Monash University Engineering Handbook, 1997

Preface Engineering is a challenging, creative and exciting career. An important aspect of engineering is its variety. Engineers are involved in planning and designing, manufacturing, constructing and managing the technological activities of our society. They interpret our technological needs, devise solutions and carry them out. But engineers are not only responsible for planning and building engineering works, they must also participate in the social decisions involving financial arrangements for these works, government priorities and community needs. The work engineers do impacts directly on the quality of everyone's day-to-day life, and contributes markedly to the future prosperity of our community.

Whatever their field of engineering, engineers are concerned with applying scientific knowledge and social skills. To apply scientific knowledge engineers must have a strong basis in science; but they must also work in a real world of economic forces and community priorities. Engineering is creative work based on science applied with art and skill, with social and economic dimensions added.

Engineers, like other professionals, are morally and legally responsible for using their skill and judgment for the public good, and it is the task of engineering faculties such as Monash to educate and train engineers so that they can accept these responsibilities. When engineering students graduate they are required by the profession to work for a period of three years or more under the direction of qualified engineers. Only then can they too be recognised as fully qualified professional engineers and, if they wish, practise in their own name as consulting engineers, or participate responsibly in engineering works as members of public or private organisations.

The Faculty of Engineering is spread over three campuses of Monash University. At Caulfield, students may choose from programs in civil engineering, electrical engineering, industrial engineering and mechanical engineering.

At Clayton, students may choose from courses in six major branches of engineering. They are chemical engineering, civil engineering, electrical and computer systems engineering, materials engineering, mechanical engineering and environmental engineering.

At Gippsland, students may choose from programs in civil engineering, electronic and computer engineering, electro-mechanical engineering and mechanical engineering. In addition to the usual full-time or part-time study modes, Gippsland students also have the advantage of being able to take their degree by distance education, which provides opportunities for students who are not able to attend the campus on a regular basis.

From these groupings an engineer may make a career within a wide range of engineering specialisations. A chemical engineer may specialise in chemical plant design, or mineral processing, or environmental protection. A civil engineer may specialise in construction and management, or hydrology, or structural design. An electrical engineer may focus on computer systems, or telecommunications, or electrical power; a materials engineer on metallurgy or ceramics; an industrial engineer on systems management or creating better conditions for workers; and a mechanical engineer on aeronautics or industrial processes. In all cases the engineers are planning, designing and manufacturing, and building quite different things, and yet they are all dependent on the same common basis of scientific principles and engineering fundamentals. It is this common basis that allows new graduates to be flexible in their career choices, and practising engineers to develop new expertise as the forefront of engineering knowledge advances.

It is worthwhile remembering that half the goods or processes we routinely use now were not invented twenty years ago. So in twenty years, or even sooner, most of what engineers will be designing and producing will be things which we cannot anticipate, using materials which do not presently exist. A faster rate of change, particularly in technology, means that more situations in practice will not have been encountered before. New technologies and newly developing disciplines will give rise to new industries.

The doubling period of engineering knowledge is estimated to be a decade or less, depending on the field. It is therefore increasingly likely that engineers will not remain within a single field during their professional career. There is also convergence between different fields of engineering, and some observers predict that the existing distinctions between traditional disciplines of engineering will not survive long into the next century. Engineering input is now required in totally new fields like the information industries, and space research.

The wide application of computers to perform routine tasks in engineering is freeing engineers to spend more time on other aspects of the design task like synthesis, creativity and assessment of multiple options. The progressive application of knowledge-based systems will, while reducing the more mundane tasks of an engineer, provide a much greater challenge in terms of personal judgment.

We are entering an era in which engineers will play a more dominant role than ever before. Requirements for both the quantity and quality of engineers are increasing. In terms of professional activity, it appears clear that in future greater portions of an engineer's time will be spent on safety, environmental and sustainable resource issues, on technical research and testing, on management, on controlling and optimising operations, on developing computer software and on infrastructure planning. Less time will be spent on routine design.

The Australian engineering profession has started to develop much closer links with the rapidly developing countries on the Pacific rim, including Korea, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. Contacts with these countries range from joint ventures into massive projects, to the interchange of small high-tech devices and products.

You may think in reading this that engineers are supermen or women: only some of them are. But there is no doubt that the good engineers were good students, and the good students are those who from the beginning are competent in the basic subjects of English, mathematics and science.

If you enjoy mathematics, and you find your science courses interesting and challenging; and if you like to solve problems and create new, useful things; and you want to join in the excitement of helping to shape the future; you will like engineering, and enjoy the courses offered by the faculty. And when you graduate you will remember your studies in engineering as a time of steady and concentrated effort, intellectual stimulation and creative achievement with a group of fine people.

M L Brisk

Dean, Faculty of Engineering

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