Preface for Students

This isn’t a book about how to get along with your roommate or how to balance your college budget (hey—you’re an engineer, a calculator is never far away). I’ve tried to avoid phrases like time management, goal setting, and finding yourself. The assumption has been made that you have found yourself and an engineering program for yourself. Less lofty and (hopefully) more useful topics will be covered. Engineering students are perceived to have a heavier workload than the average student. That perception is, well . . . pretty much correct, but the perception that this occurs at the cost of other important things in our lives is simply not true.

What this book is about is how to learn as much as you can, get good grades, and still have fun while pursuing an engineering degree. You will find strategies to ace tests, learn to love your computer in times of cyber-crisis, land most agreeable internships, and pull through end-of-the-quarter slams in ways that are specific to engineers. All of this is not just from one engineer—but from several hundred—who have given their time and input on these subjects because they know where you are at.

Enough said. Much of what this book offers is common sense. So take only what works for you and have fun!

Preface for Professors

This is not your usual textbook. This book was written while I was an undergraduate student in mechanical engineering to provide real answers to questions about engineering and becoming an engineer to which my classmates and I could not readily find answers. While tons of guides exist for the general college student, none of them seemed to fit what we were facing in school—problem sets, laboratories, and a different academic culture than our non-techie classmates. When I wrote the first edition, support for engineering students was seemingly nonexistent or not necessarily appropriate to students.

As a professor, it’s not easy to think back about the first day of university or the frustration of seemingly abstract math when you aren’t sure of its utility. Students today are smarter, more diverse, and definitely more technically-savvy than ever before. Most of us who are now instructors have had so much engineering training that our wavelength has morphed to something on the other side of the expert-novice divide. This book tries to bridge the gap by integrating subjects important to engineering instructors and issues essential to engineering students. With each edition, this book has evolved and expanded to include suggestions from faculty and students, reviewers and readers. Literally hundreds of engineers have contributed to this work.