This is what I was going to say. You really can’t understand many of the forumulas presented to you in HS physics until you study and understand calculus.
That’s anti-engineering. I’m part of that over-30% of my HS class who “couldn’t learn stuff we couldn’t understand”; over 95% of that group became engineers.
Note that you won’t understand everything, or in every way. Nobody does. My 5th year Analytical Methods teacher claimed he still didn’t quite understand how NMR worked - he could use it, but thinking about how it worked made his head hurt.
My written university exams always included a first part which was theory essays and a second one which was word problems. The word problems part included carrying a “formulas book” you had to prepare yourself; some teachers would collect these and count them as part of the grade (we got them back). Because you shouldn’t need to memorize formulas, an engineer already invented books!
Nava, ChemE
PS: in my case, and it’s the same for many of my classmates, physics and chemistry is what got math to “make sense”. We were taught math as if it existed by itself, when in reality most of math has come up because people needed to solve a problem that previous math wasn’t enough for. Physics was what the math had been invented for.
Have you heard of RADAR and LIDAR? Crow’s nests are soooooo last empire’s navy!
Nava FTW…my experience exactly…I understood differentials in Calc 1, I was good at math and calc, but it was just solving meaningless problems at first, then we started looking at the reaction rates, orders, and it suddenly all made sense…that followed through Calc 3 and P-Chem…we use the Arrhenius equation every day for different conditions, it’s just easier as we have spreadsheets to plug the data into and create the plots…math is the language of physics, physics is the language of chemistry and chemistry is the language of biology…
In fact, at the micro level chemistry is basically electricity. Reactions are the tiniest currents ever Mechanics are macro-level; PV=nRT is the equation for 3D billiards :D.
Emphasis mine - EXACTLY what we tell every young chemist we hire - you’ve proven you can pass the class, that’s nice, gold star, now we have to produce materials, solve problems and make money for the company, you have all the resources you can find (including us old folk) at your disposal…
Yeah…I love this stuff…my first Organic teacher always told us, if you want to find out the reaction product, push some electrons around, that always made sense to me, you don’t have to know the product of every possible reaction, you just need to recognize the character of the reactants, the reaction conditions and push around some electrons…I know it’s simplistic, but it’s a great place to start and a good way to teach people the thought process involved…
At MIT we were allowed to bring a sheet of paper with us to exams where we could write all the formulas. Memorizing them is not important - knowing when and how to apply them is.
It seems to me that you should be looking at one of the maritime academies.
You could study engineering there, although I think it would be pretty focused on practical applications for shipboard use.
My father went to a maritime academy and got a degree in Marine Engineering, which basically qualified him to run the engines on a ship. He got a job on a freighter, making runs to South America and back. Then he got drafted, spent a couple of years in the Army, got married and went looking for a shore-side job.
If you find that engineering doesn’t suit you, the maritime academies have other courses of study, including ones that will put you on a command track.
Also why do you need programming languages in naval engineering?Do they help you with something?
I mean an EE,ME or even a CE uses that.Why would I need to know C++ for this type of engineering?Are ships electronical?
I’ve been thinking about this thread a lot because of my own struggles. a mini rant:
I did very, very poorly in algebra and other maths beginning in sixth grade ca. 1978). I’m very happy to be an English prof but there were other careers I was also very interested in and shut out of early due to math struggles that prevented access to higher maths and sciences study.
As an adult I’m actually quite good with stats, geometry, and sophisticated financial stuff thanks to years of working with graphic design and Excel software. I pretty much gave up on numbers in sixth grade when I couldn’t get explanations that connected algebra to real world applications. “But what does this formula DO?!” wasn’t ever answered in a way I could understand.
For years I thought I was just really math stupid, but it turns out maybe some of it was just shitty teaching when algebra was first introduced.
Granted, I grew up pre-computer revolution and in a place and era that was just fine and dandy with the idea that girls were just bad at math – there wasn’t much incentive to really try and teach kids like me.
You should at least pass your math and physics subjects. Majors that don’t entail much physics include mining, geodetic, chemical, and industrial. The thing is, engineering is a tough major, and aptitude in math and physics are accepted measures of one’s chances of graduating.
I could be wrong, but I think you’re mistaken about what kind of engineer actually serves on a ship. It’s not a degreed engineer; those guys stay on shore designing more ships. The engineer on a ship is more or less the head mechanic.
I’m a petroleum engineer by degree, I got my PE in mechanical engineering focusing on. HVAC and Refrigeration and i mostly design and build distilleries now.
Mostof the engineers I’ve know who are unhappy with engineering are that way because they wanted to be Macgyver and design and build cool things. In reality most of being an engineer is reading and writing reports with a little to a lot of math and science involved to understand the reports and to prove you’re right in the reports you write. That being said I made it through the first decade of my career and never used math I didn’t learn in high school and the practical knowledge i learned on the job. My opinion was engineering school was more about teaching you how to approach problems then it was about what you learned. Learning to take a big problem break it down into solvable parts look up the solution to the small problems and then put it back together to a large solution is critical to engineering.
Now, I’m in a field where there are very little off the shelf solutions which makes it more fun and when I need to custom build a still, I have to understand metallurgy, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering. Sure, there are books for me to look up each part but then I’ve got to fit the various formula together to make a mathematical model of the still and then transform that into drawings for the fabricator and then understand welding, pipefitting, and other fabrication techniques to help the fabricator make the drawings possible. All of that is to say aside from knowing that i want cross flow of the water in my tube and shell heat exchanger and what my inlet and outlet temperatures are and what my transport mediums are i don’t need to understand transport or thermo to choose the correct formula and plug in the right numbers. Knowing thermo is useful so i know there is a formula out there and generally where to find it. I’m 15 years into my career and I’ve still never used calculus i use trig, geometry, algebra all of the time and probably spend the most time doing unit conversions.
All of that is to say depending on. The type of engineer you are problem solving is more useful than knowing math or science and really they are more about remembering that a solution might be in a given book and knowing what the words mean in that book than being able to say the three laws of thermo or why the center of mass is different than the center of inertia. You maybe faster if you don’t have to look things up but knowing there is a difference and know where to find it is way more important.
I think Pork Rind has nit the nail squarely on the head. Confusion over multiple meanings of the word “engineer”.
Aside: When I was a small child I was heartbroken the day I found out that my engineer father didn’t drive a train…
Nowadays everything is.
And learning to program teaches analytical logic. Let me put you through a little exercise my first programming teacher used to start with. Think of a food you like to make.
OK, how do you go about making it? Describe all the steps involved, in the exact sequence in which you perform them.
I’ve got 100€ which say that, even if your sequence of steps was logical, it did not include “checking stocks” and, depending on whether the ingredients are available, either “change to something else for which I do have everything”, “go buy what I’m missing” or “set the ingredients on the preparation area”.
That ability to include the steps most people forget is one of my biggest professional assets.
This was my experience as well, except (a) I’m male and (b) now I’m a mechanical engineer.
I failed Algebra II in high school; I had to take “consumer math” to graduate. But then I went to a weird, small college that offers a classical liberal arts education. (For those who don’t know, the classical liberal arts include mathematics). We learned calculus via Newton’s Principia (geometric ifinitesimals) and Leibniz’s differential calculus (which is how modern calculus classes are taught). I was intoxicated by the idea that, given the equation for a line, one could find the exact area under that line. I was off and running.
Switching to mechanical engineering for grad school took a bit of a sales pitch to my department, but they took a chance on me and I’m grateful to them. It didn’t hurt my switching experience that I had worked as a bicycle mechanic for years; bicycles are rolling galleries of simple machines.
I’m still terrible at arithmetic due to a somewhat rare learning disability, but in grad school no one minds if you do your math on a computer.
To your point, Jennshark, I was also a teaching assistant for statics, which serves as a weed-out class. I saw many more women weeded out than men. Men were more certain that they were right (especially when they weren’t) and they were much more willing to argue about grades. In fact, the weed-out classes (statics, dynamics and mechanics of materials) tended to weed out anyone who didn’t already seem like a conventional engineering type. I’m convinced that this costs my field some great engineers, though I can’t prove it.
The conventional sink-or-swim approach yields plenty of bad engineers. I once had another mechanical engineer (with a degree from my alma mater!) argue in a meeting that stacking springs in series increases the spring rate. It does the opposite, in fact. The guy got many other basic concepts wrong. But he was a competent project manager and the stuff he worked on got done on schedule, so he remained employed.
He was a great example of the “plug-and-chug” model of engineering. He didn’t understand the fundamental principles well, but he looked up the right formula (usually) and got an answer.
This is anathema to me. I’m much more interested in (and much better at) the creative side of engineering, especially when it’s driven by first principles. Most of the smart engineers I come across lean more towards creative problem-solving, but in my experience, people who memorize formulas without really understanding them are tolerated in the field. It’s a shame, but IMHO, it’s true.
Physics is such a broad topic.
I excelled at the electronics formulas. Kirchhoff’s law, Ohm’s law and Joule’s Law. I took a semester long class in acoustics and loved the physics behind it.
OTH I disliked studying forces, levers, and similar topics. It didn’t interest me and I had to make myself study and do the lab experiments.
I had a very good career in consumer electronics before transitioning to computers.
I haven’t done the other physics studies, I disliked, since college.
If that were the case, then the Engineering Professor would just hand you The Great Big Book Of Engineering Formulas on day 1 of engineering school, you’d memorize them, and in a few weeks you’d be an Engineer.
Obviously that’s not the case. Take a class in an engineering subject, and the time will be devoted to teaching you the concepts involved, so that you’ll develop a rudimentary analytical understanding of the phenomena at work, as well as how/when to apply various formula. The assigned homework is supposed to further sharpen your analytical understanding by forcing you to apply the classroom concepts in a variety of problem scenarios. When I took exams, the professors often allowed you to bring a “cheat sheet,” on which you could write anything you wanted. So memorizing formulas wasn’t exactly critical; you could write down all the formulas you wanted (often inadvertently memorizing them along the way), but if you didn’t understand what was going on, they weren’t going be of much use.
I’d agree with others here that calculus (esp. integral calc) is an important tool that facilitates understanding of numerous engineering/physics concepts. If you can get your head around that, then you have an important tool that can help you understand things like adiabatic heating/cooling, capacitors, springs, the bending of structural beams, torsional loading of shafts, hydrostatic forces on submerged surfaces, and lots of other engineering concepts.
You mentioned having completed high school, but you didn’t mention any formal education beyond that. If you’ve been trying to teach yourself these subjects without formal instruction, that can be pretty difficult. A four-year engineering degree takes, oh, about four years to finish. That involves attending a few hours of class every weekday, and many hours of homework each week. I won’t say engineering is easy, but you’ll probably have an easier time of it if you are learning from an instructor who has experience walking people through the concepts in a logical progression, working through a selection of problems specifically selected to further enhance your understanding, and having access to fellow students with whom you can study so you can learn from each other, as well as the instructor him/herself, who can answer specific questions about the material in person during office hours.