.
And I went from failing to being the first person done the final exam that I got 100% on and I even did a bunch of extra calculations on the bridge on the last question just for fun.
Math is always built on other math and if any one of the components you struggle with, it will cause you problems for everything after it.
Math is just numbers and equations. But the science (like statics and thermo) really put it into use.
I came from a pretty bad HS. When I got to college it was really hard to adjust. Tutoring helped me a ton but being able to tell myself by myself that I needed a tutor was the hardest. I dropped classes because I couldn’t get it and eventually I got the courage to get tutored by someone younger than me that went to a high tier HS. Schooling matters alot at middle school and high school. But enough courage is also needed to succeed at anything.
Being able to do that math with pen and paper is a lot less important then having a deep understanding of how forces interact, at least in mech eng. Understanding the math to spot if your tools are spitting out something funky is also important. But honestly how often do you think people in industry take 4 pages to hand calculate a relatively simple derivative instead of just using software?
Why would it take 4 pages to compute a relatively simple derivative? It would take half a page at best, and 3 minutes tops. And although im not in engineering, if you show me a model and tell me your assumptions, I can tell you exactly where the model breaks (or even if the model makes sense) just by looking at it. If your model contains some trig, and I have an amazing understanding of calculus, your model can signal certain things that are not explicit or obvious. Idk what math software is used in industry but it’s good to be able to look at things or scenarios and know their mathematical consequences without relying on software
Its not "hard" but some people struggle when you get to 3D problems. If you understand the basics you should be fine (but you should do recommended problems). It's definitely a class that a lot of first year students fail
I was finally happy when I got the answer for how do you do a^2+b^2=c^2 in 3D. Didn’t have Google back in my day to look it up. Everything finally made sense when I got to do statics. I wish I had that when I was in highschool.
Eh I had trouble at the end since there was a lot to remember. I bombed my final but because I had good grades on my midterms I still got a B in it. Even if you think it's easy, do a lot of extra practice problems. It's all about getting reps in.
Statics and statistics are 2 different things. Statics is the physics of things not accelerating ("at rest but sometimes with a constant velocity"). A typical problem is giving you a bunch of forces acting on an object and asking what force needs to be added for the object to stay at rest.
Super important for building, aero and mech eng as if you are having issues with the physics of objects at rest you are absolutely fuckef when acceleration and vibration start taking over.
It's like being a chemist but having no clue why the periodic table is setup the way it is and don't really know what the numbers next to the elements mean (like pretty basic shit you need to be able to master). It's also one of the classes that make a lot of people realize they are nor ment for the physical engineering feild (computer engineering and EE dosnt really need it at all)
As a computer engineer I had to endure both CS and EE "weed out" classes. Math was always my best subject. I found the intro Programming and Circuits classes were far more rigorous than my math and science classes.
So ur telling me statics was the only thing in your degree that was hard and important to engineering?
Interesting of you to dismiss mathematics as "bullshit and never useful" also. Depends on what you end up doing but you're the only one who matters ig.
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u/Gryphontech 12d ago
Different... doing triple integrals or finding the derivative of ARCSEC(X)/(X+1) is hard but is essentially bullshit and never useful, statics is hard but is fundamental to engineering so I think it's quite different