(and its free to download and use!!)Aeon Flux
Why have I named this article Aeon Flux? I am neither going to write about the movie, nor about any epic drama. Well, it is my story, the story of an Engineering student who did his Diploma in Mechanical Engineering and then got into Degree Engineering. It may be similar to the stories of other people who followed the same path, so similarities are purely coincidental, when you experience the transition (flux) between the two completely different approaches of education (eons, or periods). Well, are they?
Let’s have a look at a previous eon, the period of three years, when I was in my Diploma years. I did my Diploma from Bhausaheb Vartak Polytechnic, Vasai. And Vasai being a completely industrial area had its own share of ups and downs. The downs were that the place was dead, with absolutely no coffee shops to sit in with peace, no place to hang out, frequent power failures, with transformers often blowing up in series in front of your eyes, just like a fireworks show! The ups were, as I told you, that being an industrial area, it had a lots of places where you could see the ‘real thing’ happening, the stuff you would read about in text books umpteen times, and still not be in a position to visualise it, and write it down on paper. Machines cutting into metal effortlessly, robots welding two parts (which looked more like two robots dancing in synchronization), huge sheets being stamped, rolled, cut and bent into various shapes; tools scraping out metal to give an intricate shape, thick metal wires turning thin after being passed through a small machine, furnaces melting metal and pouring it red hot into a small casting box. Factories were loud, shop floors were dirty and smelly, machines were huge and monstrous, and the heat sometimes unbearable, but preciously cool, if you have the real mechanical engineer in you. For all those three years, the syllabus content did have its own side of dry theories, but they were supported by equal time spent in the workshop, getting your hands dirty and sore, scraping inches of metal for hours, with only a file, cutting into wood just to get that perfect chamfer, dismantling an entire engine and then putting it back together as it was, programming a CNC all by yourself, and at last, cleaning the machine after all the works done. These were definitely the ups of my Diploma years, and I really enjoyed doing what I did there, except the cleaning part though!
After slogging it out in the final year, I secured admission in Sardar Patel College of Engineering, but I didn’t know that things were going to change. As I had already done my Diploma, I was entitled to direct admission to the second year of the four-year engineering course. I entered the college after a long allotment process, which almost ate into a month from the commencing date of the term of semester three of the Degree course at the college. Things were different here. It took me time to realise, but I found out that more emphasis was on mathematics and theories. Mathematics was something I had to learn from scratch - the diploma course did have mathematics but none of it was in the final year, and also the calculus part was almost left un-attended to. So mathematics became a huge priority - all I needed was practice, ‘cause the day I entered the college, by the time I jotted down the complete matrix, the person sitting next to me had already cracked it! Some things were sort of déjà vu, like Engineering Drawing, and Production Processes, which I could breeze through. Sometimes it amazed me that almost everyone in the class dreaded the subjects Production Processes I and II, the subjects dealing with machines used for manufacturing. It was because of the lack of exposure to the ‘real thing’ I talked about previously in this article. Here, the numbers of industrial visits were reduced to just one per semester, or rather none. I consider myself lucky because my father is also an engineer and he could give me all the enlightenment on mathematics, which I couldn’t have received by my-self. I could go on writing about mathematics in this article, but it’s the truth, that discretisation was the word buzzing in my mind, and to be honest I hated it because of the time it took me to solve the mathematics, the tricks which others in my class had learnt years back. It was just application period for them while it was the learning as well as application period, both combined for me. All the tricks of the trade of solving mathematical equations were coming towards me like an express train, and I had to assimilate them all in a comparatively less period of time. I could have done it faster, but it all went slow and steady. After the very much bumpy ride, I managed to enter semester seven. This semester has the subject Finite Element Analysis, which no one in this engineering arena could have studied without proper knowledge of mathematics. It was this subject that cleared off my hatred towards discretisation. It showed that discretisation does help in solving difficult problems in a simpler manner and in a very short period of time. It was a misconception that took some amount of time to vanish. This kind of misconception is common amongst almost all diploma pass-outs. But it’s better you clear it before entering into the Degree course!
The current Mechanical Engineering degree has its proper share of theoretical fundamentals, which every engineer should know, but it is also important for the curriculum to include exposure to the industry, and yes, the ‘real thing’ which I have been talking about, only to make the graduate ‘industry ready’. A thousand books will never cater to the needs of the Indian Manufacturing sector. The requirement is exposure to industry, either by revamping the curriculum, and making it compulsory for all students to undergo implant training, or making the college itself capable of giving a 360 degree hands on training to all its students by equipping itself with all the technology required to do so. That is what I feel should be done, to make the Diploma and the Degree course similar, but the latter being more advanced, both in engineering theories and also the management part of the entire Manufacturing Sector of India.
This article was Printed in Sardar Patel College of Engineering’s MESA organised event magazine Torque 2007.