Just finished writing my thesis for uni and am waiting for the bastard to print out (all 80 pages of it).

Final piece of assessment (other than exams - and only 2 of those) for my degree! YAY.

got the civil engineering dinner with free booze all night tomorrow night, oh there is gonna be a lot of plastered engineers around the Roma St station area (at the holiday Inn above it).

So yeah anyone else in a similar boat?

i held hands with a gurl today =)

Does doing a thesis mean you get a PhD or something?

no

it really depends, u can do a honours thesis, masters, or even fail yadda yadda yadda and not be a Doc tor

undergrads don't do a thesis unless they're doing honours.

undergrads don't do a thesis unless they're doing honours.

Most degrees have honours as a post graduate course. There are a exceptions to this of course (engineering being one of them), who do their honours degree as a compulsory part of their undergraduate program.

drunk engineers... scary.

drunk engineers... scary.

WTF? More like a "matter of being"

engineering students of today, are extremely impractical.

props fade!

Good work mate, congrats, I on the other hand am seriously flunking this semester. A combination of being completely over university and of playing entirely too much poker.

I was over university after the mid semester break. Last semester I tried to get decent marks but this semester I'll be happy if I pass everything.

*raises hand*

My horrible 3 year Information Technology Degree @ QUT is coming to an end! w00t!

2 exams and one pathetic excuse for a takehome exam (worth like 40% with 3 small essay questions lol) to go till I'm free!


Speaking of being over uni, I was over it after first year :S Everyone said stick in there it'll get better but it never did, it was arse all the way though but after 2 out of the 3 years it woulda been a waste of a HECS debt not to finish! I'm happy as long as I scrape through.


I probably won't even end up using my degree after all this, after being in the course I have learnt how crap the majority of the IT industry is... and I'm sure I'm not the only one.





last edited by rubba-chikin at 13:01:02 29/Oct/04

Yup as someone said Engineers do thesis as part of the standard degree, as our degree is 3 years not 4 our GPA over the 4 years decides honours and thesis is just a subject you take in 4th year.

Already gotten 56% in one of my subjects so final exam is no problem and find out monday if I got > 35/40 in my other subject in which case I'm on a conceeded pass going into the exam, meaning I find out monday if I've finished my degree without taking any final exams! :D

engineering students of today, are extremely impractical.

you're thinking of architects ^^

oh and I owe alot of this to NOT PLAYING CS!

Already gotten 56% in one of my subjects so final exam is no problem and find out monday if I got > 35/40 in my other subject in which case I'm on a conceeded pass going into the exam, meaning I find out monday if I've finished my degree without taking any final exams! :D

So does that mean you have done really well or are there lots more in your position?

Well done btw :)

lots more in my position in the first subject (80% assessment returned so far) in the other one we found out about 10/50~60 got over 30/40 in the submissions so if I do then i did really well.

gg now your an engineer you can build a bridge... and get over it...

lol i make myslef laugh











seriously well done

Hehe, my dad just had his 30 year Civil Engineering reunion - back at the same place they had their graduation pissup, Storey Bridge Hotel.

gg now your an engineer you can build a bridge... and get over it...

everyone thinks thats all we do *sobs*

Remember when they used to have the beer festivals at Story Bridge? Glad they moved it, it was so damn crowded. Beer fest is ass anyway. You pay like $3 or something for some piss-ant cup of beer. Well done to whoever thought of that though, they'd be rich as.

Sadly theres a few things I'm gonna miss not being a student :(

Cheap public transport, cheap movies, cheap drinksm, hell all the student concessions! Thank god my uni ID doesn't expire till the end of 2005 :D


Also the ability to blow off boring ass lectures whenever was rather nice.

And walking through the great court and student union area at uni so much sp00t!

hehe gw brett, bout time to :P

congrats brett... must seem like you've been studying forever.

oh and I owe alot of this to NOT PLAYING CS!

lol very true.

Grats!

An interesting thing to note is that any Engineering degrees under the school of ITEE (biomedical, computer systems, electrical, mechatronic and software) will be changing to a final year group thesis (pass degree) or an invidividual thesis (honours degree) as of 2005. But looks like your school (EPSA) will be keeping the same individual thesis requirement for all their engineering degrees (Chemical, Civil, Environmental, Materials, Mechanical, Mechanical & Space, Minerals Process and Mining Engineering) and honours will be calculated as per usual via GPA.

As of the end of this semester I'll have a Master's of Applied Linguistics. A research master's too!! So I know that thesis feeling :)

Propz 2 u 4 lyfe.

Now back to CS for j00.

congrats :)

What's the wordcount?

Yeh how long was your thesis Fade??

I ground out 26,117 words, and a lot of diagrams.

I thought submitting my thesis last wednesday would be such a good feeling, but I felt nothing. NOTHING.

Oh well.

engineering students of today, are extremely impractical.

engineers of today cram 40x as much theory as engineers of 20 years ago did into thier degree.

what one of my lecturers learnt in his whole 4 years at uni, was more or less 1 semester in the 1st year of my course.

what are your thoughts on civil - where are the (plum) jobs in engineering? and whats the go with mechatronic?

Probably because they were expected to learn a fair bit on the job from senior engineers.

15,232 was the word count, just checked it then. However there was also a cover note that had 2080 words as well. So 17,312 all up.



For any of you UQ students out there, get yours hot bound at print on demand, they have a special machine that lets you write on the spine in silver or gold. So mine had author and title on the spine, looked extra classy.

whats the go with mechatronic?

I just have 2 exams to go and I'll be a qualified mechatronic engineer. The go pretty much is that people want engineers, they just don't know they do. It's tough to get a job. There are virtually no specific mechatronics jobs. It will take a couple of years for the concept of specialiased mechatronics graduates to catch on. Most of the people in my year are getting either mechanical, electirical, or software jobs.

In terms of the course itself, I enjoyed it. I'd still do it if I was selecting a course to do now, which can't mean it's too bad.

mmmmm run down on Civil Engineering.

CivEng has four main strands.

Structural
Fluids
Traffic and Transport/Roads
Geotechnical

Structural.

Two areas you're likely to find yourself in here, reinforced concrete structures and steel structures. Alot of what you will be doing will involve modelling in applications like microstran and space gas, which is used to calculate key member properties, from there you'll use Australian Standards to design particular members (I found it reasonably boring and repetitive most of the time, also not a pro at it so that also dampened my enthusiasm).

Expect to spend your first year or so doing some really s*** house work like designing columns for a few years straight. Its also the most competitive area, the truely gifted will find themselves doing finite element analysis which is major hardcore s***, the very good will get most of the decent places outside of finite element analysis.

Fluids:

Mostly Air and water, some of the more interesting stuff I've heard of is designing the air supply and air conditioning stuff for mine site operations and subway stations, Aussie company recently did the analysis for the subway station for the world trade centre. Water is ground water and above ground water flow modelling, this is obviously very difficult stuff as water doesn't exactly flow linearly so mostly this kinda work can involve some guesswork.

Employment here can be difficult at times as there is a fair bit of competition with the environmental engineers who (atleast at UQ) take all the same fluids subjects as CivEng does.

Traffic/Transport

This what I'm working in and did my thesis on, its an absolutely massive growth area atm and if you're good at it there is a lot of money and companys are screaming out for you (because everyone go's into CivEng to be a structural engineer). Alot of what we do in consulting is development applications and development application review, as well as policy stuff for council/government. All of this involves a fair amount of modelling whether it be intersection, a series of intersections (simulation) or strategic (giant networks i.e. one company I've worked for had a model that did every major road between gympie, tweed heads and towoomba).

Finally Geotech,

Unless you love dirt no one really go's here. Can be useful for getting jobs at mine sites (samew with structural and road design) which obviously pays brilliantly well (60K first year out + food and housing) mostly people go there for 3~5 years and come back with massive bank accounts cause they don't need to pay for anything. They also learn how to drink cause there aint much else to do.



There is one other area which you don't really learn about at uni and thats construction. basically you'll be on construction sites as a defacto manager making sure the plasterers, carpeters tradeys etc are in the right area doing there job on time and under budget. Basically you're a glorifiend account who gets to yell and fire people alot. Its most for engineers who aren't very good at engineering. But they pay is still good, the hours and stress levels are s***house. The biggest bonus here is that it is bulls*** and most decent engineers have no interest in it whatsoever so you'll be guarenteed a job in it (almost anything at UQ thats sponsored is by a construction firm because they're finding it so far to get people).

last edited by Fade2Black at 19:20:09 30/Oct/04

Probably because they were expected to learn a fair bit on the job from senior engineers.

similar for engineers of today - you still learn a lot on the job.

just so many extra fields of research that they have to cover most of it - every year more topics are moving from post grad study to undergrad.