I want to be a engineer

>tfw a student in mech engineering and don't know what works all im taught is formulas for no reason

Why even

Try Paul's Online Math Notes (tutorial.math.lamar.edu/). It has everything from Algebra and Trig to Calc III and DE.

get your ass down into your uni's machine shop (lol if you go to a shit school that doesn't have one)

push some metal around. grind a gear or two. you need to know how a machine "feels". vibration, heat, friction, wear, all that stuff can be detected and analyzed better by your senses than by some formula.

lol u r a terrible engineer

that's fine if you're doing hobbyist shit, but if you're doing anything useful and big budget you probably won't get to get hands on and build it yourself

then you need math, so can predict its performance before you build it and get it right the first time

What field of engineering are you interested in?

THE best way to self learn anything is to buy a decent introductory textbook, read through it and solve the end of chapter problems. If there is ANYTHING you don't understand, go back and read through it again. Use google if you have to. Don't continue until you understand it.

This way you will have a decent understanding, as good as anybody who studied it at university, and not just some meme-tier trivia.

Software computer

Viola means "raped" in French. What you actually meant to say is "voila" I believe

EE here, feels and intuition is right. The reason they teach you all the formulas is to help you get the intuitive feel for it. Once you're past that, you honestly do mostly feels something out and then check with mathematics, the intuition is the initial stage.

It's a point of philosophy, but what comes first is reality, not mathematics, and the mind is adapted for reality. This is unfortunately why engineers rely mostly on feels than maths. If an engineer's math checks out but he feels it is wrong, he goes with his gut, not the other way around.

Most homosexuals got their start by being raped as children though

Not most, but many.

EE here, and better engineer than you

Everything I do is math driven, intuition gets you a concept, but the first thing I do after the concept is back of the envelope the idea for OOM practicality(math), then I assign someone on my team to do the simulation(more math)

If your work isn't heavily math driven, either your projects are unambitious or you're wasting a lot of your employer's money.

I mean if you're a layout monkey on an easy design it doesnt matter, but if you're doing actual original design work without math you suck at your job. One of first things a good engineer learns in the first few years on the job is that your intuitions are often mistaken, so you check everything.

But there are a lot of bad engineers out there. (even in top tier firms, I can't imagine how bad it looks in the cheap seats) If you think you get better by getting better intuitions, you're probably just inexperienced or one of the bad ones. One thing Ive seen is that a lot of engineers never get the opportunity to get good because they're pigeonholed on a project that doesnt have rapid enough design cycles to ever learn from their mistakes.

one other thing Ive noticed that stymies a lot of engineers is a lack of a process oriented mindset. They think in terms of what went wrong with product instead of how they could change their behaviors so as to avoid making those mistakes in the future.

Process oriented thinking doesnt necessarily come naturally, you need to be taught it. This is why methodolgies like six sigma and agile have been such a boon.

oh yeah man, you are totally taking things back to first principles and hand deriving everything JUST LIKE IN SCHOOL.

you do the math once, and then you write a program to make solving it again a trivial affair.

>If your work isn't heavily math driven, either your projects are unambitious or you're wasting a lot of your employer's money.

>he thinks doing custom design is less expensive than pulling out a catalog and using off the shelf components.

you aren't a better engineer than anyone bud.

I'm op just started with algebra not doing so bad what do you recomend me discipline?

>feels and intuition is right

NO. You're still a fucking student you don't have an opinion.

When you work in industry, EVERYTHING has to be justified. If something breaks and the project involves multiple different organisations, everyone is looking for someone to throw under the bus. If you based your design on feels and intuition, you're fucked.

Serious engineers justify everything with math. And if they don't, its because they're using empirical data.

>he thinks doing custom design is less expensive than pulling out a catalog and using off the shelf components.

if you're doing a cots cookie cutter design, you're just middling, your job isnt hard, but not because you're particularly good at it

Not him, but you have to be a lot better at your job to do custom design than to mash together a bunch of components you found online.

Its also much more interesting.

agree

You have to justiify shit with maths but the initial step is intuition, which gives you the design, rooted in empirical observation of reality. You can't a priori a plane you fucking mongoloids.

>dat strawman
I don't think anyone is saying you deduce an airplane from first principles, but cutting edge engineering involves an engineer empowered and enabled by mathematical tools and computing techniques; and this is only becoming more true as time passes

Khan Fucking Academy. This is the only right answer. Can we stop having this thread everyday now?