I'm laughing my ass off!!Yep. System integration step 10 after you’ve spent steps 1 thru 9 checking out your actuators and feedback sensors open loop to make sure they respond like you expect.
Step 10. Close the loop and hit the enable.
Step 11. Immediately shut it down and gather any separated pieces.
Step 12. Wonder out loud “holy hell why did it do that!”
Yep. You pegged one
The ChE curriculum in my day only had 1 required course in Process Control and it was in the senior year. The main Control prof we had at that time was Charlie Moore who had played football as a defensive back at LSU. I still have a clear memory of the departmental softball game that year, where Dr. Moore inexplicably tackled me as I was crossing home plate. He also connected me with the Systems Group at Dow in Plaquemine, LA where he had done consulting and where I ended up going to work, in that same group, when I got out of school. Little did I know they would have me doing software development in Assembly Language in a 2-room trailer for 18 months before I got to transfer into production. And then I became the "controller tuning guy" in a new VCM unit where I spent the next 18 months. Fun times.
Most of mine came from my professional mentor. And we still have that relationship 30 years later. I can hang with him on several topics but we will always have that mentor/protégée relationship. When I was a wee lad engineer and he tasked me to make the world safer for humanity when I went back with my Oliver Twist review of my work if I could not explain to him based in physics what I had done I got my ears boxed and sent packing. To his point I had no idea what I had done thus how do I know if I actually fixed anything. In this day and age there are so many platitudes trying to sound all knowing (root cause analysis, etc...) that are just rehashings of that simple lesson. If you can’t explain what the hell you did then you don’t know what the hell you fixed. It’s about developing critical thinking skills.
He is pretty bright - made valid victorian in high school - but decided not to follow Dad's advice to study chemical engineering.Yep. You pegged one
But as in all schools they aren’t ALL a wasteland.
Vandy is a good school I’m sure the instructors are top notch in engineering. But... the student and his/her background and attitude have an impact also. You seem fairly grounded and thus I’d guess your son is too.
Put SMU on the list too. But a young mechanical engineer I just started working with is a SMU grad and I’ll guess he winds up in engineering leadership great maturity for this point in his career.
