Engineering students should develop the useful and practical habit of keeping orderly engineering notes as a prelude to acceptable professional practice. In industry such notes are typically bound with numbered pages and often require signatures. Formally, they are legally required in any potentially patentable R&D work. Informally, they are quite valuable to providing us with documentation on any worthy engineering work that we might be engaged in. For this latter point, which is the perspective taken in this course, it does not mean that they necessarily be neat or even particularly readable, i.e., to someone else besides you (in the somewhat artificial context of our class, though, they should be readable by your instructors). It does, however, mean some form of technical notes (whether done in a "lab setting" or not) where a chronologically traceable record was kept of what you thought about, perhaps scribbling ideas, equations, schematics, taking data etc., that eventually led to a final acceptable engineering solution to a particular problem being worked out. Therefore, all design details, schematics and experimental results will be imbedded in them.
For our purposes the format will be quite simple: each page must have your name, date, topic and a page number in the upper right corner; successive pages following the first in an obvious sequence can be abbreviated for brevity. A useful scheme is one where notes pertaining to the same topic in a series all have the same date, your initials and appropriate page number. If you have never done this, a good way to start is to set up a section of loose leaf notes dedicated solely to this purpose. If you want to use a bound notebook, it should be at least 8 1/2 by 11 inch size or larger. Any notes you make to work on a given lab assignment - inside or outside of lab - should be written, scribbled, symbolized or thought about here. Be especially conscientious at keeping the upper right corner information filled in as you go along. If you have never done this before, learning to keep good engineering notes requires some initial discipline. Remember, they are not an end in themselves. They must, however, be complete and adequately support all work in this lab.
