Undergrad engineering advice

Hey lads hows it going
Almost done with my first semester doing mechanical engineering.
What are some things you highly recommend i do to make myself a better engineer? Or for studies in general
Previous advice i've recieved is
> Even if interest is aerospace do mechanical because of the broader scope
> Maintain a neat fair book where you summarise and write what you learnt in each chapter
> Network a lot
> Learning programming by myself too on the side as we already have matlab in course

Also how do I network?

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journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001745#s2
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I highly recommend suicide

Switch to an employment sector that isn't contracting.

Im in my third year of mechanical engineering.

I recommend you get yourself into the industry as early as possible.

Also if you are interested in aerospace that's good, but depending on where you live and your ability to relocate that may not be the easiest industry to get into, it's also extremely comparative (I don't mean to discourage you).

Your utmost necessity should be to maintain good marks, as that's what employers look at (as well as extra curricular or perhaps work experience).

Grades don't matter, just get the degree + internships. I never showed my GPA on my resume, got jobs.

How to get into industry as early as possible? I'm still in first year and they don't give us much but I'll aggressively search for something in second year

not him but.. job fair? linkedin? the best would be knowing someone from inside

Thats what I thought. I'll also cozy up with the professors they are really interesting guys

>Also how do I network?

Hang out in the computer lab or MechE lounge, help people when you see they're having a problem, make friends, do joint projects, etc.

get down into your machine shop when you have time and do side projects.

fuckin' internships. it doesn't matter if your first one is with some bullshit mom n pop machine shop. the job market makes it so you need an internship to get the internship nowadays. you will thank me when you are on your last summer internship and you have at least 2 other internships under your belt.

clean your resume up and spam that motherfucker. no job is too shitty provided its paid and its somehow related to engineering. for a mechanical, little job shops are a great way to get some experience. construction firms are good too.

i graduated with a 3.1 GPA in mech E and still got an 80k a year job fresh out of school because i had an internship every summer i was in school.

>80k fresh out of school
WHAT

high purity process gas nigga. shits legit.

and its actually 82k as a base salary, not including quarterly profit sharing bonuses and peformance bonuses. i'll probably clear 100k this year.

New Zealand dollars

...

You are literally the only person who ever posts in these threads that actually found a job. Your experience is not typical.

Fuaarrrkkk mirin hard bro.
What subjects do you deal with in this industry? (hydrodynamics, thermo, what)
NZ dollars is still big bro I'm in straya myself

maybe not. but i'm a silver league engineer my man. if you can't do better than me, you are fuckin' up pretty bad.

Intel doesn't have a Fab in NZ m8. these are US dollars.

Mirin a lot bro.
I'll pick up whatever internship i can this break.

Applications for the next year close Thanksgiving the previous year. You're way, way too late if you're applying now.

its never too late to get an internship. you just got to scrape the barrel harder and pound your local pavement. there is always some shady HVAC contractor or machine shop that will pay you minimum wage to crank through calcs of some kind. is it Rolls Royce or Tesla? fuck no, but its work.

I'll keep that in mind since I'm just a freshman
People say that freshmen aren't given much regard when it comes to internships. What else can I try for then?

>little job shops
what do you mean?
also good thread bump

Just finished third year here, no internships.
Should I just give up on getting one and lie on my resume at this point?

bump

Practicing aerospace engineer here:

>Even if interest is aerospace do mechanical because of the broader scope

Good advice. You can always do aerospace for grad school (like I did) and you can still take aerospace classes as electives and work at aerospace companies for internships.

>Maintain a neat fair book where you summarise and write what you learnt in each chapter

Not a bad idea. I should have done something like that when I was in school.

>Network a lot

People tend to overemphasize the importance of networking, but it is indeed important. Getting your resume in the hands of a human being is 98% of the effort in finding a job.

>Learning programming by myself too on the side as we already have matlab in course

For the love of Jesus please learn another language. Matlab is good for its intended purpose, but programming-wise it teaches some very bad practices and it's so idiot-proof that you'll miss out on some important concepts if you use it exclusively. I'd say Python for scripting and general-purpose stuff and C++ for the heavy lifting.

1/2

My additional advice:

>Get internships
>Do undergrad research (just ask professors - they usually have openings)
>Try to do some personal projects - it forces you to think for yourself and solve problems beyond rote theoretical understanding and memorization
>Grades matter, but much less than work experience, research experience, and strong recommendations from professors and former employers
>Learn to use Linux - it's vastly preferred for scientific computing and is vastly superior in many ways for engineering work
>Go to job fairs even if you don't think you'll get any interviews - you'll get experience talking to prospective employers and making your "elevator speech"
>Create and maintain a portfolio of your work
>Try to get an undergrad teaching gig - you will master concepts much more readily if you have to teach them to others
>Form study/homework groups - you'll learn a lot from other people and make valuable connections and possibly even FRIENDS
>Join a club that does something you find interesting
>Work part time while in school - it looks great on a resume (shows your work ethic) and your student loans will be lower when you graduate (at least in Burgerland)

2/2

>it teaches some very bad practices

What bad practices? Matlab isn't much different from python.

>People say that freshmen aren't given much regard when it comes to internships. What else can I try for then?

automotive shops, machine shops, small local factorys. the guys who literally can't afford to keep an engineer on staff.

>what do you mean?
machine shops with less than 30 employee's. shops that do wear parts, AKA farmer john busted his drive gear on a tractor they don't make parts for anymore and he needs jim bob to cut him a new one. there are a shit ton of these guys out there and most of them don't advertise on indeed. use google. spam resumes even if there isn't a job opening.

>MATLAB teaches you bad practices so you should use Python which also teaches you bad practices

are you retarde-
>aerospace engineer

Carry on

Not that guy, but ECE major working as a software dev, comfortable with matlab and extremely comfortable with python.

They have a similar sytax when you compare them both to a (closer to) C type language but they work very differently, even when talking only about numpy and limiting python's use cases. Matlab has a lot of weird "quirks" like favoring large scripts/long functions. Also I think matlab code is often poorly commented; there's either a superfluous comment on every line, or basically no comments, and the use of white space can be pretty bad sometimes (again either way too many line breaks or long lines and no breaks)

That said, I think people (sometimes myself as well) overstate how weird matlab is and how it encourages bad practices. Rather, I think a lot of the weirdness comes from the fact that a lot of people writing Matlab code don't really write any other software and never learned good practices, whereas someone who uses Python is probably a bit more familiar with good coding style and practices. So I think if you are going to spend a lot of time using Matlab it's worth getting familiar with a few other languages and really learning what coding style is all about. It's so easy to tell if someone only writes matlab just by looking at the code for 10 seconds.

Here's a nice language-agnostic style guide for you guys: journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001745#s2

Recent Chem E grad here. I'm going to grad school next semester, so my path might be a bit different from yours, but hope I can be of some help.

In general don't go for grad school right after undergrad unless you can get a paid Master's or get accepted to a PhD. I was lucky enough to get the former, hoping to switch to PhD and then go into industry.

To be a better engineer, either do internships or research. Also, pay attention to your lectures and get a minor/major outside of engineering. Undergrad is a wonderful time to educate yourself on a wide variety of topics, and you never know when that stuff will come in handy.

> Even if interest is aerospace do mechanical because of the broader scope
I'm out of your specific field, but I'm not too sure about that. Mech is one of the most common engineering majors there is, so your competition will be fucking ridiculous. I don't think aerospace would be too limited tbqh, but I could be completely wrong about that.

> Learning programming by myself too on the side as we already have matlab in course
YES, cannot recommend this enough. Python is the quickest and easiest to learn, C++ is among the most useful. Matlab isn't a full language and won't be sufficient for most applications. Anyone who graduates an from an engineering major and doesn't know how programming is at a severe disadvantage.

>Also how do I network?
Networking is a meme. There should be someone in your major who's really good at that shit; make friends with them and ask for recommendations.

>know how programming
know how to program

Hmm thanks a lot user. Noted all of this down
Can you tell me how many hours a week and how many weeks/ months the internships last? Proper internships or even undergrad research. I have no idea

Undergrad teaching gi like a tutor? Will other students in the same year as me pay me to explain the stuff to them? I doubt that. But we do have some tutor programs for sportspeople so I will apply there

Already go to gym (Veeky Forums) and rockclimbing

Thanks for the advice again

I'll try my hand there thanks brah

Recruiter here

1. Maintain above a 3.0 gpa. Majority use that to automatically filter applications. Some companies have a higher cutoff but you'll get 90 percent of them

2. Do an internship at least once. Don't get a random job or go on a 3 month vacation doing nothing. Try to get it relevant to what you want to do.

3. Have some interesting clubs that you care about. We know you and everyone else is an asme member, but it at least won't hurt you.

4. Have good communication skills. Doing well on interviews is a guarantee. The others get you talking to a person.

>Can you tell me how many hours a week and how many weeks/ months the internships last? Proper internships or even undergrad research. I have no idea

My internships were 6 months (I did a particular internship program), but most internships are roughly 3 months (Summer). As for research, it's as long as you want provided you don't get canned by the professor.

>When I said undergrad teaching I meant actually being a TA for an undergrad course. I was a TA for a few recitations of Intro to Mechanical Engineering when I was in my Bachelors and I was paid by the school. Just talk to professors.

>Already go to gym (Veeky Forums) and rockclimbing

I should have mentioned it at first but this is good practice. Staying fit and eating right will give you the energy you need to make it through long and stressful days.

Being a TA sounds really good. I'll see to it too.
How do you approach the professors?

Yeah been lifting seriously and tracking macros and rockclimbing also gives social gains.

Take machinist classes and actually learn about what you'll be asking others to do for you. Turn a wrench once in a while, you retarded nigger faggot fuck.

T. Machinist

I did that. We had 3 classes, one for milling, one with a lathe and one with drill. Certainly made me appreciate skilled labour. We also had welding it was cool

>be me, fresh out of engineering school
>have to find the nominal shaft diameter of a size 16 bolt
>after way too much searching through fastener specs, I find that it's 1 inch

>over two months pass before it finally clicks that the size number refers to how many 16ths of an inch the shaft diameter is
This is some good advice

Honestly just go up to them after class and ask. Obviously make sure they don't have to rush off somewhere else first though. It really is that simple. If they are remotely interested they will ask for follow-up correspondence.

Good. The world needs smarter mech. engineers and you are already ahead of the curve. I can't count how many times some fresh out of college dick-beater has made my job unnecessarily hard. Obviously you already know or should know GD&T, but be vigilante and try to avoid tight ass tolerances if they aren't actually needed. And please remember to put the dimensions you want on the drawings/prints you give me. Godspeed you faggot. See you on the shop flo

Thanks machineshop senpai.

Top kek
Good thread bump