Hydraulics
Hydraulics...the course that I have been dreading since I signed up to come here.
Back in Guelph I barely passed Fluid mechanics by sitting down with the smartest guy in the class and having him explain everything to me 3 hours before the final. Thank you Jack wherever you are.
And that was the prerequisite for this course.
I showed up late due to a schedule conflict with another course so I missed the crucial first 15 minutes. The prof, whose name was not the same as on my course list (am I in the right class?) is busily writing on a massive white board that spans the length of the room. He is busily drawing diagrams with his back to us and as he moves over waaaayyy over to the right hand side no one around me is drawing anything. We cannot see and we cannot understand what he is mumbling behind his back. Was this why I hated fluids? Maybe it wasn't me, maybe it was a crazy prof who got caught up in badly drawn diagrams and threw off equation names like a socialite at a party- Blasius, Prandtl, Nikuadse, Chézy, Manning (why didn't anyone named Smith create these? Smith went into accounting and stayed sane no doubt).
Honestly, I like learning about treating wastewater - how to get rid of endocrine disruptors from our water mainly so I don't have to drink them. But who really cares about the momentum principle applied to a non-prismatic channel???? And why don't they make prof's take a full year course in presentation skills???
The book that apparently is the bible of this course is a 1959 text that is out of print. I can theoretically get it used from Amazon ohh... for $300.
My only grad class with Dr. Gagnon went ok.... He wants us to do a paper....on something new...maybe not a lit review... but a lit review is ok too....but a little experiment in the lab on something specific would be great....and could be used for our thesis....but this is not a thesis -just a paper.....one of the students did a little experiment on chromium last year....he got chromium poisoning though....(at this point there is a dead silence in the room). He is bound and determined to make me do a thesis on some lab based work. I am bound and determined to stay as far the hell away from the lab and poisonous materials as possible.
Back in Guelph I barely passed Fluid mechanics by sitting down with the smartest guy in the class and having him explain everything to me 3 hours before the final. Thank you Jack wherever you are.
And that was the prerequisite for this course.
I showed up late due to a schedule conflict with another course so I missed the crucial first 15 minutes. The prof, whose name was not the same as on my course list (am I in the right class?) is busily writing on a massive white board that spans the length of the room. He is busily drawing diagrams with his back to us and as he moves over waaaayyy over to the right hand side no one around me is drawing anything. We cannot see and we cannot understand what he is mumbling behind his back. Was this why I hated fluids? Maybe it wasn't me, maybe it was a crazy prof who got caught up in badly drawn diagrams and threw off equation names like a socialite at a party- Blasius, Prandtl, Nikuadse, Chézy, Manning (why didn't anyone named Smith create these? Smith went into accounting and stayed sane no doubt).
Honestly, I like learning about treating wastewater - how to get rid of endocrine disruptors from our water mainly so I don't have to drink them. But who really cares about the momentum principle applied to a non-prismatic channel???? And why don't they make prof's take a full year course in presentation skills???
The book that apparently is the bible of this course is a 1959 text that is out of print. I can theoretically get it used from Amazon ohh... for $300.
My only grad class with Dr. Gagnon went ok.... He wants us to do a paper....on something new...maybe not a lit review... but a lit review is ok too....but a little experiment in the lab on something specific would be great....and could be used for our thesis....but this is not a thesis -just a paper.....one of the students did a little experiment on chromium last year....he got chromium poisoning though....(at this point there is a dead silence in the room). He is bound and determined to make me do a thesis on some lab based work. I am bound and determined to stay as far the hell away from the lab and poisonous materials as possible.
posted by ayearinhalifax | 7:35 AM
1 Comments:
I hear ya... I find myself using Wikipedia.org a lot to keep up with things. May not have the answer you are looking for but can provide some new keywords to search for, or put things into a slightly different (more understandable) light. Good Luck!
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