The mechanical engineering department is going down hill fast.

I’m a senior in mechanical engineering and, like most other seniors, I’m getting ready to begin registering for classes for my final semester or two. Now, like most other seniors, I realize that the university and its respective departments have had to deal with budget cuts all over the place.

The ME department has chosen to deal with these cuts, it seems, by getting rid of our elective courses that we need to graduate. All ME majors got an e-mail late last week outlining a list of elective courses that would no longer be offered.

First on the chopping block were the internal combustion engines courses. Sorry, Big Three automakers, don’t come to Iowa State to find an engineer to work on your engines; we don’t know how they work. Hydraulics has also been canned; guess we can’t work on your brakes either or anything on a tractor for that matter.

Also cut was computer-aided design. Everybody else gets to use a computer, but not us. After that we have legal and environmental considerations in design. Screw the lawyers and the ducks, we’ll make what we want to make. Last one on the list of cuts is nuclear engineering. I can see why they don’t have this anymore; we wouldn’t want the terrorists to kidnap one of us to build a bomb for them.

Next on my list of gripes is the state of our CAD/CAM program. When I came to Iowa State we got training on AutoCAD and Solid works. Both are very widely used in industry, but are we continuing to use these software packages? No, we have Solid Edge this year, and next year we get Unigraphics NX. I did a little checking on Monster.com to see how many companies use these packages and are looking for help. Solid Edge had a grand total of 57 jobs listed, and Unigraphics NX has a whopping 25 jobs out there. Way to pick some winners. In comparison, Solid Works has sold an average of 36,500 seats per year for the last 10 years. Pro/E, another fine software package, has 436 job openings as of Tuesday morning. Again, I applaud those in the ME department for picking such great software packages for us to learn with.

The last complaint I have has to do with the professors the department hires. We do have a lot of great instructors in the department, but I don’t know how some of them received tenure, nor do I know how they still have jobs.

We have one certain professor specializing in manufacturing who, while I was working as a shop supervisor, asked my boss and I for a bolt stretcher. I’m not quite sure who hired this guy or who gave him tenure, but they should be strung up from the highest tree in the county. This guy isn’t the only bad professor.

In conclusion, if you are on a campus visit reading this letter, don’t go here. If you’re a freshman or sophomore, get out now and go someplace else.

For the rest of us who have wasted four years, don’t give this department any money to continue throwing away on crappy professors, bad software and canceling useful classes.

Michael Ramsey

Senior

Mechanical Engineering