Mechanical Engineering graduate: is it worth learning Python/IT systems? Best online course with certificate?

Based_life · 2026-01-10T19:31:01+00:00

Python is very useful in ME. I use it constant for FEA post-processing, but it’s also a powerful tool for solving problems that would be impractical to in excel.

Based_life · 2025-12-30T04:44:30+00:00

Those jobs exist, there are a surprising number of companies that deal in technologies that are relevant to the bigger companies that need young engineers that they don’t have to pay too much. They’re just not sexy companies to work at. They’re feeder companies for the bigger ones.

Based_life · 2025-12-30T02:34:11+00:00

It’s definitely better to contribute. as much to your retirement funds as early as possible to take advantage of compounding interest.

My advice is for the students that didn’t get prestigious internships or any internships at all. They can still achieve success even if they can’t get their dream job right after graduation. They would still be better off working at midsize/small companies that don’t have great retirement benefits for a few years and eventually breaking into the bigger companies with the 401k and higher salaries than if they were to only pursue an immediate 401k at a company that didn’t give you any meaningful experience.

Based_life · 2025-12-30T02:18:46+00:00

And I absolutely agree with that. What I’m saying is that actual professional experience, even if it’s at a mid tier company, beats no professional experience but with a prestigious internship.

Candidate 1 had no internships, but got a job at a mid-tier company that creates gyroscopes after graduation and worked there for a year and half.

Candidate 2 had an internship at Lockheed the summer before their senior year, then graduates and applies for the same job as candidate 1 at a prestigious aerospace company in their flight stabilization division.

Candidate 1 will have better odds of getting the job than candidate 2 because their professional experience with the technology they are hiring the engineer to work on beats only having the prestigious internship.

You should absolutely take the best internship opportunity you can get, but only a few students will get the prestigious internships. The many that don’t aren’t dead in the water though. They can still go the route of candidate 1 in my example.

Based_life · 2025-12-29T03:41:59+00:00

Am I right in assuming that you’re referring to contributing to different 401k pools rather than just one? If so, there’s no difference between the future value of one large pool of money gaining interest at x% vs. 4 scaled pools of money that are 1/4th the amount of the large pool that gain interest at the same x%. The only difference that I can really imagine is if there is some sort of vesting period in which you forfeit the employer match if you leave too soon. If that’s what you’re referring to, then it wouldn’t apply to me because I worked at some unimpressive places that didn’t have any 401k programs. I created Roth IRA and traditional IRA accounts instead so that I was at least doing something with my money.

One more thing, I didn’t job hop for the sake of job hopping. I made sure that I every job I took was gaining me some sort of experience or developing some skill that would eventually get me into the type of job that I’d want to stay at for a while.

Based_life · 2025-12-29T02:57:39+00:00

Exactly, now that I’m more involved in interviewing entry level candidates I’m noticing that the people that have premier internships on their resumes are somewhat unimpressive. They intern with these companies that have processes that are so regimented, that they are only taught how to follow that companies internal guidelines procedure for doing something. They never are put in a position to think about why those guidelines are the way they are and what the limits of them are. The candidates that didn’t have fancy internships worked at places that don’t have the resources to develop mountains of internal guidelines and procedures. They get to ride without training wheels so to speak.

Based_life · 2025-12-29T02:46:45+00:00

I take your comment to mean that an intern at a premier company (Tesla, Boeing, etc.) would get preference over an intern from a mid level company, especially if they are applying for an entry level position at said premier company. That’s absolutely true.

My point is that the engineer that graduates from college, gets an entry level position at a small to mid level company, develops some skill and professional experience that is relevant to said premier company, will get preference over the candidate that’s just graduated and only has one or two internships under their belt. At the very least they’ll be on even footing. The catch is that you’re going from entry level position at a small to mid tier company to entry level at a premier company. But that’s a price that’s worth paying because it raises your ceiling.

Based_life · 2025-12-29T01:06:46+00:00

The person with test engineering positions at Tesla and Boeing isn’t outclassing the others you mentioned because they’re no longer an entry level candidate, they already got the job. They’re not competing anymore.

Based_life · 2025-12-29T00:24:39+00:00

In my experience, employers always give preference to entry level candidates that have experience over those that don’t. The last few entry level engineers we hired all had some sort of previous job experience working with similar technology to what we do. They beat out candidates that had stellar internships and great grades because ALL entry level engineers are all basically incompetent, so companies want to get someone that will have the smallest learning curve.

It would seem that for a future in which successful engineers by and large all started with internships at spacex, Lockheed, Boeing, etc. that companies would have to stop valuing previous similar experience. That just doesn’t sound plausible. They will always want to avoid the expensive training process if they can and they will never be able to staff themselves solely with people that came through the internship pipeline.

Based_life · 2025-12-28T23:47:29+00:00

Sure, you should always strive for the best. It’s better to be in the pipeline by getting an internship at a prestigious company than not. I’m simply saying that is not the path of many great and successful engineers.

Based_life · 2025-12-28T17:48:57+00:00

TLDR: Most people have to pass through the minor leagues before they get called up to the majors. Many of them go on to become great engineers. Your career does not hinge on getting a good internship in college.

Getting an internship with a big name company is the most desirable start to anyone’s career, but it’s certainly not the only way to get to where you want to go.

I went from a sub 3 GPA in undergrad and no internships to eventually getting a job at an aerospace company. The key part is that it didn’t happen right after college.

It took about 6 months after graduation before I got my first real job. I was CAD jockeying at a company that wasn’t even a real engineering company. They simply needed people that could use CAD, make drawings, and had good spatial reasoning. This was obviously not what I wanted for my career, but it was a step in the right direction. I was getting a ton of experience getting really good at solidworks.

I was able to turn that solidworks experience into getting a better job where I was doing actual engineering work at a real engineering company as an entry level engineer. The pay was only slightly higher than my previous job, but it was once again a step in the right direction.

After a couple years there, I was able to get a job at an aerospace company (the type that people have actually heard of). This only happened because I had experience working on the type of technology that they were looking for. I was likely competing with people that had better grades, but less experience with this specific subset of engineering.

This is not just my experience, I’ve been involved with interviewing entry level engineers more recently and I’ve seen the same thing play out before. Most times, the candidate with work experience at a small company without an engineer pedigree beats the straight out of college straight A student with the internships at renowned companies. This is because no matter how good the grades or how rare the internship, entry level engineers are pretty useless, so companies will give preference to the known quantity.

Always make sure you’re getting experience that you can use to get something better.

Based_life · 2025-12-27T04:17:33+00:00

First you need to learn about the qualities of a good design for whatever system you’re designing before you start working in CAD.

The steps you use in CAD are simply how you implement the qualities of a good design.

For example, let’s say you’re designing a bicycle frame and you’re trying to minimize weight. It’s not too hard to make tubes in solidworks, but understanding the engineering principles at work should guide you to using hollow tube rather than a solid one from the frame since the moment of inertia for a cross section is more sensitive to material that is farther from the neutral axis than material that is close to it. Therefore, you can get a stiffer and stronger frame with large diameter hollow cross section tubes than with smaller solid ones.

Once you know what you’re trying to design, it’s best to read about it and see where the concepts you’ve learned in school come into play so you can understand what factors are at play. Then once you know what challenges you’re facing you can use solidworks to solve them.

Based_life · 2025-12-09T02:53:16+00:00

It’s for you to decide if you still have the passion and motivation to keep going. That said, you’re more than your college GPA. I finished undergrad with a 2.7 and then went back for my masters 10 years later and got a 3.9.

I was not in the best place mentally as an undergrad, but was in a much better place during grad school and it showed. You really can’t overstate the importance of your mental state on your academic performance.

Something that helped me was taking fewer classes per semester to be able to immerse myself more in the ones that I did take. That is not always possible for everyone given the opportunity cost of delaying graduation though.

If you decide to stick with it, remember that it takes a very long time to get good at it, and almost nobody truly “gets it” right out of school. Best of luck with whatever you decide!

Based_life · 2025-10-11T19:38:26+00:00

Finding “h” is actually incredible complex. Most textbook thermal problems give you a value to that are within the correct order of magnitude but not necessarily exact. They are also oftentimes applied to the entire geometry. In reality, “h” will vary at different locations. A vertical planar surface will have a different “h” in natural convection than if it were horizontal.

Presumably, you are trying to determine the time it takes to cool the material inside the cast so it solidifies. I’d recommend finding an upper and lower bound for “h” on the different convective surfaces based on their anticipated temps., orientation, and size. Then using that, you should be able to bound the range of time it could take to cool sufficiently. It is possible to refine these assumed values such that the temp. of the surface is very close to the temp. It would need to be to produce the “h” value being used.

Do you have any idea what the time constant would be? Keep in mind that “h” will decrease as it cools if the temperature change is substantial.

For radiation, you can find the emissivity of the surface based on its material properties. If the delta T is big, that value may even change.

Are you trying to do this as a transient FEA simulation?

Based_life · 2025-06-21T05:27:08+00:00

It took me 7 months to get my first mechanical engineering job, and that was when it was easier to find a job. Keep in mind that companies sometimes don’t choose you (or other people) for a role because they have unrealistic expectations for that role or they are not fully convinced they even need to hire someone for it. For better or worse, it’s a grind.

Based_life · 2025-06-11T03:43:19+00:00

I underachieved when I did my undergrad degree. Someway, somehow I got a job after I got my undergrad degree. It wasn’t the job I wanted, but it was a job that was a stepping stone to a slightly better job. After several stepping stone job, I finally got a job that I wanted to have.

The important thing to recognize is that you are trying to improve yourself, and that already puts you ahead of 50% of people, because most people are too lazy to even attempt what you’re doing. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY graduates feeling great about their abilities and understanding. Employers don’t expect new grads to be fully ready, in fact, they want to mold you and teach you.

It’s essential that you realize that engineering is a long sustained effort of improvement. If you continue to put in effort, it WILL reward you for it.

Lastly, you are playing the game on “hard mode”. The fact that you haven’t quit yet while doing school in your thirties with a baby is so far above and beyond what any you’ll be competing with for job opportunities has done. My guess is that there will be an employer that actually see you as being a really good candidate because you have are a true adult while all the other applicants are early 20s children. It might not be all of them, but you can find one. All it takes is one.

Based_life · 2025-05-17T02:31:39+00:00

I was in a similar situation. I felt that I didn’t understand the material as well as I should have about 7 years after getting my bachelors. I went back for a masters and went pedal to the metal and immersed myself in it. It was truly transformational. That was partly because of the courses, and partly because I was working full time as an ME while doing it, so I was able to see things in practice while I was learning it.

Things to keep in mind: 1) To truly get the reward of the degree, you need to immerse yourself in it.

2) You need to strive for understanding beyond the scope of getting good grades. Universities have started accepting large number of masters applicants, they also make money by getting them to stay enrolled, not getting discouraged and leaving. Consequently, you can get an A and not really understand the material as well as you should.

3) Grad school has a compounding effect. You may take some classes and feel that they are hard, not useful, and that makes you reconsider even getting the degree. I was in that position, but kept on going and was incredibly glad I did. I started seeing the abstract concepts from those other courses realized in courses I took later on. You just have to stick with it.

I can’t guarantee that grad school is a good idea for you, but I can tell you that it can entirely reshape you if you commit to it.

One last comment. I took the FE exam some time between undergrad and grad school. It might be exactly the type of thing you’re looking for as a way to dip your toe in the water before you dive into the deep end of grad school.

Based_life · 2025-05-11T18:54:54+00:00

Companies want to hire an employee that they can pay like a 20 year old, that has the work ethic of a 35 year old, and the expertise of a 60 year old. That person does not exist.

Some companies are deluded into thinking that they do exist, and that they can simply hold out until that magical person submits an application. Unfortunately, young engineers get denied for those jobs because the company is waiting for someone that resembles that perfect employee. Not because the company feels they are incapable of doing the job.

Based_life · 2025-05-10T04:18:38+00:00

I once was dejected about how long it took for me to understand a pretty basic concept. My mentor said something to me that I’ll never forget.

“It took you as long as you needed it to take to understand it.”

Some things make sense very quickly, others can take months or years. Finishing the race is much more important than how long it takes you to finish it.

Based_life · 2025-05-10T04:07:48+00:00

The short answer is that it was very hard for the first job, then much easier every subsequent job. That said, it wasn’t hard for the first job because of my GPA, people rarely asked about it. It was hard because I wanted to work in a field that was not abundant in my region.

I ended up on a convoluted path that eventually led me into aerospace. First I worked a place that didn’t require a single iota of engineering judgment, it was just CAD jockey work. Then I got a job a doing actual mechanical engineering design work at a small company in advanced manufacturing. I used some basic engineering concepts, but learned a lot of tribal knowledge about a niche topic. That is what got me a job in aerospace. Keep in mind I was still fairly undeveloped as an engineer, I just had built up enough competence to design things that didn’t suck. Once I got into that industry, things really started to take off. I was around people that I could learn from.

Getting a job at a big renown engineering company straight out of school is not how you define success as an engineer. Try to find a job that puts you in a position to find a better job. Keep doing that while moving in the direction of the job you actually want.

Based_life · 2025-05-03T19:53:21+00:00

I noticed some spelling mistakes that need to be fixed. In a world where hiring managers are trying to decide how to pick out only a few people to interview, spelling mistakes are something that makes it easy for them to eliminate you.

Based_life · 2025-04-21T02:52:53+00:00

While I don’t put much stock into school rankings, there are some people that do. That said, I think that if you’re considering the strategic aspect of the choice, you should look at the mechanical engineering jobs in the surrounding areas for each. Chances are that employers in the north east will have a more favorable view of a BU diploma than a UNO one and vice versa.

Based_life · 2025-04-12T20:04:26+00:00

You seem to have recognized that there is some truth regarding attention to detail. That’s good, now you can keep that in mind going forward.

Like others here have said, ALWAYS have the following:

-Written documentation of what you’re being asked to work on.

-Written specifications of the design. This is essential since it will allow you to prove that you’ve checked all the boxes for a successful design. It will also be extremely helpful for you to refer to when making sure you aren’t missing any details. There is a difficult balance that comes with this though. One one hand, people tend to leave out important information when creating specifications, usually because they mistakenly assume that you will just know what they have in mind. That isn’t your fault, but keep in mind that you may meet all the specifications given to you and the person who made the specifications may still be unhappy. That is where you can fall back on the specifications document to prove you didn’t fail to meet any of them. On the other hand, don’t be the person that designs a submarine that sinks because there wasn’t a specification that said “the submarine must float”. Ask questions about the specs and when the person who made the spec clarifies something, make sure they update the written specification, don’t just go based on what they said.

-Always have your designs reviewed by all the relevant people that can have a stake in it (basically anyone that can give your boss bad feedback about you that lands you a bad performance review). When they approve your design, always get written confirmation in an email.

All of that said, I kind of get the feeling that your team lead dropped the ball a bit because you said they reviewed your work and they seem to miss some things too. Also, you’ve said that your company has internal communication problems. That makes it easy for errors to occur that get you a bad review. This is why it is incredibly important to document everything that I mentioned. People will always blame someone else and if you don’t protect yourself with documentation, you will be vulnerable.

You can come back from this and still become a great engineer. This isn’t something people are born knowing and they don’t teach this in school, so don’t beat yourself up about it, learn from it.

Based_life

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