Someone said Mechanical Engineering is too broad? How so? All Engineers seem to have a broad spectrum of tasks they can perform. Having a wide range of skills helps with not being unemployed if you were to specialize in only one thing.

Not that I would want to, but there are a lot of petroleum/oil/natural gas companies here hiring mech engies. However, I think I could probably work for the company I work for now, or even get picked up by regional HP due to my current experience with their machinery if I had a ME degree.

What's wrong with Speed?



That's not a good thing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Haitian_national_palace_earthquake.jpg

Lack of engineers/engineering codes is the reason that 3rd world countries suffer hundreds of thousands of deaths during major natural disasters rather than hundreds.

It's amazing when you blow a sparkplug through the top of your engine in the middle of nowhere.

EX of average speed school student;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie

EX?

Example.

I'd never even heard of Speed School until this thread...

That aside, the ME degree is looking a lot easier to plan than the Graphic Design idea... considering a LOT more schools offer that here, instead of three state-wide I have two that are less than an hour away.

Plus you'll be WAY more likely to get a job that uses your degree.

Jon speaketh the truth.

Agreed.

I'm considering a ME degree, but not so that I can work for someone. So I can work for myself designing STCs for aging aircraft.

Ah, good old mechanical engineers. We chemical engineers call them "glorified car mechanics" ;).

In all seriousness though, the course list you gave looks pretty solid. Add some mech eng electives, and you're set. If you really hate math, you could probably get by not taking the PDE (partial diff) course, but it seems like it's a requirement? If you want to specialize in something that deals with fluids or thermodynamics (HVAC, etc), you will probably need it.

Mechanical Engineer, working for the Navy on planes. Getting my Masters in Electrical Engineering.

A benefit of Mechanical being so broad: I was able to start the Masters in the different discipline without any extra courses, and I'm very comfortable with the material. There are a lot of directions you can go with Mechanical. I was particularly drawn toward Dynamics and Control, and the Mechatronics side of the house, which overlaps a bit with EE.

The breadth of material you are exposed to in ME, from dynamics to material science to thermal fluid systems to basic circuit theory, really prepares you for a career where you are expected to know how to attack a lot of different problems, and also know what you don't know to some extent. All that exposure also gives you a feel for what you really want to concentrate on.

I appreciate the mathematical rigor I see on the graduate EE side, but that rigor is necessary because the underlying phenomena can't be seen or felt, more often than not. ME gave me an intuition about systems (Mechanical systems being analogous to so many others) while preparing me for a more abstract mathematical study of systems when I chose to move in that direction.

And for some light-hearted baiting: Civil is just watered-down Mechanical. Mechanical Engineers build weapons, Civil Engineers build targets.

I'm in my senior year studying civil engineering, hopefully going to study for a master's in structural engineering sometime in the future.

I've been lucky enough to get a really cool internship with a company that designs nuclear plants. It's been fascinating learning about all of the considerations that they take in building these plants. Hopefully I'll get to work there once I'm done with school.

++++

Internships are about 100x more valuable than grades. Try very very hard to get one. Schools with compulsory programs are best, since employers often come to them.

That's actually what I am considering doing, BAME and get my Masters in (Electronics or Electrical, not sure yet) Engineering.

LOL @ Weapons vs Targets.

It's very easy to pigeonhole yourself on something.

My father is the perfect example of how easily this can happen no matter how smart you are. When vulcan heart needs some *** old machine refitted to do a new job, or keep doing the same job my father makes about $60,000 in three months. The problem with this is that this sort of work went from occuring two to three times a year, to no times a year as Vulcan Heart began to update and modernize.

The same thing happened with his usual United Defense and Northrup Grumman contracts, which had ridiculous pay outs for ridiculously short temporary contracts.

Because he never went back to school, and his actual experience as expansive as it is limited to a small amount of manufacturing technologies no longer seen or used he can't find work as an engineer.

And we're talking about a guy who designed and built a grandfather clock in his spare time, designed tooling at Beretta that they still use in the manufacture of various things, and built racing motorcycles out of stock street machines that ran competitively with prototype class Ducatti and Honda machines of the time.

There are other reasons why my dad's life is made of fail too, like the fact that he's an alcoholic.

My grandfather is another great example, before he died he was a mechanical engineer working on nuclear power plants. (what specialty I don't know). Before he died at the young age of 36, he was already becoming obsolete, about to be laid off, and having a hard time finding anything else.

This goes with almost any field of work. If you invest too heavily in a couple of things, you will become obsolete. Which sucks if you've ever looked at the requirements employers list, such as 3-6 years doing X. Well ****, I've never done X, I've always done Z. No one wants to hire for Z, no one needs Z.

Be careful when you get in internship. I got an internship at a chemical plant where the engineers didn't do much besides replace faulty sensors and stuff. It was complete garbage. Despite my efforts to keep busy, I spent more than half my time sitting around doing nothing. The rest of the time involved me chasing around paperwork and printing off drawings to give to people. The atmosphere sucked, everyone was lazy, especially the union workers, and they had clearly stagnated professionally. The marketing guys who met with the engineers seemed sharper than they did.

I wouldn't go so far as to say it's 100x more valuable. Everyone in my class was able to get an engineering internship or research job (REU, etc) every summer after freshman year, and unless you're an idiot, they're pretty easy jobs. GPA, honors, awards, school, etc matter equally if not more (probably more), when you're coming straight out of undergrad, unless you are planning on staying with the same company. If you apply for jobs elsewhere, your one year of internship-level experience doing some other work doesn't amount to much except for 2 or 3 good interview answers and a recommendation letter, especially with entry-level positions where you'll probably be solving simple problems with in-house cookie-cutter methods. The idea is that if you're smart, which is roughly indicated by your GPA, you'll learn quickly. An extreme example is the job placement of Harvard's graduates back when Harvard had an (arguably) lowly "Division" of engineering (as opposed to school).

Of course, if you're not vying for top-tier engineering firms (BCG, McKinsey, GE, NASA, Boeing, Lockheed, etc.), that 1 year of extra experience might come into play when applying for mid-tier companies. Fact is, most freshly-graduated applicants that actually have a shot already have internship experience.

That said, experience is important for sure, I just don't think that working sporadically for 1 year during undergrad amounts to much in the end. Your mileage may vary I guess - I've known people who have done co-op who loved it, some thought it was a ****ty decision. If you don't come in with AP/college credits, you'll probably graduate in 5 years with a co-op program, and personally, if I wanted to spend 5 years in undergrad, I rather do a BS/MS program with interships in the summer.

Maybe it's different in software engineer/computer science, but everything I've seen suggests that is a load of crap. Maybe if you just get one summer internship, but at my school, we're REQUIRED to have one full calendar year of co-ops. That means by the time we graduate, we've had an entire year of work experience. Most companies will hire someone with 1+ year of work experience and a **** GPA over someone who has never worked in the field but has a great GPA.

I definitely wasn't hired based on my GPA in college, heh.

I disagree. I saw Donnie Darko. Engine versus roof: engine wins.

I sure didn't get hired because of my GPA and honors. My co-ops taught me more about what I needed to know for Senior Design and now my job, and that's what got me hired, not because I could drop the name of an Honor Society that I didn't give a **** about.