It feels like M.E. undergrad degree is a JOKE...

I totally agree with the fact that the Mechanical Engineering degree is now a joke. Although I have much respect for the many different subjects involved in learning Mechanical Engineering, things are just crashing down at the moment.

We also have an Engineering Design class which basically involves doing stuff we did in kindergarten. Last year we had to make a catapult to launch an egg, this year we are making suits out of tape and plastic to make people feel as if they are 60.

Things are coming to the point now where I can no longer tell my friends what I do at uni, the last time I sent an example of the **** we do in class to my friends, they laughed their asses off at how retarded we all were.

I'm getting the feeling that theres a big black hole in my mind, I feel as if there is so much I should know but in reality I don't have much of a clue about anything.

The starting post by Curl although quite truthful and honest doesn't present much of a solution to the dilemma of feeling as if you accidentally got shipped to a mental hospital. So far all I've been able to do is try to study on my own all the stuff I've missed out. But I'm rapidly getting exhausted cause there is just so much **** out there to know, combined with that all my time is being taken up by these ******** classes.

It sounds like you and the OP just went to crappy schools. I did my undergrad in ME and I feel like I learned plenty from my course work. Granted I learned a lot from working in labs and internships but I wouldn't have had the foundation to do that without my course work. Now I am getting my PhD in aerospace engineering and I am doing quite well at grad school. So the ME degree is not a joke in general, maybe just at your school.

Well my "piece of crap" school got $2 billion endowment and is ranked decently. Listen, it's got everything to do with the department.

Why is it that physics and math courses are 1000 times more rigorous than the ME courses? In physics or math they're not scared to give you a problem where you have to think a little bit (OMG! think?). I took Stat.Mech/Thermo from Physics in the same quarter as Turdmodynamics from ME; when I walked from my physics class to the engineering class it felt like I was walking from college to kindergarten. One problem from the Physics homework was harder (and more enjoyable) than the whole "thermo" course from ME. And they were all different problems that required different types of thinking: in ME all problems are exact copies of the examples in the book (how dumb is that?).

How are you supposed to "solve real problems" if the only things they teach kids to do is memorize how to plug numbers into a few equations? Give anyone in ME an original, abstract problem to solve and they won't be able to do it.

I still think that rather than blaming the school or the department that it is more likely that Curl just failed to grasp the bigger picture. It is common that students can solve the problems but not apply the physics to other problems. It is especially common in students who study mainly by repetition of problems without really grasping the basics.

Wikipedia: Engineering is the discipline, art, skill and profession of acquiring and applying scientific, mathematical, economic, social, and practical knowledge, in order to design and build structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes that safely realize improvements to the lives of people.

That's what I thought engineering was when I picked it as a major. This might have been true 50 or 100 years ago but now engineering turned into a bonehead-infested abomination. And they had to dumb down all the curriculum or else nobody would pass. It's truly a disgrace.

Then why do we call these people "engineers"?

That's what I thought engineering was when I picked it as a major. This might have been true 50 or 100 years ago but now engineering turned into a bonehead-infested abomination. And they had to dumb down all the curriculum or else nobody would pass. It's truly a disgrace.

A bonehead-infested abomination? Kind of offensive to a forum filled almost exclusively with engineers, or people with a large interest in the subject. Are you calling all engineers "boneheads"?

I'm getting pretty annoyed at this point, I don't know if my department is a special case or if this is universal but the M.E. undergrad degree is a joke.
I'm pretty much done with undergrad M.E. courses, I just need to take 1 or 2 more ME electives and 2 more non-ME electives and I'm out. Looking back at the core classes, I don't see how it was worth showing up to class, let alone pay the tuition:


- Mechanics of Materials
A joke of a class, all you do is plug numbers into formulas (which are just datafits). Completely mindless.

- Engineering "thermodynamics"
I call this class turdmo-dynamics because it is a disgrace to the beautiful science of thermodynamics and the name should not be associated with this. All you do in this course is look up tables and memorize how to do specific types problems (which are all the same except for the numbers). They don't even teach you what entropy is, meaning that kids coming out of this class don't know what Temperature means (since it is defined in terms of entropy). Very sad indeed.

- Heat Transfer
Laplace's equation on R^2. Solutions to some oversimplified problems and some nondimensonal groups.

- Fluid dynamics
Energy is conserved equation (aka bernoulli's eq)
Reynold's number
Moody chart which is seldom better than 50% error.
Viscosity (which they don't explain but rather state it as "experimental fact")
Lousy derivation of Navier Stokes with 2 simple solutions.
Data fits and nondimensional groups which don't help you understand anything.
Oh and supersonic flow, which was cool, except the derivations were very lousy if at all present.

- System Dynamics
2/3 of a year spent on linear (often homogeneous) system of ODEs with constant coefficients.
Some Laplace and Fourier transforms without any explanations/derivations/proofs. Basically memorize the process and do it on exam/HW.

-Manufacturing Processes
One of the most boring classes ever, all qualtiative babbling on things that are either common sense or too simplified to be useful. All exams were short answer, basically a test to see if you were awake and memorized the vocab ("engineering terms" as they call it).

- Engineering Design
lol this class reminds me of 7th grade, completely useless and everything is either common sense or just dry talk. I get bored to tears after the first 20 min and start doodling or reading a math book.

- Formula SAE
Build a racecar? How about buy a racecar. This club is a joke, all they do is buy things and wrench them together, save for the monocoque which they actually lay out with CF. Other than that everything is bought or sent off to be made elsewhere. Oh and believe it or not, a steel plate bracket is a year-long project for some members.

- Undergrad "research"
I don't understand why the word "research" is in there. All you get to do is push some buttons, epoxy some junk, and make plots. And everything being "researched" has already been done with 99.999% similarity and is most of the time completely useless.

I know for sure some want to come in here and be mad because you feel I "dissed" your field, but the honest truth is that this is sort of depressing and it makes me feel like I wasted 3 years of my life (and money too). Does anyone feel the same way or gone through the same thing. Any thoughts appreciated.

Because they possess engineering degrees. Just because someone holds a piece of paper does not make them intelligent. That goes for all fields. You will find dumb doctors and businessmen and teachers and every other profession if you open your eyes and look.



On the contrary, engineering is still filled with brilliant people, you are just looking in the wrong place. There are many jobs that engineers can do, and not all of them require you to be brilliant. There are many, many people who are perfectly content to work in near-anonymity at a big company and live a comfortable life, and there is something to be said for that. For many of them, they don't have to be brilliant, but merely competent at their job. This is how it has always been. Of course the brilliant people will be harder to find. That is just common sense.



Some of us are boneheads, and admittedly so. Being a bonehead doesn't exclude you from being a brilliant engineer though.

I agree. Don't blame the fact that your school has a poor engineering department, and the fact that you did poorly in choosing a challenging and prestigious program, on the field in general.

My school provided challenging curriculum and prepared me for the continued education that is "industry". I use fluid dynamics and heat transfer equations literally every day, and the understanding of the fundamentals of structural design is imperitive to me successfully completing projects. And, my physics course supplemented my mech courses both in kinetics/kinematics (supporting structural dynamics courses) as well as electricity and magnetism (for my electrical design and control courses). And all of this has served me well in industry so far (obviously there are many things that I don't use given my particular field)

I'm sorry you had a bad experience, perhaps graduate school would be a nice experience for you. I would suggest applying to another school's program. The engineering industry offers tons of jobs that will expect the engineer to solve difficult and challenging problems by applying his anaylitical and critical thinking experience. But you have to decide whether you want to be an engineer or a theoretician/researcher.