ThomasTLM
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WARNING: Big post ahead! Perhaps refill your coffee before going forward lol.
It's been a few months since I've contributed anything meaningful to the forum, and frankly I've gone back and forth about creating this thread. I'll think to myself "Perhaps it would be wise to let people in on my progress," and then the next day I'll wake up and think "Hell no, I need to have some meaningful results before I do so." Well, I let the former thought win. I think, even if it's only for my own sanity, I need to write down what I've done, what I'm currently up to, and what I have planned.
But first, a little personal backstory:
I went to college for Civil Engineering and I graduated in May of 2023. During that spring semester, myself and my graduating classmates were all stressed about the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) Exam. For context, it's basically the big hoop you really need to jump through at the end of college engineering in order to obtain your Professional Engineer (PE) license in the future.
This is usually how the process goes: you take (and pass) the FE Exam, you have a few years working as an EIT (Engineer-In-Training) under another PE within a relevant field, and then after those years you take the PE Exam, pass, and obtain your license.
According to several PEs that I work alongside, the FE Exam is considerably harder than the PE Exam. Personally, I think this is because the FE Exam more or less acts as a wake up call to get your crap together before heading into the professional world of engineering, but I could be wrong.
This was my personal experience with the FE Exam:
I studied like a maniac for several months beforehand. I utilized two tools for studying: The FE Civil Review book by Michael Lindeburg that I borrowed for free from a coworker during my internship at the time, and PrepFE (cost: ~$50/month), a tool which gives you practice problems, and afterwards gives you an explanation of how to solve a problem if you get it wrong.
After using these tools for about 4 months before my exam, I went in to take it and passed on my first try! I was overjoyed! This meant I could move on with my life, get my years of professional experience (which is what I'm doing now), and obtain my PE in the future.
While my experience with the exam was very good, it was very poor for others. A coworker of mine that I went to school with and graduated with has taken the exam several times and has yet to pass. When I heard the same thing from another coworker, I knew something was up. Surely the FE wasn't this hard...right?
I looked into it and came upon the FE Exam subreddit. People usually post if they passed or failed their exam, and if I had to guess probably 50% or more of the posts were people posting their failed exam report.
I had thought a lot about it, and realized that most resources available to engineering students had some flaw to them or had something missing.
For example, PrepFE allows students to take FE practice problems and is fairly inexpensive, but it doesn't really include any review material like the Lindeburg Review Book. Another example would be PPI2Pass or School or PE. Both give you some form of "comprehensive live online class", but the price is very high (usually over $1,000). Even if you just wanted self guided study material from either website, the price is still well over $100.
It's worth noting that basically every single FE Preparatory program, class, or tool give some sort of Pass Guarantee, which also includes a money back guarantee with a bunch of criteria that you have to meet in the event that you don't end up passing the exam.
With all of this in mind, I started brainstorming. Shouldn't this be easier? Why do most of the tools available for FE preparation suck so much? Or even if they don't suck, why should a poor college student break the bank for a live class or even for self-guided study?
This led to me searching for a reasonable solution.
What I've been doing/currently doing:
FE Exam tutoring over discord
Taking the advice of @Andy Black (which is really just the advice he passes on from Mother Teresa), I wanted to dive into the trenches and interact with people who are preparing for the exam. I created a discord server and since the end of September started reaching out to people on the FE Exam subreddit. There are a lot of people in the server, but there are only one or two people who regularly want to study and work on practice problems. We usually meet every Tuesdays and Thursdays in the evening. Although I haven't tutored as many students as I wanted, I still feel like I'm making a difference in a few peoples lives. I'm helping them by working through practice problems step-by-step, and making them feel more confident once they enter the exam room.
FE Prep website
In addition to tutoring, the other big thing I've been working on is a FE Preparatory Website that includes the following:
It's funny. Whenever I write down a new business idea (I have a notebook to keep track of them), my vision for it's final product is usually quite small, but then the vision gets super big and I get really excited about it. Does this happen to anyone else? I digress.
What started as a Notion template turned into an idea to create an entire website using Notion that includes all of my study material. When i was studying for the Exam back in 2023, I took notes from the Lindeburg Review book, and I still have the notebook that I used. Since about the beginning of October, I've been typing in all of my notes into my Notion Site.
There's a couple really good things about Notion:
I have many ideas for this project, and whenever I think a lot about it the creative juices start flowing. I can get scatterbrained pretty easily once something like this excites me.
Before this week is out, I'm going to get a timeline put together for how long it will feasibly take to do the following:
Conclusion
There's a lot more to be mentioned here, and I beg your forgiveness because this post is already long and, like I said before I get scatterbrained. This was primarily for me to write out what has been going on the past few months. I have big plans and I've been diving straight into it without a parachute.
I think I need to end it here before I go on and on. There's work to be done.
Questions? Concerns? Comments? Suggestions?
All are welcome.
It's been a few months since I've contributed anything meaningful to the forum, and frankly I've gone back and forth about creating this thread. I'll think to myself "Perhaps it would be wise to let people in on my progress," and then the next day I'll wake up and think "Hell no, I need to have some meaningful results before I do so." Well, I let the former thought win. I think, even if it's only for my own sanity, I need to write down what I've done, what I'm currently up to, and what I have planned.
But first, a little personal backstory:
I went to college for Civil Engineering and I graduated in May of 2023. During that spring semester, myself and my graduating classmates were all stressed about the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) Exam. For context, it's basically the big hoop you really need to jump through at the end of college engineering in order to obtain your Professional Engineer (PE) license in the future.
This is usually how the process goes: you take (and pass) the FE Exam, you have a few years working as an EIT (Engineer-In-Training) under another PE within a relevant field, and then after those years you take the PE Exam, pass, and obtain your license.
According to several PEs that I work alongside, the FE Exam is considerably harder than the PE Exam. Personally, I think this is because the FE Exam more or less acts as a wake up call to get your crap together before heading into the professional world of engineering, but I could be wrong.
This was my personal experience with the FE Exam:
I studied like a maniac for several months beforehand. I utilized two tools for studying: The FE Civil Review book by Michael Lindeburg that I borrowed for free from a coworker during my internship at the time, and PrepFE (cost: ~$50/month), a tool which gives you practice problems, and afterwards gives you an explanation of how to solve a problem if you get it wrong.
After using these tools for about 4 months before my exam, I went in to take it and passed on my first try! I was overjoyed! This meant I could move on with my life, get my years of professional experience (which is what I'm doing now), and obtain my PE in the future.
While my experience with the exam was very good, it was very poor for others. A coworker of mine that I went to school with and graduated with has taken the exam several times and has yet to pass. When I heard the same thing from another coworker, I knew something was up. Surely the FE wasn't this hard...right?
I looked into it and came upon the FE Exam subreddit. People usually post if they passed or failed their exam, and if I had to guess probably 50% or more of the posts were people posting their failed exam report.
I had thought a lot about it, and realized that most resources available to engineering students had some flaw to them or had something missing.
For example, PrepFE allows students to take FE practice problems and is fairly inexpensive, but it doesn't really include any review material like the Lindeburg Review Book. Another example would be PPI2Pass or School or PE. Both give you some form of "comprehensive live online class", but the price is very high (usually over $1,000). Even if you just wanted self guided study material from either website, the price is still well over $100.
It's worth noting that basically every single FE Preparatory program, class, or tool give some sort of Pass Guarantee, which also includes a money back guarantee with a bunch of criteria that you have to meet in the event that you don't end up passing the exam.
With all of this in mind, I started brainstorming. Shouldn't this be easier? Why do most of the tools available for FE preparation suck so much? Or even if they don't suck, why should a poor college student break the bank for a live class or even for self-guided study?
This led to me searching for a reasonable solution.
What I've been doing/currently doing:
FE Exam tutoring over discord
Taking the advice of @Andy Black (which is really just the advice he passes on from Mother Teresa), I wanted to dive into the trenches and interact with people who are preparing for the exam. I created a discord server and since the end of September started reaching out to people on the FE Exam subreddit. There are a lot of people in the server, but there are only one or two people who regularly want to study and work on practice problems. We usually meet every Tuesdays and Thursdays in the evening. Although I haven't tutored as many students as I wanted, I still feel like I'm making a difference in a few peoples lives. I'm helping them by working through practice problems step-by-step, and making them feel more confident once they enter the exam room.
FE Prep website
In addition to tutoring, the other big thing I've been working on is a FE Preparatory Website that includes the following:
- All of the material necessary to study for the exam
- An 8-week course that students can do at their own pace
- Practice problems that can be done in multiple formats (similar to PrepFE - i.e. timed exam, non-timed exam, category specific quiz, etc)
It's funny. Whenever I write down a new business idea (I have a notebook to keep track of them), my vision for it's final product is usually quite small, but then the vision gets super big and I get really excited about it. Does this happen to anyone else? I digress.
What started as a Notion template turned into an idea to create an entire website using Notion that includes all of my study material. When i was studying for the Exam back in 2023, I took notes from the Lindeburg Review book, and I still have the notebook that I used. Since about the beginning of October, I've been typing in all of my notes into my Notion Site.
There's a couple really good things about Notion:
- It helps to make my notes look organized and clear to read. Notion's aesthetic is very clean and it was built for stuff like this anyways. It also lets me write in equations using LaTeX, which, again, looks really good.
- Notion has an AI assistant that helps me write up all of my notes. I will tell it to write a section or chapter on Derivatives or Force Systems, give it equations to write, and it will just do it in 20 seconds. It's insane how fast it truly is and how well it "gets" the study material. Of course I proofread and edit as I go along. As friggin cool as AI is, I still don't 100% trust it.
I have many ideas for this project, and whenever I think a lot about it the creative juices start flowing. I can get scatterbrained pretty easily once something like this excites me.
Before this week is out, I'm going to get a timeline put together for how long it will feasibly take to do the following:
- Get all of my notes organized and written down into the Notion Site
- Record videos for the course (I have yet to start this)
- Get a system figured out for students to do practice problems
- Instead of relying solely on SEO, market the website using YouTube videos to start with (more on this in the future)
- I want to have something that isn't perfect, but good enough to market and provide significant value for engineering students
Conclusion
There's a lot more to be mentioned here, and I beg your forgiveness because this post is already long and, like I said before I get scatterbrained. This was primarily for me to write out what has been going on the past few months. I have big plans and I've been diving straight into it without a parachute.
I think I need to end it here before I go on and on. There's work to be done.
Questions? Concerns? Comments? Suggestions?
All are welcome.
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