[stiffethomas]

What is the Difficult Part of Mechanical Design and Engineering?

[bostosh]

Suffering through the learning phase and low wages.
Being at the right place at the right time with the right education and prior shop experience.

Is money the incentive? what do you do now? are you suited for boring work?

(my 27yr old daughter blew thru the BA Mech. Eng. course, works in molding shop 70k/yr)
Dad does Ttool & Die, Molds, Grandfather too. It,s in our world,
My contemporaries are retiring a 150k / year, Major aerospace parts programming

[Jim Dawson]

Everyone is different. For me the math is hard, but I love the problem solving.

[plasmamatt]

If you are good at math and physics and have a mechanical mind it really isn't difficult. It is a tremendous amount of work though.

I think one of the more important aspects if you are going to be a productive mechanical engineer though is to have a mechanical mind. I see so many mechanical engineers that graduate with a degree because they are book smart but would struggle to design anything because they don't have a mechanical mind.

[TomB]

If you are good at math and physics and have a mechanical mind it really isn't difficult. It is a tremendous amount of work though.
....

I don't really know what a "mechanical mind" is but I fully agree it is a requirement for a successful ME career. It is not something that is imparted by engineering schools. If you have it when you are a 4 year old putting erector set stuff together you will still have it at 75 after decades of productive work. I recently walked out to the shop where one of the mechanics was trying to put a transmission actuator mechanism together. The mechanic that had taken it apart had left and would not be back for a couple of days, and the guy that inherited the reassembly job was baffled. I looked at the strange casting, about softball size, and the shafts and linkages on the machine. It took me maybe 5 minutes of rolling the casting in my hands before I announced to the mechanic that it goes like 'this' on the shaft before you put 'that' part on. Maybe when I was a 4 year old I could have reached the correct conclusion in a minute and now it took me 5 minutes, but that's what happens with age.

I also don't understand the comments earlier in the thread about having to work for low wages for a long time before getting lucky to find a well paying job. ME's are among the highest paid graduates of any university. I think that continues to be true throughout careers when average wages are considered. I fully realize that popular press sources like to report the huge incomes of some investment fund guys with financial or law degrees but those are the outliers. If you average all the people with finance of law degrees that could only find work by hanging out a shingle in some small town 200 miles west of East Podunk plus the people that hit it big on Wall Street you will likely find that ME's averaged more. Remember, some of the ME's took those bank and marketing jobs that lead to big bucks also.


Tom

[bostosh]

Tom B, you nailed it correctly, right down to the part of M.E. in finance.
My niece, here, brand new M.E, degree from UCSD and went to Wharton did the MBA .
Never worked a minute in an engineering house.
Kills them in the financial world of mergers and acquisitions with brains from engineering mind.
Congrats Tom B..

[murrayadams]

A mechanical mind is a mind that thinks in pictures and is connected to its fingers. Make things AND break things, work out why it didn't work. take it to the test track. too many engineers fear failure so they over engineer. learn a trade. watch engineers fail. learn your materials. then learn the maths and show them how its done.