There is something they teach you inside a Mechanical Engineering classroom that neither the teacher nor the student is aware of but sets apart this breed of engineers from the rest. There is something in the pursuit of robustness of equipment design and greater efficiency of a heat engine that teaches one more about life than anywhere or anything else. I recall a certain movie which said “A Mechanical Engineer has a certain fire inside him”. While we just adopted the slogan as a vindication of our superiority in as childish a manner as we could, you cannot escape a certain truth in the statement now that I look back at it. There was something about being with 40 other mechanical engineers for those 4 years that I believe equipped me for life better than anything that I have experienced before or since.
This is one art of science which teaches you that something as fragile as glass can withstand the pressure of a hundred elephants given that the design is right. It is here that you realize that if you sucked the air out to create enough vacuum, water would begin to boil at room temperature. There could be no greater education in toughness than an experiment on what else but toughness! As you realized that hardness was just a surface property and that toughness was generally inversely proportionate to it, some secrets of behaviors of people suddenly became crystal. No sermon on perfection could be as telling as a lathe job turned to micrometer surface finish. The lesson about striking when the iron is hot does not come alive anywhere other than a Black-smithy workshop. And right next door in the carpentry one learns that the slightest wrong stroke with the jack plane can ruin a carefully crafted job in a second.
Where else do you see the latest computers with the biggest and fastest processing capabilities engaged in the force analysis of…… a shaft. The newest technology analyzing the oldest problems. Kinda demnstrates the interdependence of things and the fact that everything whether old or new can and will make its mark in this world. The wonder of realizing that a 3 D cube when viewed at angle that is equally inclined to all the axes and represented on a 2 D plane paper will actually have the outline of a hexagon makes you realize the fallibility of appearances like nothing else. All those reams of notes on microstructure told one in no uncertain terms that unless the grain size was right and all the slip systems had been locked at the grain boundaries, the subject matter would keep yielding to pressure. I lay no claim to be a master of turbo machinery but my biggest take out from the entire course was the vulnerability of an equipment rotating at 3000 rpm to something as inconsequential as an air bubble and insufficient pressure, kind of a humbling experience to realize the potential of even the most innocuous thing to cause the greatest harm. The music of the gears moving in sync is a perfect analogy to the rhythm of life when everything is going just right. A sudden sound out of place and you know that something has interfered.
I remember the amount of cribs that we used to come up with because we saw ourselves rotting away while filing that confounded piece of metal in oppressive environs of the fitting workshop when our counterparts in the Comp Sc deptt were busy developing codes for multimedia applications sitting in air conditioned laboratories. But I also remember the joy on my face which more than made up for the beads of sweat on my forehead when I saw my finished job at the end of a grueling 4 hours. Kind of taught one the real value of a hard work.
In many ways, Mechanical Engineering taught me more to face the world outside than anything else. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the same principles that I used to make the most robust designs would keep me steady in my personal life also –
This is one art of science which teaches you that something as fragile as glass can withstand the pressure of a hundred elephants given that the design is right. It is here that you realize that if you sucked the air out to create enough vacuum, water would begin to boil at room temperature. There could be no greater education in toughness than an experiment on what else but toughness! As you realized that hardness was just a surface property and that toughness was generally inversely proportionate to it, some secrets of behaviors of people suddenly became crystal. No sermon on perfection could be as telling as a lathe job turned to micrometer surface finish. The lesson about striking when the iron is hot does not come alive anywhere other than a Black-smithy workshop. And right next door in the carpentry one learns that the slightest wrong stroke with the jack plane can ruin a carefully crafted job in a second.
Where else do you see the latest computers with the biggest and fastest processing capabilities engaged in the force analysis of…… a shaft. The newest technology analyzing the oldest problems. Kinda demnstrates the interdependence of things and the fact that everything whether old or new can and will make its mark in this world. The wonder of realizing that a 3 D cube when viewed at angle that is equally inclined to all the axes and represented on a 2 D plane paper will actually have the outline of a hexagon makes you realize the fallibility of appearances like nothing else. All those reams of notes on microstructure told one in no uncertain terms that unless the grain size was right and all the slip systems had been locked at the grain boundaries, the subject matter would keep yielding to pressure. I lay no claim to be a master of turbo machinery but my biggest take out from the entire course was the vulnerability of an equipment rotating at 3000 rpm to something as inconsequential as an air bubble and insufficient pressure, kind of a humbling experience to realize the potential of even the most innocuous thing to cause the greatest harm. The music of the gears moving in sync is a perfect analogy to the rhythm of life when everything is going just right. A sudden sound out of place and you know that something has interfered.
I remember the amount of cribs that we used to come up with because we saw ourselves rotting away while filing that confounded piece of metal in oppressive environs of the fitting workshop when our counterparts in the Comp Sc deptt were busy developing codes for multimedia applications sitting in air conditioned laboratories. But I also remember the joy on my face which more than made up for the beads of sweat on my forehead when I saw my finished job at the end of a grueling 4 hours. Kind of taught one the real value of a hard work.
In many ways, Mechanical Engineering taught me more to face the world outside than anything else. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the same principles that I used to make the most robust designs would keep me steady in my personal life also –
“Design strength must always be greater than maximum applied stress otherwise failure will result.”
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