I was excited as I entered my first class as a student of mechanical engineering at the Aligarh Muslim University fifteen years ago. The class was an introduction to thermodynamics and the professor gave us an overview of the subject and a flavour of all the interesting things it will lead to - IC engines, steam and gas turbines, refrigeration cycles, cryogenics and many more.
We graduated from using the log book in schools to scientific calculators at engineering school. The most commonly used was Casio fx82. I was proud to use my father's 'Made in India' Methodex scientific calculator which assisted me well through my student years.
Over the next few days we got flavours of various kinds - strength of materials, engineering drawing, applied physics, applied chemistry and applied mathematics. There were introductory courses in electrical and electronics engineering as well. The practical sessions at the workshop included the smithy, carpentry, machine and welding shops. The machine shops used to be the most interesting.
The following months kept us busy with the concepts of thermodynamic work, entropy, bending moment and shear force diagrams, retaining walls, corrosion mechanisms, particle in a box, superconductivity, clipper and clamper circuits, transformers and fourier transforms.
Computers were still not the norm. For drawing we relied on a mini-drafter and spent hours on the drawing boards. It was not until the final year that we were introduced to AutoCAD. The first year had a course in Fortran programming that we found too basic to be interesting.
Computer centre was considered the most modern building where the lab technicians and staff did not understand why a mechanical engineer would need to come. There was one lab that was open to all. I went there in the subsequent years for a few days. Thereafter I preferred our department CAD lab.
At that stage little did I know that computational mechanics would become my career and that I will be spending long hours on high spec workstations analyzing mechanical systems like luxury car seating, exhaust systems, aircraft engine rotors, piping systems and turbines.
After completing my bachelor's degree I went to the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore for a master's in mechanical engineering. The course structure at IISc was different to IITs. and other engineering institutions in the country. We studied core courses in the first semester, electives in second and worked on the project in the third. The degree we received was in mechanical engineering vis-a-vis specializations that IITs and other NITs grant.
At IISc we were the millenium batch. The mood was upbeat as a survey published in the newspapers reported IISc at #18 in the world.
The outlook for mechanical engineering graduates those days was quite different from today. Although from the job placement viewpoint the thought of getting a well paying core job was alien. IT jobs had become the norm. The campus placements concentrated on IT jobs irrespective of your background and courses of study. Most students landed in jobs working in world class offices programming for diverse applications. This was also the beginning of new opportunities for mechanical engineers as IT merged with traditional engineering creating jobs in CAD, CAM & CAE. Very soon India had offshore engineering centres within all major IT companies working in areas of automotive, aerospace and energy industries. Some years later many OEMs had built their technology centres in the country.
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Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog are my personal views at the time of writing. As the thinking evolves temporally it is but natural for the contents to change.
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