[Rhodes22-list] The Nerd May Survive Another Semester At College!

[Rik Sandberg]

Hi Roger,

Well sure, I'll wish you good luck. Doesn't seem like luck has had a whole lot 
to do with it so far though. Enjoyed your arrogant instructor story. It's 
always fun to have a chance to be one step ahead of a guy like that.

Sounds like a busy week ahead. You've worked hard at this, you'll do fine.

Take care, be well
Rik


On Sun, Apr 25 2004 02:18 pm, Roger Pihlaja wrote:
> Hi Everybody,
>
> It's Roger.  I haven't been contributing much lately & I thought I just
> drop the list a line to let everyone know what's been going on in my life. 
> My last regular week of classes for the Winter Semester, 2004 at SVSU is
> over.  Dr. Schilling told me I have an A in ME497, Special Research
> Project.
>
> Last Friday 04/23/2004, Kevin VanSickle, my partner in ME480, Senior Design
> 1; & I had a really big day.  Our final assignments for ME480 were due.  On
> Friday, we had to turn in 2 bound copies of the final report, the project
> notebook, give a poster presentation, and give an oral presentation.  All
> of that together was worth 50% of the grade in the class.  I had an A in
> ME480 going into Friday & I think everything went pretty well that day;
> but, I won't really know for certain until the grades are posted.  Kevin &
> I had to be at SVSU by 8:00 AM on Friday dressed in suit & tie, have our
> poster set up by 9:00 AM, the press & other VIP's toured the displays from
> 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM, and the displays were open to the public from 10:00 AM
> - 12:00 PM.  From 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM, we had a catered lunch.  From 1:00 PM
> - 4:00 PM, we had the oral presentations, which were also open to the
> public.  My group gave the 1st oral presentation at 1:00 PM.  The
> presentations had to be 30 minutes long, all the team members had to speak,
> the presentation had to be done electronically using MS Powerpoint, & there
> was a 5 minute Q&A period after each presentation.  Each person in the
> audience had a score sheet for each presentation.  Part of our grade was
> based upon how the nontechnical public scored our presentations.  As I
> said, I think Friday went pretty well & I should end up with an A in ME480;
> but, who knows?
>
> There is a professor at SVSU, Dr. Shlien, that teaches ME356, Fluid
> Mechanics.  Chemical engineers get lots of fluid mechanics in their
> undergraduate curriculum.  ME356 was one of the classes I was able to
> petition out of taking based upon my academic transcript from Michigan Tech
> University.  So, I've never had to take a class from Dr. Shlien.  But, Dr.
> Shlien has a reputation for being a really tough professor that likes to
> put down his students in public.  During my poster presentation in the
> morning, Dr. Shlien cornered me & asked me a question about how much force
> was going to generated against a particular structural panel by the airflow
> inside the machine.  I admitted I hadn't calculated that particular number;
> but, speculated that 50 cubic feet/min airflow at a few inches of water
> column pressure wasn't likely to generate very much force at that spot. 
> Dr. Shlien got this big smirk on his face & said, "If he was correct; then,
> our entire senior project design would have to reworked."  If he were
> correct, that would be true & I felt pretty bad about missing something so
> important.  I kept looking at our design & wondering what this PhD expert
> in fluid mechanics was seeing that I had missed.  Well, I tried to do the
> calculation in my head.  But, in the middle of the poster presentation,
> with dozens of people milling about & me trying to greet people & give my
> presentation, I just couldn't concentrate.  So, after the poster session
> was finished at noon, I went up to my office where it was quiet & I could
> concentrate.  I pulled out a pencil & paper, derived the defining equations
> from 1st principles, & worked out an upper limit for the force at only
> 0.018 lbs, which is negligible, just as I had suspected.  Then, I went &
> found Dr. Shlien in the lunch line & showed him the calculation.  After
> looking at for a few minutes & asking me a few more questions, he agreed
> with my result.  He said, "I was lucky we were dealing with air flow & not
> water."  I just replied, "I have to admit I hadn't considered the issue
> because my 26 years of experience dealing with fluid flow gave me a pretty
> good engineering intuition re such things."  "We'd have done something
> different if the apparatus had been designed to handle water instead of
> air."  Dr. Shlien then said, "It was too bad I showed him this because he
> wanted to ask the question during the Q&A session after our oral
> presentation."  I just shrugged my shoulders & said, "Oh well, I'm sure you
> will think of something else to ask us."  This exchange took place in the
> lunch line right in front of the entire senior engineering class.  Well,
> with this challenge, of course Dr. Shlien wasn't going to let it go at
> that!  So after our oral presentation, Dr. Shlien asked a question
> regarding how certain tuning parameters in the control system of our
> project were calculated.  As soon as I heard the question I replied, "I
> have some supplemental slides in another MS Powerpoint file that address
> that issue.  Would you like to see them?"  As soon as he said, "Yes", I
> thought to myself, "Excellent!  There won't be any more questions after
> this!"  It took a minute or so to pull up the supplemental slides off the
> hard disk on the PC driving the projector.  As soon as I started, Dr.
> Shlien knew he'd been had.  There were 6 slides that described a
> theoretical heat & mass transfer model.  We're talking heavy duty
> differential equations & calculus here!  Remember, I did my MS thesis on
> heat & mass transfer!  After the 2nd slide, Dr. Shlien interrupted me in
> mid sentence & said he didn't want to use up all the Q&A time.  I said,
> "OK"  "To make a long story short, we use this geometry, (flip to next
> slide) apply Fourier's Law of Heat Conduction & Fick's 1st Law of Diffusion
> to get these coupled simultaneous differential equations, (flip to next
> slide) here's the solution in equation form, (flip to next slide) here's
> the solution plotted graphically, (flip to next slide) from that we get a
> time constant for the system, (flip to last slide) & that's where these
> control system tuning parameters come from."  "Are there any other
> questions?"  That was the end of our Q&A time.  Kevin & I sat down, big
> smiles on our faces!
>
> Dr. Shlien must have been somewhat pissed off, because he absolutely ripped
> up the next group's oral presentation!  The group had used a software
> package called computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to calculate the airflow
> & pressure drop across a certain complex nozzle shape they had designed. 
> Dr. Shlien asked them to explain how the airflow could reach sonic velocity
> at a certain pressure drop.  What he was looking for was Bernoulli's
> equation.  Bernoulli's equation is one of the 1st fundamental equations you
> learn about in fluid mechanics, almost everything else in the field of
> fluid mechanics is derived from it.  It would have taken about a minute to
> explain the concept of critical sonic flow on the white board with a few
> well chosen equations.  But, the whole group got rattled & just stood there
> like frightened whitetail deer in Dr. Shlien's glaring headlights!  He made
> it sound like all they knew how to do was punch numbers into a commercially
> produced modeling package; but, had no idea of how it worked.  Hopefully,
> that's not actually the case.  I felt really sorry for them.
>
> Of course, the 2 weeks leading up to Friday were pretty hectic!  Both Kevin
> & I put in some really long hours getting ready for Friday.  We were ready
> to go at 9:30 PM on Thursday, the night before.  Believe me, when I left
> SVSU on Thursday night, there were lots of groups still working on some
> facet of their projects.  I got a pretty decent night's sleep; but, I think
> many of the other groups pulled all nighters.  Oh well, they're young &
> strong - builds character!
>
> After the presentations were over & we helped clean up the debris left
> behind after the posters & presentations, nearly all the groups went over
> to TGI Fridays by Fashion Square Mall in Saginaw, MI to celebrate.  I just
> had a beer with the other groups and left after about 45 minutes.  However,
> some of the groups must have turned it into a real pub crawl because there
> were lots of hung over senior engineering students in Pioneer Hall on
> Saturday!  I was kind of a celebrity at the party at TGI Fridays because I
> guess nobody has ever put it to Dr. Shlien in an oral presentation before. 
> It was done in a very public forum & the entire senior engineering class
> just loved it!  I feel a little bit sorry for my partner, Kevin, because he
> still has to take Dr. Shlien's Fluid Mechanics class.  That guy must be a
> real SOB in front of a class, especially if you haven't done your homework!
>  I thank God for delivering me from this man.  There were dozens of things
> he might have asked that I wasn't prepared for & instead he asked one of
> the few questions I was well prepared for.
>
> On Saturday, I went into SVSU to meet with my group for ME451, Machine
> Design.  Working together, we knocked off an entire design project report
> from start to finish in only 4 hours!  The project was to design a power
> screw actuator that had a 12 inch stroke & could move an 8000 lb load full
> stroke in 15 seconds or less.  This was our 4th design project as a team &
> we're functioning as a well-oiled machine.  I typed the entire report while
> Dan & Gary, my two partners, did the calculations.  Then, when they had
> finished the design calculations, we went back thru the report page by page
> & inserted the calculated values for the results in the appropriate spots. 
> The report was 9 single spaced typed pages long in 12 Arial font.  The
> typing of the text wasn't bad; but, there were a lot of heavy duty math
> equations, which are very time consuming to create using the MS Equation
> editor.  The 4th design report is due on Tuesday at 10:30 AM when the final
> exam in ME451 begins.  My team has a 95% average on the 3 design reports
> we've submitted so far this semester.
>
> I have two actual final exams this week.  The final exam in ME451, Machine
> Design, will be Tuesday, 04/27/2004, from 10:30 AM - 12:20 PM.  The final
> exam in ME380, Manufacturing Processes & Systems, will be Wednesday,
> 04/28/2004, from 10:30 AM - 12:20 PM.  Assuming my design team gets our
> average score of 95% on the 4th design project report, I will have a 90.5%
> average in ME451 going into the final.  I have a 94.2% average in ME380
> going into the final.  So, A's or A-'s are possible in both classes, 
> depending upon how I do on the final exams.
>
> Sunday & Monday, I will be finishing up my business plan & final oral
> presentation for MSTP531, Entrepreneurship Seminar.  On Wednesday, from
> 4:00 PM - 5:50 PM, I have to give an oral presentation of my business plan.
>  This will be a formal affair; suit & tie, MS Powerpoint slides presented
> electronically, & turn in 2 bound copies of the business plan.  The oral
> presentation can only be 10 minutes long & will be scored by a panel of 3
> judges, each with experience in start-up businesses.  It's supposed to
> simulate the amount of time a busy venture capitalist might give you to
> convince them to invest in your business.  The oral presentation & written
> business plan are the only grades I will get in the class.  So, I have no
> average going into the final MSTP531 session on Wednesday!  Hey, no
> pressure.
>
> On Thursday morning, I will bring Dynamic Equilibrium home from winter
> storage at the Midland County Fairgrounds.  I have no idea when the boat
> will go in the water.  My dock is still a wreck from the ice damage in
> March, 2004.  So, I have no place to tie up.
>
> Thursday afternoon, I will drive up to Northern Michigan University in
> Marquette, MI to pick up my older son Daniel.  The plan is to stay in the
> dorm with Daniel on Thursday night, clean up his room, pack, and checkout
> on Friday.  I'm hoping to be back home by Friday evening.
>
> So, by this time next week, for better or worse, Winter Semester, 2004 will
> be history.  Wish me luck!
>
> Roger Pihlaja
> S/V Dynamic Equilibrium
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