Department of Engineering Science

Department of Engineering Science

This is an old mate­ri­als engi­neer­ing hand­book that was giv­en to me by a pro­fes­sor upon his retire­ment from my under­grad uni­ver­si­ty. I believe he res­cued it from as it was being retired from the uni­ver­si­ty library. When he was clean­ing out his office, he asked a few stu­dents to come in, indi­vid­u­al­ly, and select two or three books out of his pro­fes­sion­al library. He’d got­ten all the books he wished to keep and want­ed to see the rest be put to some use. Though I think he was­n’t entire­ly sure of all of my selec­tions were so wise (name­ly, this par­tic­u­lar book, as I recall — due to it being sore­ly out­dat­ed by mod­ern exper­i­men­ta­tion tech­niques), he let me part with some books that I did indeed find useful.

More impor­tant­ly, I think, he sent me with a wealth of wis­dom about what it means to be a good engi­neer. The bits of advice he would pass on felt to me like true pages of secret wis­dom that had been lost on my gen­er­a­tion of engi­neers. Whether it was prop­er hand­writ­ing tech­nique or that an engi­neer should main­tain a per­son­al library, he knew that teach­ing stu­dents was even more than the tech­ni­cal fun­da­men­tals. Being a pro­fes­sion­al goes far beyond run­ning a set of numbers.

By Jason Coleman

Structural engineer and technical content manager Bentley Systems by day. Geeky father and husband all the rest of time.

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