Introduction to the Engineering Profession

by M. David Burghardt

Text for an Introduction to engineering course helps beginning students decide on their field of engineering, gain a perception of the history of engineering and their place in it, and develop the survival skills necessary for an education and career in engineering. Annotation copyright Book News,

Genres: Engineering

270 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

Reviews

[Nathaniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Probably a better freshman introduction than I got in my First Year Engineering program, but that's really not saying much. The fact that it attempted to introduce actual engineering concepts was really all it took to push it over the top. Ironically, a lot of the more general material about the changing demographics of the field and so on was functionally indistinguishable from what I experienced decades after this book was published. At least Burghardt does a better job not letting that get in the way of teaching the technical content, though I'm sure a sufficiently-determined GTA could manage to teach nothing while using this book at their classes' text.

For my purposes, the book worked as intended (getting myself back into engineering self-study by setting the bar as low as realistically possible).

It's not particularly easy to get one's hands on a copy, for those who are either interested in learning more about engineering, or have someone in their life who is. I found my copy at a used book store, with a receipt in the back from Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale, dated August 1995. (There were also ads for Sprint and a mail-in order for popular magazines, include among others, this cover of TIME.) Strange to think about what is and isn't relevant 30 years later. The predictions about energy shortages largely haven't been borne out, because petroleum engineers found new techniques for fossil fuel extraction, buying us time to get renewables up-and-running. Several statistics still reference the Soviet Union. And, of course, the chapter on computers was amusingly out-of-date, no matter how useful it might have been at the time.

There were a few points where I noticed the author describing simplifying assumptions in language that was a bit too strong, probably because that wasn't his particular area of expertise, and never learned the real physics at play. I'd excuse this if he were an electrical engineer or something, because I'd probably do the same thing over there, but a mechanical engineer really should know better. This is a common problem in introductory texts, though, which I haven't figured out an adequate solution for.