(sorry, StudentVIP doesn't allow paragraph breaks). Probably the worst subject I've done at the university. If you need to do this subject, do it with Daniel Chung (previous tutors I've had have said Daniel is amazing). This semester, Daniel was away, so we had to deal with Bagus Nugroho as our lecturer, who is normally the summer semester lecturer. I don't even know where to start. I felt like I was learning nothing, as the first 6 weeks felt like high school physics with a bit extra theory attached to it. Bagus was so unbelievably unprepared for lectures that he would consistently run out of time and had to upload videos onto LMS on the rest of the lecture, which could be up to half an hour of missed content. In-lecture, Bagus could not stop talking about completely unrelated things, perpetuating many things such as him "training the Australian Navy", "doing x,y and z with his family" and talking about other professors including Daniel Chung. Now, this would be fine as a once-off, but on average Bagus would spend a quarter of EVERY lecture talking about these same topics over and over, completely unrelated to the content at hand. It really makes coming to the lectures such a drag. The content itself is unreasonably framed, that is, the ideas and concepts you apply are incredibly simple in theory, but the way Bagus would teach it would make it so difficult to learn anything outside of what we already knew from prior subjects, let alone understand anything Bagus was saying. The course content was structured horrifically. Calculus 2 and Linear Algebra are pre-requisites for this subject, but this course is treated as if those two subjects are not required knowledge. This results in even more time wasted during lectures explaining concepts from prior subjects as if it were the first time seeing them. Again, it would be nice for it to be a short recap, but derivations can take upwards of 40 minutes to complete, which usually results in the rest of the lecture being recorded and uploaded to LMS. The exam was horrific. After the exam, the general consensus seemed to be that nobody knew what was going on. I didn't speak to a single person who was confident with even half of the exam. A lot of this was a lack of understanding, as revision of course content was extremely challenging, especially when we weren't taught the content properly in the first place. Between major examples being wrong, sparse resources to revise content and the general incompetence of staff (save for the tutors - they are doing god's work), it was almost impossible to feel even somewhat confident for the exam. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Assignments were incredibly disorganised. I am unsure if this is a result of the entire staff team, or just the head staff, but Assignment 1's results released a week and a half late. In fact, they had to push the submission of Assignment 2 by 5 days and they still managed to release the results at 11:50pm the day before Assignment 2 was due (which coincided with the mid-semester break), meaning we had no time to actually use the feedback we were given. I assume this is because they started marking the assignments the day they said it would be released. The feedback was apparently "written" and "personal" feedback, however, this couldn't be further from the truth. Any and all feedback received was just what marks we lost at each section of the report, with the marks lost being attributed to parts of the rubric that were missed (note that we were not given the marking rubric before the assignment was due). When asked, the head tutor noted that this indeed was "written" and "personalised" feedback, despite it being applied to every student. Additionally, some of the tutors actively attempt to sabotage your assignment scores. In our second assignment, it was enforced that no numerical results were to be included in the introduction. Our group did not include any numbers in the introduction, yet we still lost marks for this. If this were something less objective, like a misunderstanding, then I would find this acceptable. But when you are being told that your introduction includes numbers when there is very clearly only letters and NO numbers at all in the introduction, obviously you would think something fishy is going on. Sending in a regrade request got this cleared up though, but it's appalling that an error like this would've happened in the first place. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The head tutor (Bharat) seems to be incredibly lazy. A few times, I asked him for guidance within a question that I have no idea how to begin, and his response was, and I am completely serious, "just do it". I didn't know how to respond. How can I just do something that I cannot even start on? He was never able to structure workshops well at all, leading to a lot of people rushing the practical component towards the end of the workshop. We would sometimes spend one and a half hours out of the two-hour workshop doing the workshop questions (of which there were usually two, broken down into parts). The pacing for these questions were awful, sometimes not even being able to do calculations and other times having far too much time for a simple question, like a free-body diagram. I have heard from others that their workshop demonstrators have omitted information about assignments, resulting in them being forced to rush through practical components the week of the assignment. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ I don't think I could do justice how awfully run this subject is. Please, if you can, either do it with Daniel Chung or don't do this subject at all. It put me under so much pressure as I felt like I knew nothing. There are only a few saving graces: The exam is only 50% (imo low because I do a lot of maths subjects lol), there is a scheme called PASS which is like a past-student run tutorial class (didn't attend, but friends that did said it was really helpful) and the assignments aren't terribly hard to score well on if you can write well. If you manage to do well on assignments and the mid-sem (which was really easy for our semester), you are basically guaranteed a H2A.

GARBAGE SUBJECT Very vague marking scheme, too much work to do in assignments, disorganised contents to learn and over complicated theorey.

Disclaimer: I did this during the transition to online teaching during the pandemic. I knew this subject was going to be hard but it's actually brutal. Please don't think "oh I'm looking for a subject to do, maybe I'll do Eng Mech" because thinking that is wrong. Only do it if you have to because it's not fun. The content was interesting and the assignments okay, but there was so much expected knowledge and when the issue was raised that most of the cohort didn't know certain terminology and concepts, the teaching staff didn't really do anything to rectify that. The exam was an online and open book exam, but that's no excuse to make it 10000 times harder than past exams. I had never felt so useless in my life. I've heard the second-semester lecturers are better so if you do have to do Eng Mech, just do it in the second semester to lessen the pain.

This is the worst subject I have done at uni so far. Unless it is essential do not do this subject. The content is not necessarily hard but the teaching is so bad. The lecturer for statics and solids (Christian Brandle) has bad handwriting and it takes you half the lecture to realise the letters he used. The lecturer for Dynamics (Bagus Nugroho) tries to make some dad jokes, but he is worse. I did this in See 1 and it was a bad choice, I've heard the lecturers in Sem 2 are better. Exam was messed up with one important fact missing leading to a 30 mark question being wrong. The teaching staff are incapable of doing a good job. The head tutor Dan (Daejun Kim) is probably the rudest tutor I ever met. Overall I don't recommend this subject. Stay out of it if you can

Lecturer for sem 1 was horrible, skips over stuff and could barely use the doc cam right when doing problems, the tutors were better at explaining concepts than the lecturer, the statics part is pretty easy but dynamics hits you hard. I hear semester 2 has a way better lecturer so I'd say do the subject in sem 2

The subject was very content heavy and not structured well, the questions in the tute and lectures barely even related to the final exam and the problem sheets are unnecessarily difficult. You would be lucky if you could even attempt half of the problem sheets. Thankfully the exam wasn't too hard and this subject was over and done with

If you're going to do this subject, do it during semester 2, or summer, as they both have great lecturers. First semester's lecturer made the subject a lot more difficult than it needed to be. Overall I really enjoyed the subject, despite some of the Pracs feeling somewhat "cheap". The Statics part of the subject is relatively intuitive, while the dynamics kicks it up a notch, so be prepared.

Easy and fun subject to get you interested in Engineering. Lecturer is knowledgeable and the content is good.

The first half of this subject is statics and the second half is dynamics. Analysis of shearing forces, bending moments are covered, which are crucial to mechanical/civil engineers