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Ryan_Rooker posted:As a new wave of students enter college I think it would be a good idea for new engineers and maybe some further along people, like me, to really understand what all this work is for. M.E. checking in. What they literally told us on my first day of college was that we'd learn a ton of poo poo and only use about 5% of it, but it'd be a different 5% for each of us. Basically your tastes and your career path would determine which 5% it was. Like I've barely used a single piece of the HVAC poo poo I learned, or the electrical power transmission stuff. I HAVE used calculus, but only on a very simple level, like summing data in spreadsheets to get the area under the curve. That was actually really cool, basically figuring out the total air volume moved by a pump that had such a short run time that most of the air was moved during the ramp up and spin-down. But having the fundamental understanding of the math is what made that even possible. Other things like understanding how geometry affects the strength of things you're working on, or understanding that strength and stiffness are two different things, those fundamentals can be useful every single day. Ryan_Rooker posted:For you engineers out there (any type, though I would love to see some ME graduates), what was life like after school? What did you major in and what jobs did you end up having? Do you enjoy what you ended up doing or would you have wanted to pick another major? This is not so much a thread for what can you do with a major, but one for what people have done. First off, the people I've worked with in this field tend to have stability and be stable people. In a 21 year career I've only had 4 jobs, and loved three of them. The first two were similar and fantastic, and it was only external circumstances that led me to leave them. The third job sucked rear end, but only because the engineering department (particularly me) was blamed for the incredibly lovely plastic quality coming out of our low rent chinese vendor. I mean seriously, I made a prototype run of 100 parts, which passed both lab and field testing 100%, and the first batch of 5000 parts had half of the parts fail in the box just from the forces seen in shipping. I was the only guy arguing with the VP about it, so I got laid off from that one. I'm back on my feet though, and the new job is treating me really well. To sum up what I do on a daily basis, I design parts and get them made. Whether it's tooling for the manufacturing facility, or actual production parts and assemblies. At my first job it was all metal machined parts. At my second job it was mostly aluminum with some weird ceramics and plastics, at my third it was all injection molded plastic, and my current job has been mostly sheetmetal with some molded plastic design, and minimal machined parts. If you work for small companies that make their own poo poo, which has been my specialty, the biggest piece of advice I can give is enjoy getting your hands dirty. This applies both to physical labor and also being humble around the people you work with. I work with the guys who assemble the things I design, and even though most of them have nothing beyond high school, I've learned far more from them on how to make stuff than they have from me.
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Oct 4, 2009 05:21
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El Kabong posted:How are things for engineering technicians? I'm debating going back to school for an Associates in EE, and figure that if I like it I'll get a BS since all credits will transfer for this particular program. I did this, I got a job as a drafting bitch in high school, and did night school for 4 years while working full time. 5 years later I hit a salary cap and went back for my BS. The thing is, techs are techs for one of 2 reasons. a) they're not quite creative enough to be a full engineer, or b) they haven't been promoted or gone back to school, but they will. Basically if you're smart enough, not much will hold you back in the long term. To be fair though, a lot of the career techs I've worked with were the most professional guys around, they just had much more of a "tell me what to do and I'll make it happen" kind of attitude, rather than a "I'll figure this out" attitude. I did work with a couple that thought they were the poo poo, but kept loving up when given chances to prove themselves. Like one guy shipped an extremely heavy machine with 4 lifting eyes out of a catalog, without actually calculating how much the machine weighed. The customer snapped one taking it out of the box. Fortunately it only fell a few inches but had it held out a little longer the dude could have killed someone. Another guy designed a threaded joint to take all the torque of a cutting machine, so that the machine was actually tightening the joint while it operated, and once it was done they couldn't unscrew it. As a counter to both of those, a close friend of mine is working as a full EE making around 80k a year, yet all he has is his AAS. The 25 years experience helps though. Unlike my examples above, he simply did all the work and proved himself, (it doesn't hurt that he's pretty sharp and talented) and his lack of a BS has hardly held him back. That said, at my last job I tried to get him on and they wouldn't even interview him because he didn't have a BS. Fortunately that was for the best as they were shitheads there. Anyway, uprooting my life to go back and be a student was rough, but once I was in the groove it was awesome. I felt like I was vastly more interested in the subject matter than the other students, because I had a 9 year frame of reference to apply. I have to admit though, that I was that rear end in a top hat in class who constantly referred to all his life experience trying to impress everyone. My only warning is be absolutely sure you're taking classes that transfer universally. I found out too late that mine didn't, and I was very restricted on which schools I could go to. The one I really wanted to go to would only recognize about 1/3 of my AAS so I would have had to enter as a freshman and take over 3 years worth of classes.
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Oct 8, 2009 03:29
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DNova posted:We weren't impressed. Yes I know, I meant it in a "don't do this, it annoys everyone" kind of way. I just learned it the hard way. DNova posted:Especially because most of the guys who pull that poo poo are completely uninterested in any theoretical background and whine and moan when forced to learn any theory or anything involving mathematics. "We didn't use any of this poo poo when I worked at <company name>." Interestingly enough it was the opposite experience for me. I loved the section where we learned to design gear teeth for example. I'd been picking gears out of catalogs for years, but had no idea how to run the math on them. My machine design class spent several days on gear tooth calculations and I loved it. I was like "Finally, I understand!" whereas all the other guys were like "pfft why are we learning this? We're never going to do this in the REAL WORLD, we'll just pick them out of catalogs."
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Oct 8, 2009 18:33
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JamesWatt posted:My goal, in the long-run, is to come up with a new invention in the energy industry... Please just go to school. You need to understand efficiency and losses and just how big a problem energy really is. It's a field we don't need any more half educated quacks in. Your post kind of scares me. It reminds me of our engineering tech at work. He's a great guy, very much a go-getter, hands on and very great with customers and competent. He reads non stop and always has great ideas for the next big thing. But he has just enough training to be easily suckered without the critical thinking and foundation to see where an idea fails at its core. He'll come up with some great ideas that need some magic material or bend the laws of physics to be possible. We have to rein him in all the time. And he believes those youtube videos that show magnetic perpetual motion motors. Please tell me your master plan does not involve unlocking the hidden power of magnets, please? Here is a play in one act based on a true story at my work with my tech. MAGNETS DO NOT CONTAIN HIDDEN POWER. "Oh you have to plug it in to get it started." "Okay, but once it's running why don't they unplug it?" "Well, they need to... um... I don't know" "If it was really self powering they could plug it in to itself right?" "Um... it keeps going because of the magnets and takes forever to spin down." "So it spins down? I thought it kept going?" "Well, the magnets are at just the right angle to keep it going for a long time..." "Congratulations, you found a video of guys who stuck magnets to a flywheel and think they invented something." FIN. LloydDobler fucked around with this message at 05:02 on Mar 1, 2011 |
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Mar 1, 2011 04:59
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Ingenium posted:Ugh, I am really torn here. I am rounding down my third year in ME and I have started to look longingly over at Cpt S, due to the high quality of the jobs software engineers have. The problem I have is I don't know if I would be happy as a programmer, OR a ME. After this long I would think I would have learned, but having never been into cars and hands on work I haven't experienced much things mechanical, and I have done little to no programming. In fact the classes I can say I really enjoyed was more mathematical analysis like dynamics/dynamic systems. Would it be worth it to switch over a little blind; or if I stuck with the ME major and worked on a Cpt S minor and got a good background in programming? I am assuming a ME that can program would probably be more useful than a Software Engineer that knows how to deal with energy and mechanical systems. When I was in school for my ME I decided I wanted to double major in software. I'd programmed some basic stuff here and there so I thought I'd be good at it and it'd make me more marketable. I took one C++ class as an elective and I almost failed it. In fact, the only lesson I learned from that class was that I absolutely suck at programming and also hate it. Definitely find out if you like it before you commit.
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Mar 31, 2011 20:12
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ch3cooh posted:Let me just say that the best part of being an engineer is having vendors. Who's going to Nuggets-Thunder game 5 and sitting in a suite? this guy Just knowing people is awesome. The CEO of my last company used to hand out Avalanche tickets, he had seats a few rows right behind the penalty box, where you could hold up signs that heckle the dude in the box and the TV cameras catch it. And my patent lawyer has Rockies season tickets right here, although I've only scored them once:
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Apr 27, 2011 06:01
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Agreed 100% with Lord Gaga. I'd say manufacturing, and if that doesn't float your boat, focus on materials. Your field will be pretty specialized, but getting real familiar with the kinds of materials used in human implants, and their benefits and limitations seems like something that would be really valuable.
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Jun 9, 2011 21:32
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UZR IS BULLSHIT posted:If you want to be a manager, sure. Do listen to it though if you're a poo poo engineer and don't want to admit it, so you can get paid more than everyone else for sitting around doing gant charts and bitching about the schedule and/or budget while telling your subordinate engineers to test everything to the wrong criteria, and taking no blame when the product fails miserably. No offense to you MBA guys, I've just had a couple real bad experiences.
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Jun 16, 2011 20:06
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I just posted a job opening for an ME tech/CAD jockey in the jobs thread, head on over if you're in the Denver area, meet that criteria, and need a job.
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Oct 21, 2011 18:31
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It also varies by school, I got an MET bachelors for the exact same reasons as Aardlof, where I went to community college first and didn't want to repeat a year and a half of it to drop the "technology" from my degree. Our coursework was the same as a full bachelors except we were not forced to take DiffEQ to graduate, even though it was offered and most of the guys in my program took it as an elective. We had a few more hands-on classes than a pure ME would, things like welding and machining and wiring. Graduates from my program were allowed to take the FE/EIT exams and we had a better pass rate than the ME programs at the other state schools. Basically it was a really good technology program. I think another difference was that they didn't require a PhD to teach, only a master's, although most of my profs were PhDs. The best prof there was one of the non-PhDs. As far as I can tell it hasn't affected my career one bit, I'm employed as an engineer with competitive pay.
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Nov 17, 2011 18:32
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grover posted:I'm sure there are exceptions out there, but literally every person I know with an engineering tech degree regrets not going for the full BS in engineering. The market is so flooded with engineers that they have a hard time competing as an engineering tech, even for jobs that were classically "technician" jobs; it's a HUGE limiting factor for both salary and job opportunities. Regret's a pretty strong word, but would I prefer a BSME to what I have? Probably. But I actually regret not taking the FE exam more than I regret the T on the end of my degree. Everyone in my class who took it passed it easily, and it looks great on a resume.
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Nov 19, 2011 08:19
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Definitely agree that understanding it is more important than knowing how to do it on demand. Last time I needed calculus, I took my data sample, put it into excel, multiplied each sample by the sample time interval, and summed the area under the curve that way. I used it to calculate the volume of air moved by a pump that ran a short burst, which included startup and wind-down due to the inertia of the pump motor. Very basic calculus, but calculus nonetheless, and done manually. Also understanding things like the moment of inertia and beam equations is important, even though you'll never do the math on it again. You'll use your solid modeling software to do all the math on that poo poo, but knowing that deflection is a third or fourth power function of section height/thickness informs your judgement - making things just a little bit larger can have a large payoff in stiffness. Things like that.
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Sep 6, 2013 22:26
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showbiz_liz posted:I assume that if I were to pursue engineering, I would basically be starting completely from scratch and I'd have to go back to undergrad. Obviously I need to spend some time thinking about it and researching my options, and I will need to re-learn all the math I've forgotten. And if I am successful, I will be ten years older than everyone else I work with. The maturity and real world experience will be a big advantage for you over the younger guys. Both myself and our new hire at my company did similar things, the only difference is you have zero background. In my case I was an engineering tech for 9 years before returning to school, I graduated at 28 with my BS. My newbie engineer graduated this summer and he turned 30 last week, but his background was machine shops and manufacturing. I'm having to teach him less than I'd have to teach you, but what I don't have to teach him (and wouldn't have to teach you) is stupid poo poo like showing up on time, sticking to the dress code, not being silly in front of customers, and not taking too long or too many breaks. That's all stuff I've had to deal with when working with early 20's guys who are fresh out of college. Maybe it's a good idea, maybe not. But your age should not be a factor, it's an asset.
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Oct 9, 2013 22:42
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Yeah the admission advisers should also have good direction for you as long as you make clear you want to have no constraints if you choose to transfer for a bachelor's. And you do want that even if you think you might just stop at the 2 year degree. I went to CC back in the 90's and had no plans to go get a BS. Then I hit a salary cap and my company said "no degree no promotion" so I decided to go back, and there was only one school in my entire state that would take my credits in transfer. Otherwise I'd start as a freshman with a few credits. Really pissed me off. In the end I went to that school and it worked out fantastic, and when I applied for my first job they were like "you have a Bachelor's?" and that was the end of it. From there it was all experience, and your machining experience will mean a lot to the right people. And when you order parts from china that cost less than the material costs here, you'll be occasionally impressed with the quality but the rest of the time you'll be the one asked to rework them.
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Jun 7, 2022 19:53
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DaveSauce posted:Part of the issue is that a lot of degree-specific class requirements start in the 1st and 2nd year, and they're usually pre-requisites for later classes (which are, in turn, pre-reqs for higher level classes). So if you're doing generals at a CC, then you might screw up timing a bit and end up having to wait to take the classes you need... this gets compounded by certain classes only being offered in the fall or spring, so missing it by 1 semester might put you a year behind. Right, anyone looking at engineering should specifically look at an engineering transfer curriculum. You want one that has 2 year programs specifically designed to transfer to the big schools without missing anything.
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Jun 8, 2022 21:15
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