Hello all,
I recently entered college as a mechanical engineering major. I absolutely love innovating, planning out, and trying to invent new products. I am an analytical dreamer - I am someone who can think up an idea and clearly compose my thoughts of it in detail. In high school I was student body president and robotics team captain. In writing my nickname was “the essay whisperer.” I debated well and loved politics (and still do). As a teenager, I wanted to be a film director; though, as I matured I saw the chances of becoming one were slim. So, I decided to go to college to get a degree to fall back on. I picked mechanical engineering because I thought I’d better be able to implement the ideas I had - I thought it would give me the ability to actually turn my thoughts into real things. Now in college, I get bored with CAD, and programming sucks. Surprisingly, calculus is somewhat interesting to me. It’s something structurally firm in an equivocal world. I feel like I should be someone leading, explaining to a group of engineers what I need done, not the one taking the orders and figuring out how to make the idea work. I feel like engineering is restricting my mind (as weird as it sounds). I do not want to sit at a desk all day working on math equations and drawing up CADs. I want to work with people. I want to be a voice in a dying world. I want to make a change. I probably sound like a nutcase now, but that’s okay. I really don’t know what to do. Should I change my major? What should I consider changing it to? Should I stick with ME?
Am I too early to get into any interesting classes Mechanical Engineering has to offer? Could me completing only one year of college have something to do with my uneasiness?
The problem isn’t the major, but the people you’re encountering around it…
Leadership consists of absorbing the known, taking it further through discovery/analysis and communicating your extension of the known to other people.
People we call “leaders” run the gamut from people whose “leadership” is according to established protocols, as, for instance, religious authorities in highly organized churches, to people who have gone to much greater extent in leadership, e.g. founders of new movements or modes of thought, like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jesus Christ, Isaac Newton, Galileo. On one end of this spectrum the journey is short, generally uneventful, with large security, but the journey of the leadership-extensive people is long, eventful and insecure. True leaders have to fight the current.
Simply doing an engineering degree and executing its principles without much creative building on them, even if you direct others in that execution, constitutes not going far along the leadership spectrum.
Somehow, in your classes, through professors and/or textbooks, the presumption that you will go no further than executing the engineering “known” has entered your mind. But this is actually other peoples’ notion, and you don’t have to entertain it.
Early in your life you learned how to talk and understand others. This was not the final achievement in your life. On the contrary, it facilitated your achievement of additional things. Just as you don’t have to stop achieving at learning how to talk, you don’t have to stop at learning the principles of engineering.
To lead you need material (known things), the ability to expand on known things and the ability to communicate your extension of knowledge to other people. A leader has to lead people through some undertaking, and there is always knowledge required in the elements of any undertaking. You are right to be learning mechanical engineering if you want to advance society in the conception and design of new mechanical things.
Every field is apt to offer its practitioners a choice between comfortable stagnation and opportunities for advancing existing knowledge. You are at the moment among some people who have chosen the former (what I think you mean by “dying world”), but you don’t have to make their choice. Just take their knowledge (which MAY take four years) and then go with it to someplace more inspiring.
The first two years of engineering are pretty standard fare, lots of science classes, and maybe a few very easy, no prior knowledge necessary engineering classes. Yes, you need to learn CAD and programming, but honestly, that shouldn’t take you more than a year, then you just need to pick up some tools and tricks as you need them.
It really changes junior and senior year, hopefully into something that you like more (solving problems). These problems are still easier than in industry, since you need an answer in an hour, or a week, or maybe a semester. Real industry problems can take many decades to solve, and even short term teams of people for months or even years.
I like the idea that you are interested in innovating, but maybe it is good to figure out how to do that in some concrete way … if calculus is real to you … maybe you just need to wait for junior year.
In the meantime, try to find some lab work with a professor that involves real hardware, even if it is just putting something together for a grad student. The innovation sometimes is just finding a better way to put it together or realizing 2 pieces is better than 3, or using a harder plastic, or whatever.
Leadership in engineering often means being well at the lead of the pack, so you have to have some basics in your bag of tricks. Also, explaining things to engineers … well, they know more than you right now, soon you will catch up, 4 years is a fast track to be a professional.
World will die only if we do not have people to invent the solutions of today and tomorrow, using real-life hardware (maybe software) too to solve real-life problems.
I would only leave ME if you feel you are better suited to say politics or medicine or say social work as a means of improving the the lives of others. If you want to build the better widget, ME is a good place to be.
I think technology today needs a lot of technical knowledge to develop.
Then again, you ain’t going to make policy at 20 either (unless you are a very rare bird indeed).
I have developed a lot of interesting hardware using mathematical equations and CAD, plus a whole lot of knowledge of what to put in those equations and CAD drawings and what the analytical results mean, and then how to keep tweaking the design to get it to work, or better yet, work well.
Now that you know CAD, you can really start drawing up some fun things or your serious better widget on your own. It would be great if you could have someone work with you to start understanding why you can build one thing and not another, how all the pieces go together. You can tinker with stress analysis, thermal analysis, fluid analysis/CFD, anything and everything you want. Depending on your school, there may be ways to start making prototypes of almost anything, and making it out of cardboard may just be enough at first (not to mention 3D printing, etc).
And certainly, go ask your department if they have any on-going projects that you can help on (and if it’s sweeping the lab floors, maybe just do that so you can get in the door and see some real work getting done, they will have you do something interesting quickly).
@jjwinkle has some great ideas above
“You are right to be learning mechanical engineering if you want to advance society in the conception and design of new mechanical things.”
probably has a corollary for every field of engineering and many other product creating STEM fields.
Many engineers actually do the later tasks: analyzing, building, implementing, integrating, testing mechanical things. However, there is always a need for innovative, creative, bold people who can sell their ideas, to start developing things we need or want in 3-5 years.
Wow. That cleared things up very well. I believe I am being too nearsighted. I just recently had a conversation with someone about how many college students are abandoning innovation and creativity because they are taught the concrete facts in their major and not taught to look further (not completely the educators fault though - it’s a disease among students). This is how people like Dean Kamen are successful without a complete college education - it’s a mindset the student must create and keep and as long as they know enough of the skill to build on that mindset they can succeed. I believe you stated that clearer than in what I just wrote, but my point is that your post really solidified that discussion I had with a friend. Thank you so much for your help. I plan on sticking to my major now.
Sorry, this was to both of the above people. Thank you jj, especially.
Also, @PickOne1 thank you for the lab tip. I am hoping to get into research with the professors. My ME Chair gave me some names to contact so I will talk to them over the next semester to see what I can do. I am looking to see if there are 3d printers at my university. That would be amazing. Thank you so much for the tips!