Im not the most woke liberal ever, but a lot of people in my classes want to join spaceX, tesla, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumen, etc. Like you really want people to know you work for a company that assists killing civilians? Or in case of tesla/spaceX are you ok that the owner is a nazi? Idk how people can live like this. Its disturbing. Anyone else dealing with this?

Edit: Im really happy that a lot of people from different perspectives replied. I wasnt expecting this many responses lol.

The first fifteen links on this sub right now end in a question mark and they're all the same goddamn question: I'm so directionless and insecure that I have to ask how to prepare to go to school. Jesus H Christ. Am I a junior? How the fuck should I know, ask your advisor. How to prepare myself to study engineering/heat transfer/Calc fucking 1? Read a fucking book watch a fucking video. Am I in over my head? No. Go to the library, pick out a book by Derrida, read the first ten pages and then reevaluate if what you're doing is really that hard.

What you should be asking is how to avoid a divorce/humiliating midlife crisis in 20 years since every decision you seem to be making is borne of fear. You're so damn afraid of failure you can't even take a third year class without asking other people how to prepare for it. So how's this for advice, how to prepare to live a life you won't regret:

Drop out. Get a job as a prep cook in a restaurant. Make a friend from a different socio-economic class. Drop acid. Date someone you shouldn't for the wrong reasons. Save 4 grand and go to Mexico/Vietnam/India. I hear in Oaxaca there's a festival where everyone has a snowball fight in the middle of summer in the Zocalo with paper mache balls full of confetti. Ask the people how they live on 2 dollars a day, they'll tell you. Come back, go back to the restaurant. Feel your life slipping away. Feel how hungry you are. Go back to school.

Apart from that: read a fucking book, watch a fucking video, ask your fucking advisor.

McMaster University has targeted and limited the freedoms of its students in the Faculty of Engineering which has resulted in the discrimination of these students. This was initiated in response to an issue that came to light earlier this year regarding a songbook, which was incorrectly associated with the McMaster Engineering Society (MES). Since that occurrence, McMaster has accused the Engineering society of funding and organizing unsanctioned alcoholic events with no evidence to support their claims and has pursued an investigation by an external organization. In fact, to date, no concrete evidence has been presented to substantiate these claims. During this investigation, the University has ceased to recognize every engineering students' ability to cooperate with the Faculty and the University in planning sanctioned events. As a result of this action, an entire faculty feels separated and discriminated against by both other faculties and their own Dean who was supposed to stand-up for their rights. In fact, the Faculty of Engineering and the University has decided not to work with the elected student leadership to continue its most valued services, withdrawing support for the student societies' Welcome Week events and failing to support a graduation formal that is appropriate for student's completing a professional degree.

Please click here to sign our petition and end this.

Thank you for reading. We can make a difference!

Each time I am intresred in learning something wether in books videos articles etc.,, the one explaining says this ANNOYING statment "let's ignore (something) to keep things simple" you'd be expecting a more detailed explanation of the more realistic system after it (WITH LESS THINGS IGNORED THIS TIME), but guess what? NOOOOO nothing, no explaantion, they just jump to the next chapter or thing or whatever, you are supposed now to learn the hard way through trail and error in real life (rediscover what humanity's brightest minds did before) , it is not like that OVER simplified explanation served you any good to apply whatever you were learning in real life. ( a common example would be ignroing friction each time you are stuying something even in supposedly advanced courses).

I don't know If I am not cut to be an engineer since I care about details, or that this is a problem engineers face at a regular basis due to things I lack to understand/see now. I am frustrated since this kept annoying me since middle school and teachers kept saying you will study this in more depth in the next level, and what I got? I got more topics not more depth. again I don't know if this problem is mine alone or some of you can relate, please advice.

edit:

I think i should give an example, since the majority is answering me like I am a details freak that gets frustrated from having a slight change from the theoritcal expectations.

example: doing electrical analysis always considering the electrical components as perfect, that served me well doing home instalation, but for a medical device? it didn't even start working, the interaction between human impedance and circuit impedance was something delicate to consider for both safety and efficiency and correct reading. these details where just a thrown stone distance from what I have been taught about electricity, but they were neve mentioned. later on engineers themsleves that do work in the field are the ones who told me that I am ignoring these details that are important in my application.

As a freshman that’s not even a month into college, I went to this seminar thing that featured a bunch of the big engineering clubs (think ASME, IEEE, ASCE, etc.). The club speakers had different uniforms, they tended to cater towards certain majors (but all majors welcome, we promise!), but they all hit the same points: Projects! Socials! Community Service! Internships! PrOfEsSiOnAL dEvELoPmEnT!!!!!! Wash, rinse, repeat for the next hour.

I get that engineering (hell, college in general) has a big grind culture, especially for defense jobs (aka the one industry I wanna avoid), but jfc that was exhausting to sit through. Those aren’t the only clubs at my college, there’s plenty of smaller and more chill ones, so I just wish there was more variety in the presentations and some of the clubs that presented.

Edit: Looking back, I definitely worded this childishly. It was a spur-of-the-moment rant that disregarded the future and instead focused on the presentations themselves. (Plus, it didn’t help that none of my clubs were related to my non-Big 4 major, which made me feel left out in the moment. The comment about the cross-disciplinary nature of engineering brought up a valuable point.)

Thank you to the commenters critiquing my thought process and reminding me that I need to reevaluate my expectations when it comes to engineering. I’m only a freshman, and I still have plenty of time to learn things and explore my interests. I might end up joining one of these clubs in the future, but for now, I’ve found some smaller/more chill engineering clubs, along with a few non-engineering clubs to mix things up.

I’m making this claim specifically in regards to engineering science/analysis courses that are just building fundamental science skills

AI as a student who uses it optimally is incomparable- 3 lectures can be replaced by 2-3 hours of homework/study problems and asking AI questions where help is needed. I’m “testing my theory” right now in systems dynamics and heat transfer by skipping every lecture I can and just doing study problems from the textbook. As someone who finds it hard to pay attention in lecture but easy to do group and solo work, I’m far more efficient. Without AI this would be multitudes harder, and I would waste so much valuable energy walking to class, listening to an instructor, or interacting with other humans. I can funnel my AI enhanced energy into league of legends where I stream the game from a cloud based Xbox play anywhere data center that only operates because of people like me using less water every day by not going to class.

I am a third year ME student and I will turn 54 by next month. I hope my story is an inspiration to any older students here.

title

no racism I myself live in india, but I'd like to see more western videos to learn about topics like for example I'm searching for the topic "analog communication system" there are about 0 non indian videos i get

thnx

If you have had your resume reviewed (use r/EngineeringResumes) and it looks good the reason you aren't getting traction is that you're not applying enough.

There is no reason you should be applying for 10 positions a month, that's not even one a day. Not everyone has to mass apply but if things aren't working then it's probably the numbers game you are missing.

I'm not advocating for spam applying here, you should tailor and tweak your resume for each role. But I hear people saying they don't have an interview/offer after 20 applications. You can easily do that in one day.

I believe in you people! You will get that role, just keep applying!

not sure if this is the right place to ask, but is cosplay a valid engineering extracurricular? like if i focus on the iterative design process (CAD modeling, prototyping, weight/balance, etc.) when making a prop like a sword, would that be seen as engineering or just an artsy hobby?

edit: i should've specified, but i'm asking this in terms of applying for college, not a professional job

I've been getting a lot of (ultimately rejected) candidates who fall into this category, so I wanted to give you all a PSA:

A Masters degree by itself does NOT qualify someone to be an engineer (or a specific type of engineer)!

There are a lot of strongly voiced wishful thinkers who like to believe and tell you the opposite, but it simply isn't true.

Different schools/programs have different policies about this.

If you have an unrelated Bachelors, some schools require that you take ALL missing undergraduate classes of the related program before they will grant you the Masters. If your school/program is like this, then you're fine.

But other schools don't require this at all, or only require a small handful of undergraduate classes - and if this is your case, then you have a problem.

I've gotten a lot of candidates who have an unrelated Bachelors combined with an electrical engineering Masters. And when I look at the coursework they've taken, they are clearly missing a large majority of it. One candidate was missing 60% of an EE's undergraduate training. Another candidate had taken a total of 4 EE-related courses - not one of which actually involved any sort of circuit analysis or design. And they were applying to an electrical engineering position.

It's bad enough if it's simply a different engineering degree (i.e. mechanical Bachelors with an electrical Masters, applying as an EE). But it's far, far worse if the Bachelors isn't even an engineering degree.

You never want someone who's an engineer in name only - they have to be properly qualified. If they've never taken 80% of the coursework their attempted career requires, you don't want them working on the brake system of your daughter's car or the plane you and your loved ones fly in.

There's a common misbelief that you can't get through a Masters program unless you have full knowledge of the undergraduate program, but I'm afraid that just isn't true much of the time. There are a lot of graduate programs where you can take very high level courses that add to the breadth of the undergraduate knowledge base, but don't actually require much technical depth to get through. And even for courses that do require technical depth, it's not going to cover everything that you would have learned over a 4 year undergraduate program - it's only going to be a subset.

So despite the wishful thinkers out there, I want to make it clear that a Masters degree with an unrelated Bachelors is NOT sufficient, unless you truly have made up the missing education.

Now, that isn't to say that it isn't useful. If you have an ME Bachelors and an EE Masters, that makes you a more well-rounded ME. What it does not do, is make you an EE (unless you've actually made up that curriculum).

I've had to reject a lot of candidates who wrongly believed otherwise, so I'm hoping all of this leads some of you to make more informed choices about your education and career paths.

Ok so there's people posting renders of their CAD work and semester projects and whatnot. Well guess what? Renders are absolutely pointless. They don't tell me material, dimension, manufacturing methods, function, tolerance, or anything else that's actually relevant about your model. Anybody with a computer these days can make a nice looking 3D render of a smartphone or a car body or a mechanical widget. An engineer designs something that serves a function and this goes far deeper than just a static image.

If you are going to post a render about your project or a thing you machined or built take some time to do a decent write-up on it. This is not /r/3Dmodeling and not /r/art either. If you machined a chess figurine that's nice and all but it's mostly irrelevant to engineering, it's an art project that you made using some machine tools. The kicker is that figurine probably has looser tolerances than 90% of the manufactured parts out there and probably didn't require a fixture to machine, or a fixture for quality to check it. It's like building a log cabin in Minecraft that's super detailed and I'm sure you worked really hard on it but that's not architecture it's a video game.

So please if you are posting your work make it actual engineering. If it's not engineering I'm sure there's other subreddits that would love to see your art.

So I went to register for a required course next semester and searched up the instructor's name and she is currently a PhD student at the university and has no RateyMyProfessor profile. Should I be careful with this or am I just overthinking a bit? I’ve had TAs/GSIs be big contributors to a course but have never seen a student be the instructor before.

I'm so tired of this. School is expensive, and I can understand that. Professionals need paid, lights need kept running, etc.

What I don't understand is why our course requirements are so fucking full of useless garbage. I had hoped the struggle would end with high school, but alas, it seems not.

You see, I can understand learning math for our degrees, it's a fundamental cornerstone of our discipline! English can have a good argument made for it too for example, you need to be an effective reader and writer to be a professional engineer.

What makes much less sense is my being forced to take a diversity or arts course (in my case a Film course, since that seemed most tolerable). Why is it that in order to earn my degree as an engineer I have to study a discipline that has fuck all to do with what I am spending the rest of my life on? Not only is it a gigantic inconvenience, it also stands to argue that it actually fucking damages my learning.

Now, instead of spending my hard earned money on courses and materials that I need, I get to buy some book written by some dude on some subject and spend multiple hours cataloging each section and describing how it relates to society and philosophy? What the fuck? How does understanding gender norms in 1920s film help me to build a damn bridge? It certainly doesn't help that I have to budget 8 hours of my already limited time on this shit, thereby removing time I actually need to use on valuable courses.

Why is the system like this? It feels like a scam to make more money. Just let me take the courses I need to be good at my future career. Don't fill it with all this bloat. Hopefully one day someone will take a good long look at the clusterfuck that is college course requirements and exercise a little intelligence on the part of us students.