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  • EADD Moderators: Shambles

Dissertations

Sorry... but it sounds like it.

Neither am I, for what it's worth. :)

My father (before he became a Governor) rose to the ranks of "Engineering Officer" in the Prison Service.

He was a plumber to trade. It's just a word and I wouldn't worry about what some pompous lecturer said about it.
 
One more thing: in Germany, qualified engineers are addressed as "Doktor" Whatever. That's how seriously they take engineering over there. ;)

Back to the dissertations.
 
felix said:
And don't give me nightmares about higher extended abstract imaginary maths; it's giving me flashbacks. :p
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There's nothing quite like resolving a force into orthogonal components, forming a three-dimensional vector; multiplying by mass to get an acceleration vector; and integrating it twice to get a velocity and a position vector respectively. Basically it's all your old familiar equations of motion, only stacked three deep.

The one trick I learned for getting engineering calculations to work out right is never, ever use anything but fundamental units. That is, express every length, no matter how short or how long, in metres; every mass, no matter how heavy or how light, in kilograms; every amount of time in seconds (the 86400-times table really sticks with you); every force in Newtons, every capacitance in Farads, and so on. Trust exponential notation to take care of the figures. Now, you won't be able to keep the exponent treble when using log tables or a slide rule for these intermediate calculations, because there you need the mantissa to lie between 1 and 10; but you should normalise it to a multiple of three aferwards when declaring the final result.
StoneHappyMonday said:
I told you I knew nothing. Now I'm doubting my dad was an engineer by [Felix's] description. he certainly didn't have an engineering degree. He was a skilled toolmaker. You're going to tell me that's not an engineer aren't you?
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Could he look at a problem and instinctively break it down into a series of smaller, easier problems? Did he know when it was OK to rely on a rule of thumb and when it was necessary to do a precise calculation? Did he not only make stuff, but make better stuff than anyone who had gone before?

Then he was an engineer.
 
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My dissertation for my environmental science degree was "Examining the efficacy of microwave radiation as a potential bactericide" - or words to that effect anyway.

I got the idea from the list of 'suggestions' they give out to lazy fucks like me who can't be arsed to think of their own original study. However, I still had to do research to formulate the hypothesis, design the experiment, perform the experiment in the labs, collate the results, apply statistical tests to the results to determine their significance, then write the fucker up!

True to form, I did absolutely shag all until a week before the deadline - then panic set in...

Took about a day to skim through whatever existing research there was, come up with a suitable hypothesis and design the experiment. Then spent three days in the lab diluting down their stock cultures of e.coli for experimental samples, blasting half of them for a minute in a domestic microwave oven (not long enough to boil the solutions thus possibly confounding the results), then making up culture plates from the irradiated samples and non irradiated controls to see if there was a significant difference in the number of viable cells remaining.

Of course, with it being a bit of a rush job, I had nowhere near enough results to prove anything one way or another - even with the most powerful statistical analysis known to man. So I made up a shitload of results using excel to generate random numbers within parameters determined by the few results I'd obtained, then performed the shittest statistical test known to man on my fabricated results as it was the only one I could get my head round...

Needless to say, the test came back as 'insignificant', so the only conclusion I could draw was that the experiment appeared to support the 'null' hypothesis (i.e. the hypothesis that predicts there will NOT be an effect). However, I still had to write this crap up and only had a couple of days left to do it. Now being the daft cunt that I am, I get extremely OCD over the presentation of written reports - to the point where the actual content becomes irrelevant. Consequently, I eventually submitted my beautifully written and presented (but absolute bullshit) dissertation nearly a week late, thus automatically incurring a 30% penalty to be deducted from the final mark.

In the end, I graduated with a 2-2 BSc(Hons) in Environmental Science - so my procrastination had cost me a 2-1 - for which I could kick myself now :(

The greatest achievement from my degree so far has been successfully avoiding paying back any of my student loans for 15 years. Only another 15 to go... =D
 
BecomingJulie said:
There's as much maths in an engineering degree as there is in a pure maths degree, as a subject in its own right and embedded into every other subject.
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Not around here, at least not if looking at the more traditional engineering fields like Structural or Civil.
And Mechanical or Electrical Engineering here are mathematically neither as broad nor as deep as "pure" math degree.
Yeah there may be as much maths as in sheer quantity, just like an econometry or even a physics degree has sheer amounts of math but generally doesn't require the mathematical maturity or the level of abstract thinking that a math degree does.
 
BecomingJulie said:
Could he look at a problem and instinctively break it down into a series of smaller, easier problems? Did he know when it was OK to rely on a rule of thumb and when it was necessary to do a precise calculation? Did he not only make stuff, but make better stuff than anyone who had gone before?

Then he was an engineer.
Click to expand...

I'm biased, he was my Dad (he's also been dead 35 years). Of course he made 'better' stuff in my eyes. He was patenting a lawnmower he'd made just before he died. He had something to do with heating systems in cars and a bit of the wing on Concord. He knew more Maths than I ever could (and I'm not bad). He was a definite polymath. He answered more questions correctly on University Challenge than anyone else I've seen. But he'd never been to university (born in 1927, working class). He was going to go when he retired. Died at 53.
 
I did an LLB, so we didn't have to do a dissertation. It's a bit of a doss, Law - you just need to cram.

Dropping out of the rat race after 10 years and doing an MA now though, so shortly I'll be wankily critiquing shit with gusto =D
 
Mine was titled: Deterministic chaos and order in selected plays by Tom Stoppard.

Did an English lit degree mind you :)
 
My last one had the words "virtual space" in the title but despite that it was about mundane acoustics and signal processing (wave field synthesis)
 
I think mine was some wank on defibrillators and emergency medicine. I don't even recall if it had a title.

My friend is a geneticist and is currently completing her phd on clamydia in koalas. That shit gets her laid all the time
 
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