every time someone says they're bad at math I feel an urge to help them understand math better and usually they don't want that
I'm having trouble with Calc 3, and I think it's because vectors are that special combination of "I've done this a million times" and "specific technique that looks like 3+ others, but each has a very different purpose so you can't mix them up ever."
@Tathar if you want some help I'll gladly provide it
Yes please. I need practice with tangent vectors, normals, binormals, and some other stuff.
@Tathar okay, binormal is not a term we're familiar with; whatever it is, it isn't something that's come up in our work. we probably learned about it a few years ago and forgot
so, tangent and normal to what, anyway?
I'll have to look up my notes after class.
@Tathar it's been a long time since we've thought about vectors with the ijk formalism instead of as n×1 matrices, wow
@Felthry
Does this mean it gets easier?
@Tathar possibly; the stuff we work in just has a different way of looking at things for the most part
a lot of engineering is trying to figure out where you can avoid the difficult math without sacrificing your approximation too much, really (largely because you want to do stuff that can be easily done by a computer very quickly, since a lot of engineering involves a lot of equation solving repeatedly)
@Tathar There's not as much complicated stuff to memorize, trust me
at least in engineering, the main thing to learn about differential equations is the concepts; the actual solving of them is generally done by simulink
What should I expect from the Foundation Exam then?
@Tathar What's the foundation exam?
I think I mean the FE, and someone just told me that's what it meant a while back. I don't remember the details of how it came up, really.
@Tathar I'm not familiar with anything called "the FE"
First exam towards becoming a licensed engineer. Might be a US thing?
@Tathar oh, we're in the US too but we're doing academic work, which doesn't require a PE certification (also engineering licensing is on a per-state basis so your state might be different from ours anyway)
scattered FE recollections
@Tathar Last I checked, there were some practice materials out there - I think my school provided some - but quick bullet points that I remember:
- Bring a calculator off the approved list; scientific calculator, basically no memory storage. They don't want people copying the exam into an electronic device and carrying it out (or in) with them. (On which note: you'll have to leave your phone in the car or a locker or something.)
- (I don't know anything about accessibility accommodations.)
- Bring a lunch to keep in your car. It's an all-day affair. Hundreds of people sitting quietly doing work in a fairground building or whatever.
- There's a selection of different exams; I think one general section and one topical section? I took the mech.e. topical section because I happened to have taken a lot of mechanical courses.
- I think they /provide/ you a reference book; it has a lot of the equations and tables and constants that you might put on your cheat sheet if you were allowed one, which you aren't. (That'd be why they provide the book, too - so you can't bring your own with Clues™ written inside.) I bought a copy of the book before taking the exam so I could familiarize myself with it. It was clear, well-organized, and easy to understand and use for me.
...I feel like it's basically a really, really long final exam, like one might have in a course? But it's been a while and all I remember about the content is that I didn't know the refrigeration stuff.
And it's pass/fail. You don't need to ace it or anything, you just need to score enough to pass.
@Felthry
Looked into it further. The Foundation exam is something my university requires for CS majors, and I mistook it for the other FE because engineering degrees come through the same college.
@Felthry
I haven't even touched those yet.