Mechanical Engineering: Not Only About Drilling Holes In A Block Of Metal!

Before I begin… What is all this??   Well..we are a group of guys (like you.. who a few years back were behind good grades or addicted to counter strike :) ..but now are working in various industries or universities in different parts of the world) who will try to write articles (spanning over wide variety of disciplines) that will give you a glimpse of academia and industry, touch upon some exciting technical topics and try to create a platform to share and discuss ideas!.. Believe me..something which is infinitely exciting when you stumble upon some random group of people with same interests. 

A little bit about myself: 

I did my Mechanical Engineering from BITS-Pilani Goa Campus. After my undergraduate studies I pursued my Masters from University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and currently I am working in Automotive domain mainly focused on electric powertrains.. the so-called future of  cars.

So as a common misconception of most of the first yearites (including me).. mechanical engineering is not only about designing cars or spending time in workshop doing manual labor :) . There are so many different facets of this discipline that one can explore… and it becomes very exciting when it gets interdisciplinary. As a broad division you all know mech spans design, thermal, fluids, and solid mechanics. But these are very broad categories and I feel before you graduate you should be aware of the numerous more branches that you can focus on. So here are some more fields that I can think of..

1. Automotive
2. Control Systems
3. Mechatronics and Robotics
4. MEMS and NanoTechnology
5. Energy Harvesting (Renewable resources)
6. Dynamics and Vibrations
7. Computational Mechanics
8. Fracture Mechanics
9. CFD
10. Bio Mechanics and Bio systems engineering ….umm.. and I guess a lot more.

There are so many universities abroad that specialize in these areas of mechanical engineering (like MIT, UM, Berkeley, UT Austin, RWTHAachen etc etc) and I feel a funded gateway to such research labs is the knowledge about these fields and possibly a couple relevant projects on your resume.. and good contacts.

So, even though I know the CDCs are important and will provide you the basis for the discipline.. and are mandatory for a good GPA ;) … I feel we can spend some time in exploring a few of these. In next coming articles I will try to glance over some of these and try to give you guys a picture of what all exciting things are waiting for you …if you remain in engineering :)

Cya soon…..

--Tejas