You are not supposed to memorize the formulas. You are supposed to *understand *the formulas. If you didn’t learn what they mean, either you had a lousy teacher (very possible) or you just don’t have the right type of intelligence (also possible). If you can get into a decent engineering school, it won’t take long to find out if you have the aptitude you need. And if you don’t, you can always switch to a business major and make twice as much money in the long run.
Also, don’t sell short the importance of good communication skills. Yes, you can survive as a low-level button-pusher with no communications skills, but the excellent writers and speakers are the ones that go far in the engineering world.
Meh. We engineers are notorious for bad spelling and grammar. You’re lucky if you get a coherent sentence out of us. Lack of proper punctuation use is definitely not an impediment to an engineering career.
Chemical engineering major chiming in. As a chemE, I endured two years of physics for engineers (i.e. calculus based physics) in college. Then, there are classes of thermodynamics and transport phenomena, which draw heavily from physics. So, chemistry won’t save an engineer from physics.
Electrical engineering might get you away from the mechanical elements of engineering, but it will hardly get you away from the formulae. V=IR and all that jazz. But you have to deal with the right hand rule which is so much bullshit.
Engineering isn’t about remembering a formula. It’s about solving a problem. Life is open book. It’s not an absolute requirement that I remember that PV=nRT, but it’s awfully convenient. It’s even more convenient that (PV/T)1=(PV/T)2 (so much subtext is lost on the Internet), which is derived from PV=nRT. It’s even more convenient to remember 22.4 mol/L at 0C and 1 atm, and that I can scale that based on temperature and pressure.
I do a job I didn’t even know existed in college. Engineering taught me the skills to learn the skills I have now.
And no matter what you learn as far as technical skills go, you’ll need to be able to communicate them. It’s an overlooked element by many engineers entering the field, but the most successful engineers and scientists I know aren’t the most technically gifted. They’re the ones who grasp the technical elements but are great at communicating them.
Arg! No! Technical communication is important. If I can’t write a letter explaining why my project is important and why it’s allowable under the regulations, I haven’t done my job, technical profieiency be damned.
My situation was similar to yours: due to bad/non-existent math instruction, I got off the math and science track in junior high school. After graduating high school and working minimum wage jobs for a few years, I became interested in electrical engineering, having developed an interest in audio systems and the electric guitar. College classes in math and physics were difficult for me, because I hadn’t seen them in high school, and thought I was poorer at them than I eventually turned out to be.
Not all engineers were physics whizzes in college. But you have to develop a working knowledge of the principles required for your chosen field. All engineering majors had to take two semester of mechanical engineering (statics and dynamics), but I only learned enough to pass them. I ended up concentrating on radio frequency engineering, so a command of electromagnetics principles was essential. But after graduating and getting a job, it was rare that I had to do the detailed math that I did in college. Working as an engineer often involves more practical knowledge and problem solving than advanced math and physics.
I would recommend doubling back and studying subjects that you’re unsure about your capabilities with. Is auditing college classes an option? Do you have the discipline to study on your own? Repeat exposure helps. Brush up on math as well - you need strong math skills to do well at physics.
Find out if you can develop the necessary working knowledge.
As others have mentioned, some engineering disciplines require less math and physics than others. In addition to computer and system engineering, there’s industrial engineering.
And I also concur that for an engineer, no skills are more important the simple ability to communicate clearly (even if your spelling, punctuation, etc. aren’t perfect).
You guys are not disagreeing. Communication is important in engineering, but lots of engineers are very bad at it. I know - I’ve done lots of editing. And it has gotten worse.
Ditto for speaking. At the engineering conference I’m involved with we enforce good slides by changing them if necessary. We can’t do anything about boring and lousy speakers though. Which is frustrating.
Heh. When I was in college one of our friends, who was a chemist, for fun went to the Physics final - 3rd year I think. He wrote F=ma on the paper and nothing else.
He got 5%.
Did you take calculus in high school? That is the kind of stuff you need for many types of engineering.
My impression of naval engineering is that this involves the design of ships, not the running of ships. I may be wrong. If you want to be a ship captain wouldn’t the merchant marine academy of Naval Academy be better?
Not that we’d want you docking anything with bad eyesight!
But if you go into consulting, say, you might still see more of the world than you’d think. But most of it is hotels and airports.
I have a degree in mech engineering. But physics and math come easy for me. What are the problems you are having with understanding?
Memorizing formulas is not the point of engineering or science. The point is to develop a model that captures the essence of the problem and then use mathematical techniques to solve what needs solving. The models and formulas in texts apply to the problems in the text with the constraints and assumptions listed. Understanding what and why the models are used allow you to develop the ability to create models that are relevant to the problems you need to solve.
OP, have you learned calculus, yet? Physics without calculus is hard. So difficult that I think they really shouldn’t even try to teach it. Once you learn the math (calculus), it becomes so much easier since you don’t have to memorize the formulae, you learn the basic principles and just create any formula you need, on the spot.
For example, to convert from degrees F to degrees C, you have a formula. I have trouble memorizing it, so I don’t try. I know that it involves a 1.8 (either multiplied or divided, I can’t remember which) and either a + or - 32. But, I also know that a degree C is larger than a degree F and that 0 degrees C is equal to 32 degrees F. So, if I have, say 37 degrees C and want to know what the degrees F would be, I just think a moment. If it was 0 degrees C, it would be multiplied by a number (the result would be 0 since anything multiplied by 0 is 0) and then add 32. But, it’s not 0, it’s 37. So, since a degree C is bigger than a degree F, I have to multiply the C by 1.8 (which would make it larger). 37 x 1.8 = 66.6 and add the 32 and you get 98.6 degrees F.
You don’t have to memorize the formulae if you know the principles. You have to understand the math to make it work, but if you understand the math, it isn’t hard. At least for me, if I think about it enough.
If you really want to build things, then the suggestion of software engineering might not be for you. When I was in school computer science included both computer engineering and software engineering, and they are very different.
Some parts of engineering need more physics than others. Today if you design a circuit board, you have to worry about radiation, signal integrity, timing, noise, all of which involves physics and lots of math. Doing semiconductors is even worse.
Engineering covers a lot of ground. You should read about the different specialties and figure out what appeals.
And there is reason for that above and beyond presenting yourself well; most engineering roles involve the drafting or interpreting of requirements and specifications, which are essentially the engineering equivalent of a contract. Like contracts, the language and grammar used in these documents has to be precise so that everybody referencing them has the same understanding. A poorly written specification or the misinterpretation of a requirement can literally doom a project to failure, or worse result in a defect that can pose a hazard to property and human life. Engineering (and architecture) is one of the few jobs outside of the battlefield where a serious failure to understand or communicate can result in mass casualty; when a building collapses because someone misread a structural analysis report, or an airplane crashes because of a poorly designed latch monitoring system that didn’t meet failsafe requirements. Being able to communicate clearly, accurately, and with precision is crucial to any position of responsibility in any engineering discipline, and the failure to do so can cost money, programs, and lives.
Marine engineering (or naval architecture as it is often referred to when applied specifically to the design of boats and ships) is a multidisciplinary field covering the design, modification, and operation of sea-going vessels and platforms. It certainly requires as good of a mastery of physics as mechanical and electrical engineering, and while there are no doubt opportunities for travel most marine engineers either work in an office environment doing design and analysis work, or on a platform or shipyard overseeing construction or modification.
I don’t know what the scores referenced by the o.p. mean, but if he is not confident in his ability to understand basic physics he needs to either seek better teaching or consider other professions. Not all fields of engineering directly apply fundamental physics on a daily basis, but any field that involves any kind of mechanism or physical product being able to apply principles of physics to understand why things work (or don’t work, as the case often is) is imperative to being successful. Not everyone can master physics and mathematics, but for many people it is more a matter of scholarship discipline and good teaching rather than not having some inherent je ne sais quoi quality. Few people really grasp physical laws without some effort, especially those that are abstract or seemingly contradict our everyday experience.
If what the o.p. wants is just to travel the world and explore, there are far more appropriate vocations for that than engineering. Many engineers I know have never left their native country, and in general tend to be of a conservative bent with little interest in other cultures or ideas beyond their native experience.
I think wanting engineering without physics is like going to a restaurant and ordering “steak please, but make me one without meat”. “Just a baked potato then?” “No, I’m tired of eating vegetables all the time, that’s why I ordered a steak.”
It’s not like everything is physics - of course there are other aspects to engineering than just that - but… It is one of the main parts, one that will block your way quite badly if you’re constantly trying to avoid it.
Many, I’d say most, of the engineers I know had to learn a strange culture, that culture being the American one. And those of us born here were exposed to their cultures also, one of the better things about working in Silicon Valley.
But I must know a better class of engineers. It is not clear that the OP knows the difference between one field and another.
If you do a lot of physics, you’ll probably end up memorizing a lot of formulas, but that’s just because you’re using them a lot. Memorizing formulas won’t help you much, aside from saving a little time on looking them up (which real physicists still have to do occasionally, for ones that they don’t use as often). As others have said, what’s essential is understanding the formulas. In fact, even if you don’t remember a formula, you can often re-derive it, just from understanding it.
As an example, suppose you forget the formula for centripetal acceleration. But picture yourself going around a curve in a car, and how much you get thrown around inside the car when you do it: You know that you get thrown around more when you’re going fast than when you’re going slow, so v must be in the numerator. And you know that you’re thrown around more going around a really tight turn (with a small radius) than a gradual turn (with large radius), so r must be in the denominator. But it can’t be a = v/r, because that has the wrong units: So it must be v^2/r instead. And all you have to remember now is whether there’s any 1/2 or 2*pi or something in the formula, and in this case there isn’t: a = v^2/r , and you’re done.
I have a EE degree and while I loved physics, I still remember the day I decided I wouldn’t become an engineer.
I was in my third year, and we had a communications class, there you had to calculate waves traveling through various media, with propagation and reflections et al. One Friday, three of us were in the class and the teacher have us a multistep solution to a particular type of problem. “Al” had to take off, but “Don” and I went over the material after class while it was still fresh. After that, we took off and enjoyed the weekend.
On Monday, Al came to class all excited. He had found a better solution which reduced the number of steps. It provided the same result, but was more elegant. He did admit that he spent most of Saturday and Sunday working on it.
I distinctly remember thinking that Al really needed to become an engineer and I didn’t to find a different line of work. I finished my degree and later went into technical sales and marketing. That was my ideal job, I could understand the material, but just wasn’t that passionate about creating the stuff myself.
