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What to expect after graduating from Mechanical Engineering school?

If I graduate with a BS in Mechanical Engineering, how much of what I learned in school should I expect to apply to my first job/internship?

  • Additionally, I am currently an undergrad at Southern Methodist University and I am considering applying to Grad school, but I am worried about whether I should get some job experience before getting a Master's Degree. I do not know what to expect when employers look at my resume and see a Master's in ME with little to no work experience.

  • Answer:

    A BS in mechanical engineering exposes you to a very broad array of engineering topics.  The level of exposure to any one of these topics is probably not directly applicable to any job you'll get, thus you'll probably learn most of the skills needed to function within a company "on the job."  What a BS in mechanical engineering does give you is the ability to critically think and solve problems across several disciplines.  With the basic foundation of all these disciplines laid, you'll be able to build on any one of them via direct hands-on experience at a company or graduate school. I personally found it very rewarding to pursue a graduate degree via night school at a local university while working full time in an engineering discipline.  A few years of sacrifice and hard work will position you well as a candidate for jobs requiring both an advanced degree and work experience.

Andrew Giampa at Quora Visit the source

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I was schooled in a system that awards 5-year engineering diplomas, which are sort of a combined BS+MS, but the consensus among my colleagues is pretty much the same as what Andrew describes. I will simply add that an MS will help you focus your career options more according to your preferences than following the path that your fist couple of jobs will lead you to. Once you are already working on one sector for a couple of years, it becomes harder to switch. On the other hand, the younger you are, the easier it is for you to leave your life behind and go work in a challenging project away from home.

Achilleas Vortselas

A rule of thumb for most engineering or science jobs is that you will only end up using about 15% of what you learned in school, no matter how long you've been at that job. If you have free summers, either spend all of that time in internships or full-time research at your university.  Employers really don't like seeing obvious manifestations of "summers off" on resumes, and a lack of any research or internship is a good indicator of summers off because almost no upper-division courses are ever offered in summer. An interesting statistic that I found was job satisfaction among engineers.  I don't remember all of the exact numbers, but job satisfaction for people with bachelors degrees in engineering is well below 50%, while job satisfaction among engineers with graduate degrees is well above 50%.  I've also heard it said among a lot of engineers that as soon as you start working, it's hard to go back to school, especially if you're married (your wife gets used to having money). From everything that I've heard from professors, employers, and students who just landed their first job, getting the first job isn't necessarily about your skills, since even if you have experience it's bound to be minimal, but rather it's about contacts -- who knows you who already works there?

Jacob VanWagoner

I am currently an MS student with no full-time job experience, but asked my internship supervisor a similar question: "What do you look for in a resume for out-of-college hires?" Besides obviously looking for a skill set particular to a certain job, he told me that it was important that an applicant's summer was not spend "laying around on the beaches of Miami."

Vu Hong

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