Kaitlyn
What do you do as a mechanical engineer or a computer engineer
#engineer
2 answers
G. Mark Stewart
G. Mark’s Answer
It's difficult to generalize from my own career. I started in a company that operated under the philosophy that engineers were interchangeable. Specifically, they wanted engineers and scientists in this particular arm to be flexible enough to do any part of a project from problem definition to requirements to design and implementation and management. I was lucky enough to have opportunities to work in all those areas. Particularly for problems that I'd gotten patents for solving, I also traveled the country and did presentations while also having the opportunity to interface with customers to get more insight and problems to solve.
In general, most engineers and scientists in my experience have tended to focus on one or a few of those areas at any point in their career. When I was investigating problems, I was also very fortunate to have access to labs and tools to begin prototyping and at one point, building hardware to support the laboratory team I was managing, who happened to be extremely talented and driven. Many engineers will be working on teams. The current trend of "design thinking" and the like is again encouraging engineers and scientists to be multidisciplinary and work on teams with this same quality. This gives the team variety of points of view for solving problems. So as an engineer, you may end up working on any aspect of a project, either longterm, or for the duration of that particular project.
In computer engineering, I was primarily designing programs and implementing them. As I progressed in my career, I was afforded more latitude to choose where I worked in the process. In my particular case, I enjoyed working solutions from end to end -- as I said, from the customer contact to the problem definition all the way to testing, deployment and support, both sales and lab developments.
The bottom line is that engineers do a lot of different things, but each engineer may settle in a particular area best suited for them.
Rickey Dixon
Rickey’s Answer
The mechanical engineering profession is very broad and covers a range of specialties from automotive, mechatronics, robotics, design, sales and many other areas within it.
Most mechanical engineer colleagues I know are designers where they design parts in effort toward building machinery that will make a product such as machines that make food, beverages, cars, etc. These engineers spend a lot of their time using AutoCAD or SolidWorks to design equipment that will produce a goods and services.
There are also mechanical engineers who are project managers that manage the entire process in a manufacturing facility in order to make sure the goods and services (i.e. cars, foods, etc.) are made exactly the way we need them.
Lastly, there are robotics engineers who will program, simulate, implement and troubleshoot robots in a facility as these robots help make goods for us.
So to answer your question, it really depends on your interest in the area of mechanical engineering as your interest will lead you along path that will require certain skills to develop in order to do it well.