I'll be graduating soon from college with an aeronautical

If you're getting job placement before you get your degree, take it. See if they'll let you get some time in the shop (if they have one) or just make a point to hang out with the machinists.

If you don't get placed, take the extra semester/year for the classes while you look for work. Even if you do get placed, they might let you take 6 months to a year to stay in class. It's your money but see if they'll pay for some of it.

>>1209078
This.

And it's important you know the difference between a screwdriver a bus driver.

The biggest issues with engineers is the design the unmanufacturable, the un maintainable, or they just go too far. A bit of time with tools will ground you effectively and make you a realistic, practical and effective engineer.

Good luck on getting your peng as well.

>>1209072
Yes, and God bless you.

This is a holy war for me, and I could give you all the reasons why, but I'll just leave you with one thing:

Do realize that your entire design has to be grounded in a real process, and not some magical CAD hand waving. What was trivial for you to imagine will be a suicide mission for a machinist to implement. A lot of older folks that couldn't conveniently make batshit insane designs with CAD in their day and worked in shops before doing engineering work understand this, but the new blood often doesn't. Think about how hard you're boning whoever will have to actually make the part you're designing and save the poor guy any trouble you can.

work on a modern car by yourself a bit, you'll learn why engineers are sometimes despised.


>bonus points if car is German or Swedish from 1995 or later

I'm a technician with an engineering degree. The best engineers I've worked with either started as technicians or are often working alongside us. The poor engineers send the prints and you.never see them...nothing beats real world experience when designing. So either take a machines job before moving up or spend as much tune as possible with the people your designing for, being the prints with tough and talk with them. I've taken the technical route because of similar concerns and honestly I make as much it'd more than the engineers designing to job.

>>1209072

Once the cash starts rolling in, consider whether or not you enjoy working with your hands as well as your mind.

If you like making things, get a drill press, small lathe and a welder. Later on a small mill. Learn how to cast aluminum to make the basic structure that you finish on your mill.

Guys who can weld and machine things can make lots of cool shit. Restore an old car, or modify a newer one.

The point is that you will do this because it is fun, but you will learn 100x more than you will in the typical class, and the guys on the shop floor will realize that you are the real deal compared to most design engineers.

>>1209072
Talk with the guys actually making the shit you design because they know more shit than you and your degree means toilet paper to them.
So if you make something unmakeable they'll know you're a , so ask them about what would work before making it and then revising it

>>1209072
Following with interest, I am in a similar situation. One thing I do know is that asking questions and indicating you realize they have a lot more practical, valuable knowledge on the subject is usually appreciated.

>"Hi mechanical man, what did you think was shitty on the last design? How would you solve it? What did you like?" "Well dear theoretical tommy, that one hole was impossible to get to. What the fuck were you thinking?!"

>>1209674
>what did you think was shitty on the last design?

And regrettably once in a while you have to build a difficult product.

We kinda backed into a design for a stepper motor for a TRW satellite that simply could not meet the specification. Another vendor had already spent two years and had given up. Why we took the job is beyond me. Arrogance, I suppose.

Anyway, I was named project engineer for that turd where about 10 different diameters had tolerances and concentricity requirements of nominal - 0.0002 inches. Not plus/minus, just minus two fucking tenths.

We only had to make about 20, because that's how it is in the space business, 20 units for about 30 grand apiece that are not much different from Japanese steppers you can buy for $100. Of course those don't have beryllium housings. Amazing what the military will pay to shave a few ounces off a satellite.

I'd occasionally have to go out to the shop and deal with marginal parts. The machinists were all cool, but they had to think I was the biggest dipshit who ever lived.

>>1209734
>10 different diameters had tolerances and concentricity requirements of nominal - 0.0002 inches. Not plus/minus, just minus two fucking tenths.

Did you guys edm the whole thing or did you grind it down?

>>1209734
Interesting! You seem to have a bit of experience here. Could you tell some stories? Anything you did in the beginning of your career you now do differently and all?

>I will be going from university directly into a management traineeship at an energy behemoth, very interested in ways to not look a complete idiot when working with people who really know their shit. And I don't mean by pretending or evading, but by being honest where my knowledge stops.

>>1209072
Thank you, anon, for giving a shit about this. Engineers like you who understand there is a gap between design and actual manufacture are pure gold and terribly rare.

>>1209734
>ten thousandths of an inch for some parts, thousandths for others

I'm EE but got a "find out what's wrong with this" project from a company that makes generic high-quality vacuum parts.

We were supposed to try and figure out why these offset rotors worked and some didn't (this was a thing where like they'd sell 5-10 a year, and one or two might not work, but the seemingly identical one they'd send out would).

Let's go over it shall we:
>this company only made duplicates - they didn't HAVE the original equipment
>some of the measurements went to +.0000/-.0002 (yeah)
>we only had access to typical machine shop equipment (calipers, micrometers)
>they'd rather us find the mistake, instead of trying to describe better measuring and manufacturing steps
>dimensions were strange, someone brought it up, there'd be like .551 inches... well that's 1.3995cm, company would just ignore me when I'd mention they should convert it all to metric and round the numbers to reasonable things

I don't know what the guy was thinking letting students take the project (he has a Doctorate in Industrial Engineering), or than a "let's see if they can come up with ANYTHING"

The company even admitted at the end that basically it was a "cut once measure never" process.

>>1209782
And one of the best parts of this project: they didn't have a record for us of which parts worked and which didn't, all we had were like 6 large and 5 and small and were asked to find the discrepancies from the diagram.

>>1209763
>grind it down?

All the critical parts were ground. Amazing work.

>>1209774
>Could you tell some stories? Anything you did in the beginning of your career you now do differently and all?

Well of course your entire demeanor and style changes once you have proven yourself. The snot-rags who wouldn't give you the time of day treat you totally differently once you have solved a problem that they couldn't even comprehend.

I have stories, but almost all of the good ones have bitter or sad overtones. In one case, we had been failing miserably to meet schedule, and another project from hell was in my hands. The customer informed us that we were going to have a meeting and there would be visitors there. Turned out some of the visitors were wearing uniforms, some were wearing suits, and none were actually introduced.

They also paid a huge amount to bring in a consultant who was going to make sure we didn't bullshit the electromagnetic details. Well, he was late, and I'm at the head of the conference room table waiting to start, and nobody had sat within 4 seats of me. It was me against about 20 guys and a few women.

And then the door opens. It's a consultant from California who had flown across the US to check us out before, and he was my pal. He walks past all the guys who were paying him, right up to the front and sat down beside me. It was smooth sailing from that point on.

>>1209785
>And then the door opens.
Thanks for the laugh, must have been a huge relief on your side and bit of a laugh for you as well.

>The snot-rags who wouldn't give you the time of day treat you totally differently once you have solved a problem that they couldn't even comprehend.
If I understand correctly, you would say to just give it time and prove yourself. Makes sense actually. I will probably even try not to be a dick about it if/when that moment comes!

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>>1209072
I'll say something that might not seem obvious: take shit apart. You'll see regardless of product, there's commonalities: holes/screws arranged in arrays, rounded edges near contact edges or moving bits, etc. A lot of designs are very simple, and it's for both manufacturing and conceptual reasons. It'd be nice to make overly complex designs but you'll find they really aren't necessary. Like the whole point of holes in shit like concrete blocks or the tube steel in the chassis of my car, there's basic principles like bending and "maximum useful effect" from designing things certain ways.

>>1209782
>>1209783
I misplace my work docs (might have been on a broken flash drive) but managed to find the motor: ESDP 12 and ESDP 30

Fucking things were spiral scroll pump things, with the actual pumping being done by the offset rotor and the spirals in the plate. A flat goddamn teflon seal is what kept the plate from rubbing against the body and sealed the air channel.

>>1209783
>they didn't have a record for us of which parts worked and which didn't, all we had were like 6 large and 5 and small and were asked to find the discrepancies from the diagram.

That's what makes it fun. Dealing with unreality.

We managed to create a stepper motor that defied physics in such a weird manner that we did not even notice it in our tests, and it wasn't until Hughes Aircraft had it in a higher assembly that we got a call asking why the fuck was the rotor jumping half a step when they removed power.

Everyone at our end said it can't do that. So the shipped the motors back, and every engineer had to go out to the motor lab to have it proven to them, including myself. And since it seemed to defy all the rules, we had no clue as to what could be happening.

After sweating for two weeks, it literally was one of those "the answer seemed to fall out of the sky" deals. I wrote a short computer program to prove the theory and showed the printout to my boss. He said "no way", and was done. I said "do you mind if I run it past Bob?". Bob was my boss's boss, the smartest man I've ever known.

Well, my boss frowns, but we have a meeting with Bob. He looks at my shit and kinda screwed up his expression for a minute or two, and said "mark up the prints and build one". The guys over in Industrial Engineering came back and said I had made a mistake, because I was asking for a small error in the stator skew. I said it was intentional.

The guy from the tool room calls up. Same discussion.

Anyway, the sample worked, as did all the rebuilt parts. The trick is hard to explain, but the tolerance in the fixture that was used to bond the stator lams had the usual plus/minus 5 thousands, and that was where the parts were going off the cliff. I just pushed the lams in the "wrong" direction far enough for that not to happen.

As I said, it's hard to understand. My boss retired early about six months later and went to manage a golf course.

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>>1209791
>somethings rubbing, what do we do
>uhh, grind it down and see if it fixes it?
Fucking rocket science man

>>1209798

YOU'RE HIRED! Just name your price, sir.

>>1209785
>Amazing work
How much did the company make?

>>1209814
>How much did the company make?

I'm not sure what you are asking.

How many products? Mostly motors and gearheads for satellites, the shuttle, and the space station. There was a period of time when any astronaut took a piss they used basically a vacuum to control the piss, and the motor that created the vacuum was one of my designs. Each astronaut had his or her personal adapter for the vacuum hose.

How much money? A normal aerospace profit, which probably would seem obscene to an outsider, and probably was.

What percentage of the components? The beryllium housings were made by a company that was good with beryllium which is toxic for one thing. We made all the stainless steel parts, the stator and rotor. The samarium cobalt magnets were made by a magnet producer.

My brother is a mechanical engineer. He gets job offers, promotions, raises, and mad respect based on the fact that whatever he designs he can also walk into a shop and build it from scratch.

>>1209783
Forensic engineering sounds like fun.