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Any advice on finding an internship (I'm MechE)? I have ok grades but no technical job experience at all.
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Oct 5, 2009 02:33
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yeah, but you can get a good education elsewhere anyway. If you can get through differential equations, none of the math I've used so far is nearly as abstract as that (in MechE).
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Dec 3, 2009 17:10
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How screwed am I going to be if I graduate without any internships/co-ops? I have a decent GPA (~3.2) from a solid top 30 engineering school, but I'm just not having any luck finding internships. I've applied to a bunch, but only heard back from a couple and at the moment my best opportunity is basically painting meters for an electric company. So am I going to be poo poo out of luck when I graduate next year with no real work experience? Mech. E, by the way.
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May 15, 2010 20:04
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The Engibeard posted:I am in Biomedical Engineering now. Let me just say this now. If you were hoping to get a co-op, you either better A) know someone in some company or B) have a drat good GPA. It is drat near impossible to get one. I have applied to about 10 companies in the last week for my next co-op this fall and not a single one has responded. Just for shits and giggles I applied to 2 companies in Japan and they both got back to me. They said no, but they were still courteous. I think getting an internship in general is really competitive right now. Most of the people I know getting internships are doing it through connections, while less connected people aren't getting anything. A friend of mine just graduated with a 3.7 in civil engineering and had to take a $9/hour internship for the time being.
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May 19, 2010 16:15
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Kurei posted:Second. BME and bioengineering degree is useless. Who would you rather hire to design a medical device: a "biomedical engineer" or a mechanical/electrical engineer who actually knows electronics and mechanics? Who would you rather trust conducting tissue engineering: a bioengineer or a material science or a molecular biologist who knows stem cell physiology and material properties? I did a biomedical engineering degree only half way through my third year when I realized it was completely worthless and picked up a mechanical engineering degree. Anecdotal evidence: of the 3 graduated BMEs I know, 0 are working as engineers. One worked at a medical device company briefly, but they only had him going through documentation.
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May 24, 2010 17:34
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I've had the best luck using indeed.com; you search for "engineer" and "loc" and then refine to internships. I've gotten some interviews this way, but no internships unfortunately. http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=engineer&l=new+york+city&jt=internship
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Jun 9, 2010 20:46
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Dotcom656 posted:At my university they offer a program where you can take classes for one major and then switch to a larger university that finishes up your courses and gives you another degree in a engineering field on top of that. My school does a 3/2 program where you graduate in 5 years with a BS/MS in your field. If you're thinking of doing a PhD, that might be a better route. I really don't think employers will care much about your civil background if you're applying for computer jobs, though.
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Jun 23, 2010 02:31
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The curriculum at my school assumed that engineers would have taken Calc 1 in high school, but it wasn't a problem if people needed to catch up. This will probably depend on what school you're going to and what kind of engineering you're majoring in, since MechEs need to get up to differential equations and some others don't. If you have the opportunity I'd still recommend taking calc in high school. At the very least you'll have an easy A math class your first semester.
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Aug 17, 2010 21:22
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Any advice on grad school for engineers? I'm debating on going for my masters (mechanical or materials science) right out of school or working for a few years and trying to get someone to pay for it.
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Aug 24, 2010 17:34
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Sgt. Slaughter posted:
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Sep 22, 2010 02:06
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A good portion (maybe half) of the BME people at my school are planning to go to med school. We do get a lot of recruiters for biomedical, but most will take mechanical engineers too. I'd just go mechE and take some biomedical courses as electives. T.H.E. Rock fucked around with this message at 05:19 on Oct 22, 2010 |
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Oct 22, 2010 05:01
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Is 1 problem set a week per class really so much to ask?
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Oct 23, 2010 01:19
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I don't know how other schools do it, but at my school financial aid and scholarships end after you get the BS. A lot of people will get paid TA jobs, though.
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Nov 20, 2010 05:16
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What are my odds of getting a job out of school if I have a mediocre GPA (~3.25 probably) but no internships? For whatever reason I couldn't find anything at all last summer despite two interviews where the interviewer told me it had gone well, so I ended up doing freelance writing on engineering subjects at BrightHub. I do have 4 years of a varsity sport, but I don't know how much that'll help. I'm considering focusing on applying for internships again.
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Dec 7, 2010 04:46
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4 years in college, but in a "minor" sport (cross country/track). Still, it's good to have something to play up I guess. I only have my overall engineering ranking, which is 145/221. I suspect it's better for mechanical engineering specifically, but probably still not all that great. I guess as long as you're saying my resume wouldn't automatically get tossed in the garbage, that's a good thing. Would you roll your eyes at the engineering writing thing?
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Dec 7, 2010 06:17
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For a new graduate without much job experience, does it make sense to list technical courses on the resume? I figure it would help to have various technical words that HR might skim for, but I've seen conflicting advice on this.
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Dec 30, 2010 21:21
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Cool; thanks for the help.
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Dec 30, 2010 23:49
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Murgos posted:When I interned with Honeywell the interview process consisted of, "You want to be an intern?".
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Apr 8, 2011 05:29
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BeefofAges posted:It gets easier when you stop trying to do everything on your own and start working in a study group with your classmates (if you aren't already doing this). This, and go to the TA-led help sessions. If the TA isn't an rear end in a top hat they can be really helpful. Plus, people will end up working together there anyway.
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Apr 19, 2011 04:57
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I really don't know any engineers outside of EE who program for a living. That being said, CS is a great field and there's nothing wrong with it. If you don't like programming, though, you'll be bad at it and probably not be all that successful, so why not do something you actually enjoy?
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Apr 25, 2011 03:16
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Dr. Goonstein posted:Speaking of calculus, it looks like I'm going to finish my Calculus 1 class with a B-B+. I made the mistake of taking it my last semester of high school and I will admit that I did not give it my full attention because, well, I was a senior and had just a few short weeks left. I got a pretty good idea of the stuff, and we covered through integrals. Would you guys recommend I jump into Calc 2 next semester, or re-take Calc 1 so I am not hosed in the long run? A lot of schools expect you to have completed Calc 1 before starting an engineering curriculum, anyway. I'd say as long as you understood the concepts out of the class you'll be fine.
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May 9, 2011 18:57
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Brendas Baby Daddy posted:
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May 28, 2011 03:59
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Shipon posted:After a few years post-high school (I'm 23 now) of just trying to get by with little success (working as a driver, then working at a law firm and dealing with lawyers all day before being laid off), I've decided to go back to school (thanks FAFSA for your arbitrary age limit of 23 to be declared an independent student!). Edit: does anyone have any suggestions on books about manufacturing/lean tech stuff? I might have an opportunity to work as a lean tech at a pretty big company and I'd like to have at least some idea what I'm talking about before I go to interview. T.H.E. Rock fucked around with this message at 16:46 on Jun 6, 2011 |
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Jun 6, 2011 16:35
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Have you looked into Engineers Without Borders? I don't know what they have as far as full-time careers, but I know they do similar work to what you're talking about. The group at my school was working on developing a stove for South American communities that wouldn't throw out as many particulates and other hazardous crap into people's homes.
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Jun 14, 2011 21:08
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Pieces posted:I graduated last year with a degree in engineering (Civil), and I took a year off just to travel and pursue some personal interests.
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Jul 24, 2011 00:43
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I had good results on Craigslist. You'll mostly get smaller companies though.
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Jul 26, 2011 22:46
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I always thought it reflected badly on companies when they said they'd call and then didn't. I mean, if you're so scared of conflict then don't say you're going to call in the first place.OctaviusBeaver posted:Sure. Also if anyone wants to critique this I would be much applied. For context I'm an EE graduating in December and planning on getting my Masters if I don't get an awesome job,I sent this out to a few places as a long shot though. Your Skills section is kind of vague. Considering that you appear to have plenty of room to work with, I'd expand that and maybe break it down into specific software used/techniques/whatever it is EEs do. You don't want employers to have to spend time interpreting your resume to find out what you can do. T.H.E. Rock fucked around with this message at 02:40 on Aug 18, 2011 |
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Aug 18, 2011 02:37
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I had a lot of professors ban the TI-89 specifically or sometimes calculators in general. They were generally the old rear end in a top hat professors (I'm looking at you, heat transfer prof who insisted on answers in BTUs but gave out charts in metric and banned calculators until the last 10 minutes). You should probably make sure you'll have access to a TI-83 if professors ban the -89 at your school. I'm currently working in PCB design but have a degree in ME and can see myself moving back that way eventually. Will this experience be useful at all or will I end up pigeonholed in PCBs?
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Aug 24, 2011 02:39
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movax posted:PCB Design is your experience, but if you have any previous ME experience, you should be good to go outside of the field. I assume you want to get away from PCB design entirely? Most likely out of PCB field entirely. EE really isn't my thing and the mechanical jobs in circuit boards don't seem too interesting. I don't actually have any job experience in ME - this is my first job out of school and I had no internships. I'm totally OK going to grad school (provided it's paid for) if need be. Mostly I'm just worried that it'll be difficult to get a job outside of this area if I end up staying more than 2 years. The bastard of it is that I had a really good shot at getting a job in composites but they didn't get back to me about interviewing until after I had started this job.
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Aug 28, 2011 00:46
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Kolodny posted:Speaking of undergraduate research, what's the best way to get involved in that? I know I should get to know professors and find out what's going on, but it seems kind of strange to me as a random name in class to come up and ask if they need any help in their research. I would really love to do something and I have some areas in mind, but I'm not sure how to broach the subject. I'm in my first senior year in aerospace without an internship or anything subject related to my name; I feel like if I don't get something on my resume I'm pretty much consigned to the military after graduation. Frinkahedron or Dead Pressed, maybe one of you can comment, I'm a Hokie as well. All you have to do is go talk to the professor and not come off as a weirdo. If they have any openings they'll suggest them. If they don't have any, ask if they know anyone who could use some help. At your stage any kind of research will be helpful, especially if it gives you someone to use as a reference.
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Aug 28, 2011 04:18
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grover posted:I whipped up a small program in VBA today to crunch & import a massive dataset from an arcane proprietary data file into excel. 90 minutes later, I get a nice pretty graph telling me precisely what I need to know, and every month after this, all I have to do is hit one button and it will automatically update with the latest data. Would have taken me all day to do it manually in excel, and I'd have to do it each and every time... Is VBA pretty easy to learn if you already know some basic programming? I have to remove some garbage from files before I can import them into a program and it'd be nice to save the ~2 minutes wasted on every single project.
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Sep 8, 2011 02:11
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Does your college have an alumni group on LinkedIn? I've seen a bunch of people get jobs just by posting what they were looking for to the group.
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Sep 18, 2011 15:31
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I've gotten the impression that most engineers hate interviewing people. A lot of them seemed to feel pretty awkward/not know what to ask when I was looking for work. The worst was a panel interview for a job I didn't really want ($45k in NYC) where no one had any idea how to interview and would just ask "so...any questions?" every couple of minutes. That was also their first question. My best luck with getting interviews was just applying to the engineering jobs on Craigslist in the Northeast. Write up a nice, concise cover letter showing what you have to offer w/rt the job and proofread it. Never got much response applying through company websites - 1 phone interview out of hundreds of applications and it was to make Hormel canned meat products.
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Sep 24, 2011 20:18
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Thoguh posted:So anybody working in aerospace/defense experiencing significant layoffs? I am hearing about them from a number of companies. My company does a lot of work for defense companies and we have been seriously slow since August. I'm hoping it's just temporary since I'm almost certainly the first guy to go.
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Oct 21, 2011 04:06
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As soon as you can. It helps if you've actually had a class with the professor and don't wait til the last minute to ask. At the very worst he'll say no, so you really don't have anything to lose by looking.
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Oct 29, 2011 03:15
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Isn't this to some degree a problem with the teaching in engineering classes? There are a lot of engineering professors who seem to hate teaching and put in the bare minimum of effort. When you essentially have to teach yourself everything, the theory-based classes seriously suck. I also hated Control Systems. The labs were actually really interesting, but when your professor is barely able to communicate and the book seems to have been written by a robot, it can be really hard to get through classes. I think we could improve engineering education here if schools focused on hiring professors who actually want to teach. T.H.E. Rock fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Nov 11, 2011 |
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Nov 11, 2011 22:21
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A big construction firm I interviewed at said they required MEs to eventually get a PE. I'm kind of surprised that companies would hire engineers for tech jobs. Personally, I'd be looking to leave as soon as an engineering position came up/I could tick the "1 year experience" box, and I assume most other recent graduates would feel the same way.
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Nov 21, 2011 07:19
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Continuing on the grad school questions - how hard is it to get money for an MS in engineering (not paid by your company)? Some of the schools I've looked at explicitly say that there's very little available for MS. I'd like to be doing some research or at least TAing if I go back to school.Log082 posted:I graduated with a BS in mechanical engineering last May, and I've been having trouble finding an engineering job. My work experience is mostly in the materials field; I had a research position with a campus lab where I worked on metal and ceramic properties at high strain rates. This is a pretty general question, but does anyone have advice on what industries might be hiring, either in the area I specified or just entry level Mech Es in general?
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Dec 7, 2011 05:39
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evensevenone posted:
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Dec 23, 2011 00:45
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You're stressing out in February? I had interviews as late as June - lots of places take their sweet time hiring interns. Contacts are by far the best way to get internships, and thinking back that's how most of the engineers I knew got work in school. You probably don't think you have any contacts, but you do. I got a job through an ex-girlfriend's aunt's common law husband who had never even met the girl. Ask your friends who've interned, ask family members, ask professors. Maybe your uncle's friend owns a company - who knows until you ask.
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Feb 15, 2012 01:59
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