Over the last couple of months, I have been working with a number of junior engineers at senior undergraduate level and junior post graduate level. While their enthusiasm has never been in question, I am shocked by the lack of basic skills I am seeing.
The two biggest areas of concerns are their inability to do hand calculations, and a complete lack of ability to reason mathematically. The first area of concern motivated an article I wrote a couple of months ago on the joy of hand calculations. The purpose of this article is to deal with the second concern.
If you are serious about being a capable engineer in any discipline, the ability to reason mathematically is a must-have skill. I am noting with increasing alarm how when junior engineers are given a problem, their fist instinct now is to plug the numbers into something like SolidWorks or ChassisSim and hit a button, hoping it solves their problem for them. Don’t get me wrong, these are very powerful pieces of software but, used blindly and with no idea of the underlying principles, they can easily lead you to the wrong conclusion very quickly.
I can give countless examples of engineering disasters that could well have been averted if the time had been taken to have a
