Relationship with Company Engineers:
Establish a set schedule for your team to contact your company advisor/mentor. This insures that the projects do not go off on a tangent, and that a good working relationship is established between each team/advisor group.
Sources for information:
While the types of sources of information which you may wind up using for your project will vary, depending upon its nature, it is generally intended that you use the scientific literature for your information. This means journal papers.
Using the web to search for information is a useful way to START locating information. Beware of information on websites, however. It is usually not peer reviewed and not edited. Use the information on websites to get to the good stuff (the journal papers).
My recommendation is to use Chemical Abstracts. It contain abstracts for virtually all scientific and engineering work ever done over the past century. What more could you ask for? Using these abstracts used to be a real time-consuming chore. However, Penn State is now a subscriber to the web searching service for Chem Abstracts. Go to the EMS Library and log on to SciFinder Scholar and enjoy its power!!
All papers must contain references to scholarly work
Some don'ts:
Don't capitalize the names of elements.
Don't use page breaks in the files you turn in on the computer.
Don't reference any paper which you have not read at least in part.
Don't list any reference which is not used, and referred to, in the text of the paper.
Don't add figs., tables, etc., without:
1) referring to them in the text before they appear, and
2) discussing all of the items which appear in them. Don't add this type of info just because it appears necessary to have some.
Don't leave one space between sentences; leave two spaces.
Don't leave two spaces between words; check with ¶ button.
Strategy:
A major problem students uually have is that they do not review their work before submitting it. It is usually submitted within seconds after the addition of the last word. Spelling errors and typos remain, along with a lot of sentence structure that needs correcting, and the need for general, overall editing. In addition, many people have difficulty proofreading on the computer, at least in the beginning. Therefore, finish your work early enough so that you can let it set for several days. Then go back and do your proofreading. You will be much more likely to catch the many errors. Of course, this requires arranging your schedule so that you don't jam the deadlines.
Good written work does not just appear on the screen, as if by magic, or by divine inspiration. Rather, it evolves. A final version of a paper frequently looks nothing like the initial version. If you carefully reread your paper at several days' intervals, you should be able to make many improvements each time. The computer makes it easy to make these changes......sometimes even wholesale reorganizations.
Warning:
With today's computers and word processors, there is no excuse for misspelled words and most typos. Make sure that you use the spell checker!
Papers with more than 5 misspelled words will not be accepted.
More:
It's poor procedure not to correct the errors noted by the instructor on previous papers before incorporating that writing into another paper. Go over corrections on graded work, and change your files immediately. Don't submit the same mistakes time and again.
When writing on the computer, it is not necessary, or even desirable to start writing at the beginning. In fact, what you visualize as the beginning of a paper could even wind up being in the summary! Start with whatever thoughts come to your mind. These don't even have to be sentences, or punctuated, or formatted. Write each thought and hit return a few times. Then start expanding on one of them. Move it around until it seems to fit with the thoughts around it. As you work, move your unexpanded thoughts to the bottom of the file so that the paper can start to take some form. Add new miscellaneous thoughts and ideas to the bottom of the file as you write. Move these up into the body of the text as you need them. You may want to use a split window with the text in the top and the ideas in the bottom.