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Taking classes strategically aerocontrols Send a noteboard - 27/06/2011 05:10:52 PM
The one class I had trouble with was Engineering Statics.....beams, forces, right-hand rule, etc. Maybe because I was going for a chemical degree, but that crap confused the hell out of me! I dropped it one semester when I found out that the summer class was a bit easier due to the time constaints. I barely got by that SOB with a C.


As an aerospace engineer, Statics was a freshman-level course for me. I had a good teacher and it gave me no trouble. I saved Circuits (it was not prerequisite for any of my other courses) until my senior year, not because I thought it would be hard, but because I was pretty sure it would be easy and I wanted to have a 'light' class at the end. It turned out to be incredibly easy, because physics is physics and it turns out that stuff like Kirchoff's Rules for current flow in multi-loop circuits are analogous to the equations of stress and strain in hollow beams (which I had studied in my senior-level structures classes already). I forget exactly how that particular example went, but it was something like "if we treat electrical resistance in this problem the same way that we treated modulus of elasticity in that problem, and do likewise with current & voltage vs. stress & strain, then we can write the equations exactly the same way." There's lots of stuff like that across disciplines where, if you've really studied one topic, the elementary stuff from another topic will just seem obvious by analogy.

Oddly enough, I had to take the pre-chem course in college before I could take regular Chem class (the only chemistry teacher in my high school had a rather shaky business relationship with my family, and I didn't want to be in his class when it all came tumbling down). Never had to take any chemical engineering classes - the closest I got (besides Chem from the science dept.) were classes like material science and thermodynamics. If I had gone into propulsion instead of controls, I likely would have taken some ChemE in graduate school.
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