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I'm job hunting at the moment; did my bachelors in aero and then went to grad school to get a PhD in mech but decided it just wasn't for me and dropped out with a masters. It was a hard choice cause all my life I wanted to be a scientist and was dead-set on it but that's life and things change. Now I'm looking for jobs and I'd like to limit myself to major cities on the West Coast and NYC. I guess this leaves Seattle, Portland, and the San Francisco Bay Area (and NYC), and on the bottom of the list would be the LA and SD metro areas (would like to avoid southern CA, for no reason other than I find SF much nicer). Since the only time I ever went job hunting and went to career fairs was during my undergrad, I'm unfortunately only familiar with the major aerospace and defense companies (LMS, Boeing, etc). I don't know anything about "normal" companies that need mechanical engineers and I don't have the resources/connections to go to job fairs and such anymore. Is it kosher to ask here for names of companies that fit this bill? Not asking for people to do my homework for me but whatever companies that immediately come to mind would be nice. At this moment my main concern is to just relocate to one of those metro areas with a job in hand and start working to get some experience so I can be more hirable as an engineer. I can pick and choose my jobs later when I the last job I held isn't "research assistant."
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Jul 11, 2013 10:34
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KetTarma posted:Jump on LinkedIn and connect with everyone that you did undergrad with. My only experience with LinkedIn is getting spammed from them from people I had like a single class with freshman year in like one of those 100+ people lectures, so much spam that I just blocked everything from LinkedIn as spam just so I never see those god drat emails anymore. I never even signed up for it so I couldn't figure out how to turn off the spam any other way. e: I have a probably irrational hate of LinkedIn from this. Boris Galerkin fucked around with this message at 22:52 on Jul 11, 2013 |
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Jul 11, 2013 22:47
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djroomba posted:I would say don't pick and choose where in the country you want to work right away. I have friends doing that and they are unemployed. One of the reasons I didn't want to continue my career path to academia is because I'm starting to have an insistent desire to root down somewhere like right now and that's just not possible with academia (I'd have to constantly move around every couple years to do a new postdoc somewhere totally different). I can't explain it but I've done the whole traveling thing thing, studied abroad, seen a hell of a lot of the world, and always lived in a 'temporary' place and now I'm tired of it all and want something permanent.
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Jul 12, 2013 11:33
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evensevenone posted:What kind of ME are you? ME is insanely broad. I guess you would say I specialize in CFD, HPC, and regular fluid mechanics. I've got some CAD experience but it's not that great. Honestly I don't really see too many jobs for people in my field out there so I'm trying to sell myself as a ME that can learn new things really fast.
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Jul 15, 2013 20:30
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One position I applied for asked me if I could submit a portfolio of my past projects. What in the world is a portfolio in the engineering sense? Are there any good examples out there? I've never actually designed and built anything but the position I applied for isn't a designing and building position either.
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Jul 16, 2013 19:11
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KetTarma posted:Jump on LinkedIn and connect with everyone that you did undergrad with. KetTarma posted:Accept every connection. Figure out who can help you. I finally got around to making an account last weekend and spruced everything up and started looking for people from my contact list, people from Facebook, and then looking through their connections and adding people I remember going to school with. After a week I'm at a grand total of… wait for it… 8 connections. Yeah, that's right, less than 10 people I remember going to undergrad with use LinkedIn. I also texted and messaged a few people I talk to and keep in touch with about what they think of LinkedIn. Every single one told me some variation of "it exists but I don't know anybody who uses it." One guy who's on a project manager track at a global corporation (and extremely visible in this industry) told me that none of his managers use LinkedIn to find people. Another guy at another company told me none of his managers give a poo poo what you have on LinkedIn or not, cause all that they care about is what is in their personal system. So yeah. It would seem nobody cares for LinkedIn in my industry. All anecdotal of course.
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Jul 19, 2013 19:13
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This might sound really dense and I hope it's not offensive, but why do you/software engineers call yourselves software engineers and not programmer?
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Jul 22, 2013 09:48
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I'm starting to get anxious/worried about finding a job. The thing is, I did a classical engineering degree for my bachelor's (mech) and was dead set on staying in academia all my life so I focused on something very narrow (CFD) for my master's. Well plans change and I withdrew from my PhD after getting a master's. I had internship experience during my undergrad in a well known company but it was quality engineering, and gently caress if I'm going to be a paperwork proofreader and the most hated 'engineer' in a company (but it was my first (and only) internship so I took whatever). Since I did CFD in grad school my set of skills are programming and HPC related stuff. Maybe I'm not looking in the right places, but HPC jobs are hard to find and most of the times it seems they are actually looking for system maintainers and admins, which isn't actually what I do at all. My friends hear me say programming and they they say "join a startup and make millions  " which actually wouldn't be bad cause I'd love to move out to the Bay but my programming expertise is C/Fortran which isn't anything like Ruby or web application scaling or whatever toolset every single startup needs.So I feel like I'm just being overlooked by every position I'm applying for because I don't have the experience to do something like say systems engineering at Boeing but I also don't have the user facing/webapp experience for software/program engineering jobs I find. I guess I'm just venting and moping around 
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Sep 16, 2013 16:46
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I got a job offer for a consulting company and I'm reading through the employment agreement. In addition to the standard stuff (at-will, confidential information, etc), there's this claus that kind of sticks out. Paraphrased it says something like: I acknowledge and agree that I will be educated and trained to perform the duties of my employment. This training will be provided at a cost to the company and should I resign or be terminated within 24 months then the company will not have obtained the benefits they intended and were entitled to, whereas this training will immensely benefit and be useful to me in my future employment with third parties (i.e., employment with clients, customers, or competitors). Therefore, I will pay a sum of $X (thousands) of dollars to the company if I resign or am terminated within 24 months and thereafter begin working for a client, customer, or competitor. This amount is the fair dollar amount for the training and education provided to me. Is this loving normal? Because I have a lot of issue with this and I want to know if I'm in line with thinking this is outrageous and that I should run for the hills.
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Dec 5, 2013 23:36
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For training it says "technical education and training (including on the job training)." So it just seems like a blanket statement that I'm pretty much gonna have to front up thousands of dollars if I quit or am fired.
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Dec 6, 2013 00:22
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Senor P. posted:However we do have a clause where if they relocate you (paid) for a job and you quit before a year then you owe them the money for your re-location. I don't have that much of an issue, one year isn't that long. There's a claus for paying back relocation as well but that one I fully understand. spwrozek posted:The problem I have with it is it doesn't specify outside training or school reimbursement. It basically reads like he will be trained on the job and they will want his pay back if he leaves or gets fired before 2 years. That seems pretty bad to me. French Canadian posted:Both parties are taking a risk. But you have much more to lose if you have to pay for your training costs. I would negotiate to get it lowered to 1 year if you're really stoked on the job. I paraphrased the agreement because I'm paranoid so for that same reason I don't want to post any numbers, but the amount it says I'd need to forfeit is roughly 8% of my starting year's salary; it's a fixed number. 8% of $50k is $4k, just fyi.
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Dec 6, 2013 04:19
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Don't all the cool people call themselves hackers nowadays?
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Dec 12, 2013 07:40
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I feel like I'm gonna get fired here sometime in the near future cause my supervisor has been really dodgy lately and doing things like telling me to do X, and then when I show my status he'll go "Wait why are you doing X and not Y? That makes no sense." Despite the fact that I do specifically question him if he really does want me to do X when Y would be better and this keeps happening lately. Plus workload is slowing down in general (we're a contractor) and I basically have no real responsibility after 1.5 years when other people that started around me do. There are other feelings I'm picking up and I think he's kinda trying to set me up as being incompetent. So today something happened again and I'm just completely fed up with it. I've been "looking" for other jobs for months now but now I realize I need to get the hell out of dodge asap. Could I get some advice about career path? I did aero (undergrad) and mech (grad) and specialize in CFD. I'm working now with turbo machinery, just basically doing minor design changes and analysis with CFD. I'd like to keep doing things related to CFD (doesn't have to be turbo machinery) but there just doesn't seem to be too many of those jobs around. Am I missing something in my search terms? I've mostly been browsing for jobs directly on the bigger companies in cities I want to live in (preferably coastal but lakes are fine, progressive, cool summers and no humidity, don't care if it rains every single day). And mostly what I find are random things like "Engineer II" with descriptions that I don't really understand. Id also be ok (and prefer) a position more on the programming side since that's my entire graduate work but I'm finding it difficult to get any job as a programmer because I don't have "software engineer" next to my degree.
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May 26, 2015 16:22
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I use CFX here for the flow solver and post processor, ProE/NX for CAD, and mostly Star CCM for meshing. I don't program anymore except to write shell scripts to automate stuff but I'm quite familiar with C, Fortran, and MPI libraries (graduate work was developing and implementing a model into our in house solver).
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May 26, 2015 21:15
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Can you guys recommend any of those resume writing services in SA Mart or elsewhere?
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May 29, 2015 21:41
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Alright, I'll stick to doing it myself and posting excerpts here for feedback if this thread doesn't mind that. I think my main problem is that I'm not sure how to convey what I currently do into bullet points with action verbs and quantifiable metrics. Partly because I'm on a team so the things that I've accomplished haven't been done by me and me entirely, and also because I'm not sure how much I can get away with w.r.t. eg., NDAs and such. For example, here's a project I am currently working on: My client has a turbine blade that requires X amount of internal cooling. They want to investigate ways to cool it with less than X. I run baseline CFD simulations and my team and I propose to do x, y, and z and I implement those design changes and run the simulations. I present it to my client and the entire process is repeated. So my hangup is 1) I didn't come up with the ideas entirely so I don't feel it's right to put in my resume something like "developed method x to reduce …". Also 2) some of these "novel" ideas aren't really new, they've been done before/are patented (by the same client) and our client/customer contact basically tells us it's fine. 3) Nothing I do is for production products. 4) I am not totally sure what I can or cannot say. Like I don't know if I can specifically quote that something I did reduced cooling requirements by a specific percentage. #4 seems the most problematic because I don't even know who I can contact to clarify without giving big red flags that hey I want to leave this company. A second thing that I just remembered while reading one of these resume help websites is about patents. I worked on a project last year and we did something that a patent is submitted for. To be honest I don't know anything about how patents work, but I think it's in the "we submitted an application for this patent" phase. Should I mention this?
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Jun 1, 2015 22:53
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Vaporware posted:I think the understanding is that you're working on a team, rather than the expectation that you did all of this by yourself. Save the clarification of "What was your role" for the interview, just list "developed method for blah" and leave it there. Yeah that makes sense. Thanks.
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Jun 2, 2015 21:10
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I’ve never had another ‘real’ job before so am I just taking things personal or are my coworkers rude as gently caress? Coworker Alice will come to my cube and ask me something project/work related and I start showing him or talking to him about it. Coworker Bob will come over to my cube to just make a short quip to Alice that he needs her help after she’s done with me. If this was the end of story then that’s fine, but Alice then asks for a general idea of what Bob needs help with and well the conversation goes on and on. OR, Coworker Charlie will come and blurt out to Alice “hey did you watch Game of Thrones???” and they start talking about it. Or Alice will overhear Coworkers Dan and Eric sitting in the cube next to me talking about something (either work or fun related) and she’ll join in their conversation. Meanwhile I’m sitting here like what the loving gently caress why are you both wasting my time and then Alice turns back to me and “sorry got distracted, ok can you start over from the beginning again?” I've also noticed that when I need to ask someone something very quick (like say "what operating pressure are you using again" where the answer can just be "20 bars" end of discussion) and they are in a conversation with someone else, I'll walk over to their desk and stand there waiting for them to acknowledge me before I ask my 1 answer question which can take forever of standing around. While other people like rear end in a top hat Bob up there will just come in and butt right in mid conversation.
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Jul 20, 2015 19:51
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Should I list patent applications that have only been filed with the patent office or are these things generally only listed on resumes when they're actually approved (which from my understanding takes years)?
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Sep 15, 2015 00:40
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Hed posted:Put the applications on, and just put patent pending on it. Do I put like a bullet point under it to describe it or anything? I'm honestly not sure what I can/can't say about patent applications cause I've never dealt with one before and this was pretty much just someone higher than me telling me to sign here and there as a co-inventor.
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Sep 19, 2015 15:31
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I applied to a couple jobs at a large tech firm online and got a friend who works there to look up the vacancies and give me the names and contact info of the hiring managers so that I could address them directly in my cover letter. Is it kosher for me to email them directly after a week or two to follow up on my application, if the HR or Taleo people haven't gotten back to me yet? Speaking of Taleo, gently caress Taleo.
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Oct 15, 2015 00:46
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Thoguh posted:Yeah, no harm in contacting them directly and if they like you they can probably cut through some of the HR bullshit. In fact next time I wouldn't even wait. I'd email them simultaneously with submitting your resume. I just submitted them yesterday on Tuesday but cool, I'll just follow up on Monday then.
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Oct 15, 2015 01:46
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Well okay, I'll shoot an email to them here in a little bit. I thought it'd be weird and overstepping since the names aren't available to people without contacts in the company but whatever helps me I guess. Should I just say something like "hey I applied for this position online and just wanted to follow up, by the way here's my cover letter and resume attached [since there's a 0% chance HR/taleo would have gotten around to my application already] thanks bye"?
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Oct 15, 2015 17:38
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Grimarest posted:Thanks for the reply! Most companies seem to want US residents and FAR 22 comes up often in the job description regarding composite materials, but I haven't really looked into what it entails. Unfortunately those jobs are getting shifted out of Washington and into like loving Alabama. Southern California is still pretty good for more defense type work and rockets. There's some startups in Nevada. Tons of companies out in aforementioned South.
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Oct 20, 2015 12:34
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So my small team of like 5 people recently had 3 people turnover in the past months leaving me and another guy who does only CAD and no analysis. They've been trying to hire replacements but it's going really slow and it's still just us two. I plan on leaving in January for a new opportunity (already have the contract in hand) and while I don't give a poo poo or have any loyalty for my company, they are a contractor and I know that me leaving their team leaving only a CAD guy is going to very significantly harm their ability to conduct work, especially for the current projects and customer that I'm assigned to. On the one hand id like to try to work with them in ensuring they have people to take over when I'm out in two months. On the other hand this company's business model is "just hire the cheapest fresh graduates you can find they're all expendable anyway." I'm in an at will state so I don't technically have to give any notice at all I suppose. Would it be incredibly stupid of me to give them more than 2 weeks? I don't want to leave them dry but I also want to keep my paychecks rolling until January.
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Nov 1, 2015 11:24
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I think I'll do that then, just keep pushing for an extra body to "help" take some load off of me. I don't think they would give me the boot and/or that they are even in this position to do so (like I said, they have me and one other guy who only does CAD ie he draws what I tell him with my analyses) but I can't be sure so id rather not risk it.
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Nov 1, 2015 20:59
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E: wrong thread
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Oct 5, 2023 00:42
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What stood out to me was the part about how he was told his job was being eliminated and then he just… did nothing with this information? He didn’t start looking for jobs until his first day of being unemployed? He might want to look inward a bit because if I was told my job was being eliminated at some point I’d be looking for jobs and interviewing asap.
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Jan 24, 2024 16:25
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I feel like if you've already talked to someone else then you kinda went over your manager already, so you should talk to your manager before he hears it from someone else. That's just my opinion though. I don't do management.
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Feb 29, 2024 23:14
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Oodles posted:I’d say it’s a giga slim chance he finds out, as it’s a totally different business unit, in a different country. Project Director: Hey Oodle's manager, me and Oodles had a nice chat about him coming over to this department. So what timeframe did you have in mind? Can he wrap up his work with you within the next 2 months? Oodle's Manager: ???????? It's not a good look.
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Mar 1, 2024 05:23
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LeeMajors posted:How did you guys settle into your respective specialties? Did you walk into uni with a goal, or find niche interests during your educational course? I took an elective sometime around my 3rd year and ended up really liking it so I stuck with it. e: The actual major itself, I guess I just chose it because it sounded cool to a 17 year old me applying for college? I knew I wanted to do something with engineering so I just picked the engineering major that sounded the most interesting. I didn't really find my specific specialization until that 3rd year. Boris Galerkin fucked around with this message at 22:54 on Mar 8, 2024 |
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Mar 8, 2024 22:48
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Wouldn't it be easier to just switch industries instead of switching careers? I know a few dentists and I would not want to work the hours that they do. At the end of the day unless you're working for yourself every job is going to be able increasing shareholder value in some way or another. Just… accept that and move on with your life and find a job with the work/life balance you need and find value outside of work. IMO. Mechanical engineering degrees are like a jack of all trades. You can pretty much branch off into everything/anything you want.
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Apr 13, 2024 15:21
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Qubee posted:My biggest fear is one day wanting to leave this country, but not having the needed knowledge or experience to be hired by any decent company abroad: "Says here you've been in an engineering design role for five years, what skills have you gained during this time?" "I can make a mean coffee, and during night shifts I discovered I can bring my own personal router in so I can watch netflix all night". I think you're being too hard on yourself and it kind of sounds like from your post that this is entering "get therapy" territory. But it also doesn't sound like you're in the US as I assume what most people assumed so that may or may not be doable in your location. I don't really have much to say except that it helps if you keep a journal of work accomplishment, big or small. It'll help you when you update your resume/cv and when you're prepping for an interview and will need to answer questions like "what did you do at soulless megacorp?" Your journal obviously shouldn't be too detailed or contain sensitive information that could get you in trouble of course. I'm sure you've done more than just watching Netflix all day every day and you should celebrate that. You mention design engineering, so that means you've learned/trained on some design software right? Another advice I have as a 30something engineer is to make connections if you haven't already. You don't have to like the people you work with, you just want to be on good terms with them so that they can recommend you for a job at their company later on.
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Apr 16, 2024 01:19
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