ME C85

If you are anything like me (or frankly any typical American child), chances are you’ve spent a fair share of time playing with Legos and Tinkertoys.  In my case, I probably have enough hours of experience with K’nex to merit a mention on my resume.  Regardless, these harmless children’s toys help foster a crude yet important basis for engineering.  It was from these toys that I learned about I-beams and triangular truss stability.  These days, knowing which structure is statically sound has become second nature from naive intuition.  Then this class comes rolling along and proceeds to either reinforce or correct my intuition.  ME C85 essentially marries the topics of Newtonian physics and material science with a bit of calculus sprinkled in.    

ME C85 was a class I knew very little about at the outset.  I should probably change this habit, but I tend not to look into the topics of my future MANDATORY classes.  If I am inevitably going to take it, I will let the chips fall where they may.  For this reason, I took a while to warm up to both Professor Gu and the course curriculum. 

The pace of this course accelerated exponentially.  I was turned off by the course initially due to the agonizingly slow pace of lecture combined with a simplicity of material.  Most of the first few weeks were dedicated to re-learning basics such as 2-D vectors and Newton’s laws.  I feel my frustrations were justified since Multivariable Calculus and Physics were listed as course prerequisites.  Additionally, Professor Gu re-taught aforementioned subjects slowly and in detail, as if the class was learning it for the first time.  Consequently, I was concerned that the course would be, well, boring.  

Towards the end of the first month, we began learning something a bit more interesting: truss analysis.  This was right up my alley!  I had spent enough hours for a lifetime building wooden towers, bridges, and boomilevers for grade school engineering competitions.  Though I was well-versed in the different types of trusses in existence, I had never tried my hand at analyzing every individual force through each beam.  Truss analysis was the unit that sparked my interest in this course.  Problems stopped becoming odes to our ability to punch numbers into our calculator.  Homework and exams began to challenge me, and I was happy.  

The final gigantic unit justified the title of the course: Solid Mechanics.  What is solid mechanics?  I had no clue but was about to find out.  Our curriculum focused on analyzing the normal and rotational stresses and strain of static structures.  This is where the course took a turn into material science lane.  Material properties such as the Young’s modulus or shear modulus became common vernacular in the course and were used extensively in finding stresses and strains.  The best part of this final unit?  I was finally learning something new 🙂 !

A couple years have passed since I last learned something truly new to me in the field of physics.  As an added plus, the curriculum was particularly interesting not only for its novelty and difficulty but also because it quantifiably justified much of the naive intuition that I developed from childhood toys.   

Overall, this is my favorite course at Berkeley so far.  I have already expressed my appreciation for the curriculum, but I must also mention that Professor Gu’s slow pace and in-depth lectures as well as her availability for questions set students up for success.  I am both relieved to find out that my journey through studying physics continues and excited for the follow up to this course: Dynamic Mechanics.