7he3ngineer

...Woh, that may sound a little daunting. I am doing a 4 year course. IMO most finish (that do finish!) in the four years, but it is very common to take 5, and yes a fair few take up to 6, but this is generally beacause of laziness, excessive drinking or trying to study full time and work 30 hours a week. My advise is to get any idea of failing out of your head. However, take the attitude that if you fail its not the end of the world. Its also worth saying that, providing your not an absolutely terrible student, if you only fail by a little, the universities will try and help you and may grant you supplementary exams... they want to see you pass. Just keep up with your workload and you shouldn't fail anything (gee I'm a bit of a hypocrit, although havn't failed a unit [yet?])

Sorry to dissapoint you, but assignements can be pretty long. The average lab report may take at least 5 hours of long, hard slog. But some design projects may take 25 hours. However, what you have to take into consideration is that you have maybe two weeks to do the average assignment. Unfortunately, assignments are only a small part of the course. They won't be very helpfull when you need to prepare for exams for example. However, don't let this put you off... its all do-able. If want a degree for no effort... do an arts degree:D Josh

The hardest part would be, that is to say, the reason why most would drop out is because they got behind or became overly flooded with new info and felt unable to catch up. The level of intelligence across all of eng. is pretty close. People don't drop out because they're stupid, its usually because of a lack of commitment (or the fact that they're grades were rubbish because they were working 30 hours a week!). I'm definitely not a good example of a student. I'm a poor attender, and am always a bit behind, and always seem to end up getting my assignment done last minute. But in saying this, my assignments are always done, and relatively well. I always have a fair idea of what needs to be done and learnt and by when, so all in all, I'm still a 'responsible' student (I've also never failed anything as yet, and am currently just maintaining an average of 70%). The key to graduating (without extending your course too much!) is to make sure you keep up with everything. If you can do this, you'll be fine... Just don't be one of those students that aims for 50's though (its very easy to fall below the line... trust me, I've been one of these students in the past!). One last thing; First year is the easiest and is generally BS, especially if you have one of the common first years like I did. Most drop out after first year because its a shock to the system to actually have to do some work and not to be spoon fed. However, expect to learn nothing in your first year (suffer it out like the rest of us!). Josh

I'm a third year mechanical engineering student in Australia. It is my experience that students that are poor at maths, tend to really struggle. There are quite a few who enter my university via the back door, coming from technical college (called TAFE) rather than high school, who actually tend to have a much better attitude towards study, but really struggle with the maths (resulting in a high proportion to drop out). Yes, the course is much more applied (less mathsy) as you reach the third and fourth years, but you still have to reach these years. I'd say that you won't be able to hack the course if you don't have a good grasp on maths, even if your understanding of physics is that good. However, I'm guessing that if you are as good at physics as you seem to think, you probably underestimate your understand of calc. Maths is one of those subjects that if you don't understand the basic stuff, your not going to be able to understand the more complex stuff. For example if you skip a chapter in your text book, it probably will start to look like heiroglyphics. My advise would be to take a step back and maybe work through a more basic calculus text... real introductory stuff. Then build on this until you understand at least the high school level. You can do it, but clearly you are going to have to do some work, and lets face it, you've got that extra time while every one else is studying physics! You can ask me if you've got any questions about Mech. Eng, Josh

Well, at the very least I'm sure we can all agree that the meaning of life isn't shopping! Josh

I would say that if such a thing seemed in any way plausible, then some crackpot surgeon (whose degree came from the Weeties box) would be working on setting up some sort of practice (or pretend research centre) to attract some celebrity interest ($). Cats are not on their priority list, but if we havn't seen some ridiculous 'scheme' for people, I would say we ain't gonna see it on anything. Josh

I havn't given this a great deal of thought, but here's a clue, consider the solubility of oxygen in water, and where this dissolved oxygen comes from. Perhaps check out: http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/oxygen-solubility-water-d_841.html You were trying to rush us... but you did say please! Josh