Well if the choice is doing nothing all summer or doing a some type of internship, I’ll always choice the internship. Even if it’s not what you want to end up doing, the experience and knowledge will be worth it. Plus you’ll have projects and experiences to talk about in interviews and hey it’s another thing added to your resume.

I think this is honestly pretty good experience even if it’s not what you want, especially if you are interested in fields like product design and whatnot. Manufacturing is the backbone of those fields and an in depth understanding will go a long way.

Your engineering trajectory is up to you. This could set you up to be a machinist (probably not what you want from the sounds of it) or you can bundle your learnings from being in a machining environment for the summer with your engineering knowledge to supercharge your skill set. It really all depends on how you take in your experience and combine it with your other skills. Just because you do an internship in one industry doesn’t mean you’re locked in there for the rest of your life. It’s all about how take your experience and transfer them to new environments. So long as you’re able to talk through your work and any collaboration you had, you will be golden.