Wish me luck, folks

[VAE]

The big bad end-of-first-year-engineering exams start tomorrow.
The first one is Mechanics, Fluid mechanics, Thermodynamics and Mechanical vibrations.
Structures and Materials are on the third (that one i will need most luck on as i suck at structures) with Electricity and Mathematics on 7th and 8th respectively.
For the first one i did what i could, going through five years of past papers - the time limit and my tendency for stupid errors will be the worst enemy....

[Drayco84]

I wish you luck, and urge you to eat decently and sleep well the night before to maximize your abilities of recollection.

[Gabi]

Good luck, danman!

[Tapewolf]

Good luck, and let us know how it goes!

[techmaster-glitch]

"Wishes luck*

Be sure to tell me what to expect when you're done, I'll likely be taking the same or similar stuff down the road!

[Mrs_A_ZeTavia]

Good luck and I hope you do well! 

[Chairtastic]

Good luck danman!   I've saids it once, and I'll saids it again: Good luck!

[Liatai]

Seconding the "make sure you eat and sleep well" recommendation. Staying well-rested, well-fed, and well-hydrated always helps. Don't forget carbohydrate-rich snacks before/after long exams; the brain uses up a lot of glucose (I've seen estimates ranging from 50-90% of the body's total glucose supply), especially when it's being worked hard. Snacks can help you fuel up before tests and stave off exhaustion afterward.

Best of luck to you! 

[VAE]

Hmm, knowing myself, i will need forcing to eat in the morning but i will make sure i drink enough and eat at least two bananes.

BTW, for the Thursday's paper (paper 2 - struct. and materials) i was checking answers to a crib and it was written by some funny person who  actually mentioned the most egregious errors and many funny comments. Apparently someone has found separation between impurities in an impure aluminium to exceed radius of galaxy, and did not remark on it, while someone else found that the incremental crack growth in a fatigue problem was of order 1e-55.)
Apparently the question itself was flawed with maximum hoop stress in the testing exceeding yield stress for the material , prompting the person to remark it is good luck the author does not design pressurised vessels...

Revision has never been so funny

[Ketchup-Crumbles]

Good luck fellow engineer
And force yourself to eat enough I always bring along heaps of food for an exam.
And those are some interesting errors in the revisions.

[RJ]

Do your best, and good luck! I'll send you luck muffins

[VAE]

So, a fourth of the whole thing, and the second worst exam is over.
I estimate myself as gaining between 50-60%
Some questions were outright ebilness that did not appear in the last five years, esp. on mechanics.
Some were good.
I made some extremely idiotic errors, which i will share here as i deserve the shaming

(honorable mention) Overlooking part c of a question which was just calculating difference between Bernoulli's constants, and explaining why they are different (it was due to energy dissipation as over the dam there was turbulent currents)  - something i can do in my sleep.
(stupid 1) According to less than thoughtful me, if a body (in this case three rotors on two shafts with some torsional stiffness) behaves as a rigid body, it still has an angular frequency (i didn't notice there are no springs at the ends... duh)
(stupid 2) Not connecting the dots, and considering a compressor that pumps air into a vessel, i used an work approach which assumes constant pressure
(stupid 3) Using Steady flow energy equation for the work on the dam mentioned above... the answer was only 3x the real one, so i didn't notice the error (one thing i can brag as being good at is checking i have sensible answers)
(stupid 4) not being able to prove a thing in the first 5 minutes (at the end, returning, i got to the error, but time ended) that is basically equivalent to showing that a right angled triangle's area splits evenly at 2/3 of its base from the low end. Durr!
(stupid 5) Being baffled by the fact, in a problem with mechanisms, that a slider on a shaft, and the shaft itself have different velocities....


EDIT:
Second exam done, this time surprisingly seems i did not do that bad, considering this is my worst subject, and with some luck, expect to get about 50%