Engineering | Dominik Mayer – Products, Asia, Productivity

I’m a big fan of social search service Aardvark. Today I got a question I couldn’t answer. Aardvark explains why it thought I would:

aardvark: OK. Type ‘mute’ if you’re not interested in art. (I sent you this question since you know about mechanical engineering.)

Beachten Sie, dass zur Lösung mancher Aufgaben die Durchführung einer Integration nötig sein kann.

Note, that it might be necessary to process an integration in order to solve some exercises.

Got a paper cut on my finger tip. What really annoys me is the fact that the wrongdoer was my old and highly appreciated mechanics book I was about to lend.

PS: Is this really the hottest question concerning a bleeding paper cut?

I just learned that I’m only applying for the School of Economics and Management which is completely independent from the one of Mechanical Engineering. In order to be admitted to the graduate program I need to provide information about the management not the engineering courses I’ve heard here.

I only finished one of four yet and will write two more exams before I leave. The last one will take place after my departure. According to Tongji the worst thing that can happen is that they’ll put me in the undergraduate program, so they’ll not reject me. Good. My landlady already found a next tenant.

Amazon offered me some great things today. Books about elastostatics and maths for engineers, another one about programming in C and a scientific calculator. Halleluja.

I did it again, another experiment. No LEGO this time, today was all about cruising. Driving a BMW 6 Series in a simulator seemed to be fun. It seemed. Instead, I got a chance to gain first-hand experience of how you feel when the motions you see don’t correspond to the ones you sense…. not good. The whole simulation didn’t even feel like driving a real car. The automatic transmission was odd and the steering had a delay.

I actually managed to run over a pedestrian and the fact that I hadn’t noticed it at all didn’t help me answering the question of how I thought the accident could have happened. I chose “I didn’t see the pedestrian.” But I saw the next one I hit… continuing his way.

The freshmen wrote their mechanics exam this morning, so there’s only information technology left. My last one for the time being is flight mechanics which will start in 50 minutes. Wish me luck.

(It’s time that it ends, my script starts to fall apart.)

Today was the third intermediate exam, Materials Science. There are only two left. Keep up, you’ll make it!

According to an article on the German news site Spiegel Online, the Second Legal State Examination is one of the hardest exams worldwide:

Denn das zweite juristische Staatsexamen gilt als eine der schwierigsten Prüfungen der Welt. Gut jeder fünfte Referendar scheitert im ersten Anlauf.

The Second Legal State Examination is reckoned one of the most difficult exams worldwide. Almost every fifth trainee fails at the first attempt.

Every fifth, ok, so 80 percent pass. I think many candidates here would be highly pleased with that quota.

Today is the first day of intermediate exams for the freshmen. They have to pass five exams now, starting with Technical Electricity, and another six next year.

Good luck to all of you!

The intermediate exams in engineering are tough, no question, but that doesn’t mean you have to learn 24/7. This year’s freshmen are overdoing it a little bit. How could we succeed without brooding over our books all day long? Didn’t we manage to have at least some evenings were we sat together talking?