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Ideas for a Mechanician

Hello All - 

 

I am soliciting advice for how to continue to keep mechanics skills sharp while in a more business/leadership role.  

 

Please advise on techniques you have used or suggestions for ways to stay current.  

 

Thank you for your input and for your continued development of this discipline.

 

Regards,

 

Luke Porisch

 

p.s. - if you were Harvard DEAS from 2003-05 please send me a note!

Comments

Hi Luke,

Here are some ideas:

(i) Teach courses on mechanics as a visiting faculty in an engineering school near you. It matters not how poorly ranked the school is. It does matter if they have good library & laboratory facilities and at least a few good students (i.e. those who are intent on learning).

(ii) Sponsor (on condition of co-supervising) a few University bachelor's/master's projects/theses.

(iii) Publicly blog about some challenging problems you can solve, the various simple/back-of-the-envelop approaches to complex ones that you take for them, and, equally importantly, the problems you cannot solve or the ones you are (or at least should be or could be) working on. Simply loud-thinking via a blog helps one sharpen (or at least organize) his thoughts better. Also, one sometimes runs into some really helpful people this way.

(iv) Secretly undertake to write an Idiot's Guide to Mechanics (either the whole of it or some part of it that is interesting to you). I know, you will never finish writing it. But the attempt should make a sharper mechanician out of you, anyway. And, such books, IMHO, should ideally be written after you have gone a bit of a distance away from a particular field.

(v) Strike a column-writing deal with a local newspaper. You would regularly cover some of the latest advances in mechanics for them. You could get to know some of such advances simply by visiting iMechanica. (The newspaper might even pay you a bit for the arrangement!) You could perhaps also cover biographies of some eminent past mechanicians.

(vi) Go ahead, predict the future, for some (sub)areas of mechanics. Blog about it. Then, simple! Just wait and watch!

It's already far more than what I have ever tried for myself, so let me now just shut up.

--Ajit

[E&OE]

 

Ajit - 

Thank you very much for the note and creative ideas!  

All -

Are there any suggestions for recently available online courses?

Regards,

Luke

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