Hardest Engineering Classes - Mechanical (Honors Student)

A lot people tend look at engineering as one of the harder degrees you’ll find in most universities. Personally, I’ve always done well it came to physics. And I’m somewhat okay when it comes to math. Which is pretty much the backbone fundamentals of mechanical engineering. However, there were definitely some subjects in mechanical engineering that made me struggle. And today, I’ll be presenting my personal list for the 5 most difficult classes I took in my mechanical engineering degree.

Number 5 on the list is going to be machine design/design of machine elements. This is actually one of the most important classes in mechanical engineering. This class is all about the design methods of mechanical parts such as shafts, bearings, gears, springs, and so much more. The reason this course was difficult was because in engineering there is a lot of iteration involved in the design process. So at the beginning of a problem there’s usually a lot of assumptions to be made. You’re not gonna have all the information in the world to get the perfect design on your first attempt. And you just have to go along with your assumptions through the long and tedious design process to ensure that your design is within the operational and safety standards that the problem requires. Also a lot of the information and equations taught in the class is emperial and not theoretical. So instead going through the long and tiring process of deriving an equation through rigorous mathematics and basic principles of physics. You simply develop an equation based around a set of data that is obtained from experiments and tests. Trust me you do not wanna analyze the strength of gears through mathematic derivations.

Number 4 on the list is going to be dynamics. Dynamics is a class that teaches about the mechanics of objects and machines that are under acceleration. It uses basic classical mechanics principles such as newton’s second law and third law, kinetic energy, potential energy, and momentum. The reason this is such a hard class for a lot engineering students is not only because there’s a lot of math involved because it requires you to imagine the machines actually moving working in synchronization in order to visualize and solve the problem. You’ll be working a lot with vectors so keeping track of the magnitude and the I,J,K components every time you do a calculation or a dot product is quite confusing.

Number 3 on the list is going to be basic electrical engineering. This class taught the basics of electronics like resistors, capacitors, inductors. Kirchoff’s laws. After that we started getting into some of the more advanced stuff like circuit analysis methods such as superposition, Thevenin’s theorem, Norton’s theorem, dependent and independent voltage and current courses. Node voltage analysis, mesh current analysis TRANSITIORS. We applied ordinary differential equations to RLC circuits. Then we learned the concept of phasors which is like expressing sinusoidal functions using eulers equation and complex numbers. I was taking complex analysis and differential equations along side this course so it was like we were applying mathematical concepts that we had just learned last week to electrical engineering as we were learning it this week. We were taught the concepts of the frequency domain which is kinda what you need know for Fourier transform and Laplace transform. Bode plots, high pass filters, low pass filters. And finally, it all ended with op amps.

Number 2 on the list is going to be linear algebra and complex analysis. I just found it hard because for me, I’m more comfortable with physics than I am with math. Most people start learning about imaginary numbers and complex numbers in high school. I didn’t have as much math backgrounds as a lot of my friends did. Linear algebra is the study of linear functions and how to solve them. You’re work a lot with vectors and matrices. You’ll learn about different methods of solving systems of linear equations, matrix operations. Vector span, vector spaces, vector subspaces
Eigenvectors, Eigenvalues. I’ve completely forgotten what those are
For complex analysis, we learned about complex functions and calculus applied to them. Hyperbolic functions, path integrals, Cauchy integral theorem, residue theorem.

Number 1 on the list is Differentials equations. Differential equation is an equation that relates one or more functions and their derivatives. What you have to understand is that to solve a differential equation you need to be very very good at integration. I really wasn’t lying when I said that I I’m only somewhat good at math. In fact I struggled so much with this subject I had sign up for tutoring in the finals. I really should have spent more time on this subject but because I hate integration so much I just simply didn’t.

Table of Content

(0:00) Intro
(0:38) Number 5
(2:57) Number 4
(4:47) Number 3
(7:32) Number 2
(9:02) Number 1

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