Greetings! Seeing the mid-sem test season’s about to begin, why not read a couple blog posts? Might make a good break in between your studies 🙃. Now, I know my first post is a bit… unconventional, so it’s fitting to do a follow up here.
This time, less narration, more opinions.
Firstly, a proper introduction of me. You’d probably already know that I’m Jerry by this point, not just a disembodied text box. I grew up in Auckland, hence UoA is pretty much a no-brainer. To answer the question¹ that may be on your mind: Yes, mech is indeed my first choice, and I don’t regret choosing it.
Which, begs to the question: what is mech exactly?
To put simply, mechanical engineering is the study and design of moving things. As a mech student, you’ll spend a great deal learning about how things move (kinematics), why things move (kinetics), and inventing things that can move (design). In conjunction, there will also be several courses on material mechanics, thermodynamics, and fluid dynamics, just to name a few. It might seems like I’m just randomly copy-and-pasting of the Wikipedia page for “classical mechanics”, but classical mechanics is what mechanical engineering excels at!
Being possibly the second-oldest engineering discipline, mechanical engineering has had centuries of knowledges for reference. However, we are not a group of elusive figures clad in ominous cloaks and chant ancient equations at steam engines (despite how cool that sounds). Mech researches are happening in fields such as high-performing automobiles, additive manufacturing, flexible mechanisms, and even aerospace. In fact, all these above are happening at UoA right now 😀. As long as humankind continues to exist in the physical world, mechanical engineering is always needed.
So, why did I choose mech? Well, mostly because I enjoyed the classical mechanics part of physics since high-school, as well as the dynamics half of ENGGEN 121. However, for some reason, I was never really into electronics and coding (says the person writing on a laptop instead of a typewriter). As such, I figured mechanical engineering best suits my taste, especially after hearing about some of the researches at UoA.
(Totally not because I wanted to dress in ominous cloaks and chant ancient equations at engines!)
But that’s about enough texts for this week. I hope that was somewhat informative on the nature of mech. While waiting on the next post, why not grab a copy of the Engineering Handbook from student services? It has a lot of less-biased information on different specialisations than a student blog 😛.
π = 3, g = 10, mech = ∞,
Jerry
Footnote:
¹: The question is “was mech your first choice?”