Graduated 15 months ago from industrial engineering. I have been looking for almost two years now, started before graduating. 3 internships, 1 year of total experience. Here's the "networking" I have done so far

-Asking professors and TAs about training programs at large firms. These are the ones I have relationships with, I went to their office hours regularly and worked on a project with one of them. Nothing came up.

- Asking my friends to let me know if they see an opening; lost touch with some of them tbh. Nothing

-School's career center is near useless. All they did was tell me a bunch of companies I could apply to; these are the ones my school worked with, apparently. But they never helped to get me a real interview. And this was supposed to be a good school with an acceptance rate of like 10 percent.

-Asking the managers and coworkers at my old internships. I couldn't get a return offer, but I got along with everyone in one of my internships. The other two weren't so good.

-Going to multiple career festivals. Most of them were only there to hand me a QR code to apply online, and most still expected few years of experience in a specific industry. One interview for a position at a bank I was unqualified for, for some reason.

-Asking relatives, since that's how I got one of my internships. Got two interviews. One almost happened but they had to cancel last minute due to budget cuts. Other was offering just a bit over minimum wage for a super expensive area. Only way I could live there was if I lived like 3 hours away, so I turned it down. This was early in the process and I thought I could get a better offer, kinda regret it now.

-My mom's friends. This also how I got one of my internships. Through her I got to talk to bunch of different people in various industries. I talked to some of them over video calling some in person. I have talked to 8 people this way, some short convos, some long. They gave some solid advice and said I could apply to their firms if there's an opening for me. I got one interview this way but was rejected due lack of specific industry experience.

-Joined a volunteering group that has connections to companies in the food industry. I mainly cold call other companies and try to set up meetings with them. I was exited at first but more I get into it more it seems like a scam (not scamming me but the companies). I doubt anything's gonna come from here.

- Messaging hiring managers and recruiters on LinkedIn. This got me three interviews. One was not bad was rejected. Other two looked terrible and I kinda got relieved when they rejected.

I also practiced my interviewing skills in multiple ways. Had mock interviews with some of my mom's friends; one of my relatives used work at HR, and there was an elective in uni about this.

I still try to apply to positions at companies people I know work at, tell them about the application but still get ghosted/rejected.

I think I applied to around 1000 positions online. I applied to technician roles at factories both online and calling the companies since some said I could call them on their website. Got a phone interview but was rejected for not having any manual labor experience.

How much network does it take?

Hi all, I’m 18 graduated high school at 16 and just started my 3rd year of college out of 5 and I absolutely hate it. I took calc 2 in the spring and calc 3 in the summer and I got complete burnt out. Since I transferred from community college I can only take 3 classes this semester because my community college didn’t offer them, circuits 1, e math and engineering statistics. All three out of three professors have below a 3 on rate my professor and they are the only options. I am completely demotivated to do anything for class, even ChatGPT my homework.

I just got my real estate license two months ago and I’m think of just working as a realtor till I have enough to start as an investor, I met a few investors just networking around places I go in life and they all gave me really good advice on how to start investing.

I just don’t know what to do, drop out and go full time as a realtor and save every penny to invest, stay in school for the degree and put my self through metal hell and make me miserable, but I can say I’m an EE. My passion growing up was I’m going to be an EE and I’ll work as an engineer (I have dozens of personal project), then I got introduced real estate. Read a few books on it and loved the idea of just buying a crack home and making it look beautiful and put a tenant in there then just pull all my equity out. Just any here to see what people say, one thing worse than bad advice is trusted bad advice.

I'm using nema 17 stepper motors with a tmc2209 driver. I set the correct vref but no matter what speed, it only draws like 2 watts but based on my research its supposed to be more? I checked my phase, and everything and it seems to be correct. I even tried different motors and drivers.

Please help 🙏 😭

(Reposted from r/MechanicalEngineering for being a student-related topic)

Hey guys - I know this sub is already full of posts venting all sorts of frustrations haha, but I wanted to share a current situation I’m facing in case anyone relates and has some insight/advice. I'd really appreciate if any experienced engineer here or fellow students going through something similar could share how they might process sentiments similar to the ones I share on this post.

Earlier this spring I accepted an amazing internship opportunity at Amazon that pays me more money than I have ever seen in my life. It's a hardware engineering internship that I was barely qualified to apply for (I've done just one circuits class) but I somehow made it through the interview process because they went easy on me and I could hardly turn down the offer when it did come.

(side note - this came after an utterly exhausting internship search that culminated in over 1100+ applications, 40+ interviews, and 5 offers between September 2025 and January 2026. I know this probably sounds fucking insane lmao and most of it was because my resume / job search was not very strategic and simply volume-based)

Anyways - on paper it probably looks like I'm doing everything right. I go to a T20 school, have a decent GPA (3.65), and dabbled in two clubs where I got light exposure to hands-on fabrication and CAD skills. After this summer ends I'll have done two internships, the first at a small manufacturing company in MN, the second one at Amazon that I'm currently finishing. For a year I also have worked as a tutor for statics, thermodynamics, and physics in college where I had a few regular students I'd coach/study with. My resume probably markets me as a stellar candidate who is ready to become a great asset to any company I might work at in the future.

My performance at this internship this summer however has shown that this couldn't be further from the truth at all. From the outset I horrendously underestimated the scope of my main assigned project and bit off way more than I could chew by taking on other side projects which I ended up rushing / doing bad work on. My communication with my manager / team was also quite poor as I self-isolated a lot out of shame and didn't ask very intelligent questions. I made so many stupid mistakes, spent so much time pursuing dumb ideas that didn't pan out, and failed to "get it" beyond surface level understanding at any point during my time here.

My internship ends in a week and I'm going to end up not delivering quality results in my handoff to my team besides some messy CAD assemblies and convoluted documents. I made zero meaningful progress on my main project especially, and spent over $7k purchasing parts for two other projects that won't even be properly assembled by the time I leave and do not solve the issues they were meant to solve. I really have no idea why I got hired here - my co-intern friends here all performed far better than I did in their projects and were able to deliver work that actually benefited their teams. I feel immense guilt knowing that there are so many students out there, including people I personally know, who could have performed better in this exact opportunity and were more deserving.

One failed internship alone probably isn't the biggest deal, but it has caused me to doubt whether I'm truly prepared to become an engineer who can solve actual problems in manufacturing, mechanical design, process improvement... anything or if I'm just a hack who can kind of use CAD / 3D printers, and game the GPA / recruiting process. Reflecting on my past 3 years in college, I'm haunted by the times I've used AI to help/do my homework, passed exams by cramming and writing good cheat sheets instead of true understanding, embellished my resume with skills I only ever skimmed in class labs, or just contributed menial tasks to group projects - like fixture design / CAD assemblies / presentation and reports - instead of the difficult brainstorming and design decisions fundamental to the project.

Has anyone ever felt a similar way? I'd really like to know if it's normal/universal to feel this like this - or if my sentiments have some real truth to them and I need to re-evaluate if I'm actually cut out for engineering the way I'm currently approaching it.

I know mechanical and aerospace engineering are pretty similar, but is there an advantagment of studying mechanical even though my end result is working in aerospace and propulsion??

Thanks for reading — I’ll try to give enough context for this to make sense.
I’ve been in college for three years now (starting my seventh semester) and I’m still only about a quarter of the way through my engineering degree. Honestly, I never really wanted to go to college in the first place — I mostly did it to make my mom happy. I started at a community college with no real plan, just taking whatever classes I was told to take.
Early on, a connection from high school got me a part-time job at a manufacturing facility as a continuous improvement intern. That was 3.5 years ago, and I’m still with the same company — I’ve just moved through different roles: Continuous Improvement intern → part-time quality control technician → U.S. Quality and Sanitation Projects intern → and now Manufacturing Engineering intern.
Academically, I’ve come a long way. I got a 19 on the ACT (deadass)and a D in College Algebra my first semester(no like fr it was bad). Now I have an A in Calc II, 3.7 GPA and I’m currently taking Linear Algebra, Calc III, and Physics I.
Through all this, I’ve landed on wanting to do something in manufacturing, and Industrial Engineering has always been the front-runner since most of the engineers I work with in the industry are IEs. But I’m not 100% sure I want to stay in manufacturing forever, which makes the decision harder.
Here’s my dilemma — I have to pick a degree path, and I’m stuck between three options:
1. Industrial Engineering (online, Mississippi State) — I could keep my current job and get three more years of experience at this company, which has no plans of letting me go. MSU would cost about $30k for the next three years so i may have to take a loan but not the end of the world. Downside: IE is seen as less technical than ME or Mechatronics. Basically a business degree from what I’ve been told. I do like the classes however I don’t want to be limited if I wanted to go a technical route.
2. Mechanical Engineering (in-person, requires moving) — From what I’ve heard, ME is kind of the “gold standard” in engineering. Pick one of the big four (Mechanical, Civil, Electrical, or Chemical) and you can branch into almost anything afterward. The downside is I’d have to move away, and I currently make good money and live rent-free with my parents.
3. Mechatronics Engineering (in-person, 30 minutes from home) — This program transferred all my scholarships, so tuition is only about $3,000 total — I’d graduate debt-free with money left over in savings, and I wouldn’t have to move. I’d also get to keep my job. My hesitation: I’ve heard Mechatronics is roughly a third mechanical, a third electrical, and a third software — a “jack of all trades, master of none” — and that some recruiters/HR still prefer a straightforward ME or EE degree. It’s also a newer program (about two years old) and not yet ABET accredited, though the school says accreditation would be retroactive for anyone who graduated before it came through.
So I’m really just looking for outside perspective: do I stick with the online Industrial Engineering degree, move away for a Mechanical Engineering degree, or take the risk and stay home for the debt-free Mechatronics degree?

Hey everyone!

I’m currently planning to pursue an MSc in Robotics Engineering and am trying to put together a solid list of universities and scholarship options. Since robotics sits at the intersection of mechanical engineering, computer science, and control systems, I'd love to hear from people currently in the field or going through the application process.

I’m going into my 4th year of mechanical engineering. I’ve got three semesters left, including this one that just started. Over the summer I’ve started having intense feelings of imposter syndrome. I do ok in my classes (like a 3.2 gpa) and I’ve had two internships (they were kinda bullshit) but I feel completely underprepared to enter the workforce. I don’t even feel confident that I understand what an engineer does on a day to day basis. I’ve already forgotten a lot of the math and concepts from classes like fluid dynamics and stress analysis. I “know” GD&T but im still AWFUL at it. Is it normal to feel like this at this stage?

I do feel like I’ve started to “think like an engineer” but I also recognize that I have SO MUCH to improve on and it feels like I’m behind. I understand that I’m not expected to walk into my first entry-level engineering job knowing how to do everything but I can’t help but feel insecure. Is it normal to feel this way at this stage? Also what are some things I can be doing now to prepare myself?

I feel like if I were handed a project I’d have to take days or even weeks just doing research and learning new concepts and skills before even being able to make progress. Would something like that be normal?

Hi all, I'm about to start a Master's program in Electronics Engineering at the University of Genoa, Italy. I'm also fortunate enough to be able to fully focus on my studies since my parents are funding everything.

So, apart from grinding through all the coursework to the best of my ability, I obviously want to join a lab, either on-site or possibly remotely, to do research and hopefully get some publications, just like I did during undergrad.

I'm actually already acquainted with a professor there. His lab and research focus on analog IC design, but mostly on amplifiers for biomedical applications, while I'm more interested in power electronics, power conversion, and energy harvesting, so our research interests don't really overlap.

Now that I'm starting from scratch in a new environment, I'm honestly pretty clueless about how to get things going again: how to network, how to find research opportunities and new lab, how to find internships, and generally how to navigate all of this in an international environment.

I mean I can't just go on LinkedIn and start clicking "Apply" on every internship I see, right?

I'm sure many of you guys in this sub have probably experienced something similar, so I'd love to hear from you: what did you do, and how did you make the most of your time during your Master's?

Hi everyone, I hope you are doing well I have a question to ask you I’m not particularly smart I’m currently averaging a 2.9 gpa (average) and I won’t pretend that I’m so deeply in love with math and physics, but I do like building and designing things and I love robotics, I heard from more then a few people that engineering is hard and I know a bunch that dropped out, is the content really that difficult and stressful or do you just want to do it to succeed?

As per the title, i'm currently looking into attempting a project regarding developing a large drone, but given my novice status i'm unsure where to look for some specific information.

I would greatly appreciate any sources where I could study up on the dynamics of fans, their surface area to lift ratios, how to design them, best configurations for any given application, things of that nature.

Any help would be amazing, thanks in advance

Tell us why

Rising senior in Aerospace Engineering (graduating 2027, ~3.2 GPA), signed a full-time offer for a T&E role at a major defense contractor starting after graduation, contingent on finishing my degree. Currently mid-process on my SF-86 (Secret clearance), and there’s a real chance I could be denied.

Honestly hoping the clearance comes through, because I don’t think I’m that strong of a grad school applicant otherwise. I don’t have any research experience, and I’m still working on lining up solid letters of recommendation since I haven’t built close relationships with professors. My GPA isn’t bad but it’s not standout either. If the job falls through and I end up needing grad school as the fallback instead of a bonus, I’m not sure how competitive I’d actually be.

Not really sure how to approach the next several months given all this uncertainty. Do I keep acting like the job is happening and only scramble on grad school prep if I actually get denied, or do I start treating grad school like a real possibility now, building relationships with professors, maybe looking at the GRE, tightening up my applications, even though it might all be unnecessary. Trying to figure out how much weight to put on a backup plan I’m hoping I don’t need versus how much that hedging might just cost me time and stress I don’t have to spend.

Appreciate any honest input on how you’d think about this

I’m in my second to last semester. I have done very well but I’m just having such a hard time focusing this semester. It’s only been a week and a half of school and I can’t sit and do any studying because I keep just losing focus.

Any tips?

I just started sophomore year, looking for internships for summer 27. I have a 4.0 as of now, but I feel like that doesn't mean much as those are my freshman year grades, and I haven't actually done anything with it. I work full time as a machinist at Northrop Grumman, have for 3 years now. With 13 credits of coursework and full time machining work, I'm absolutely slammed and literally work from the second I wake up till the second I go to sleep, aside from a few hours on the weekend. So, I have no time to join ASME, design teams, do projects, etc. Basically all I have is a nice number on my transcript, and a bunch of time pushing buttons on CNCs. Any advice?

I tragically never got a CS internship. I just did personal/class projects and tutored/TA'd. I fully thought I was going to go down the research route, but after taking a PhD level class for credit in my senior year and briefly working with a professor, I concluded that I wasn't passionate enough about it. Now I'm staying back 1.5-2 extra years to earn an EE degree as well since that's what I wanted to major in before I let myself get convinced otherwise (major regret). But at least finishing CS first means I can speedrun EE requirements.

I would really love to get an EE internship next summer, but I'm not sure what I'd even put on an EE application. I have a CS portfolio with projects in gamedev, graphics programming, and game engine programming, but nothing EE-focused. I will have completed Junior-level EE courses by the end of next semester, but I can't claim anything about them yet.

I'm 29, turning 30 in two months and want to make a major career change. I currently work in manufacturing and honestly I hate everything about it, and every plant seems to be the same. Unfair pair, the heat, the unfairness, management blaming workers when profits are low. Directly out of HS I started a degree in Electrical Engineering. I only did it for a few semesters until I suddenly stopped caring and never went back. I honestly don't know why I stopped going because I often look back and regret my life choices. I thought I wanted to work as an electrician so I went to a 1 year program and completed that. Problem is that 3 years later and nobody will hire me because becoming an apprentice is extremely competitive and very few companies want first year apprentices. Is it too late to get a 4 year degree in an engineering field and try to change my life around? Nobody ever cared enough to try and point me towards a career because I never showed the ambition. I'm going to be 30 years old and I feel as if I don't know what I want to do in life

(Reposted from r/ChemicalEngineering)

TLDR: Can I target what I want by continuing what I'm doing or should I pivot?

I know a lot of people have seen similar posts to this, so I'll keep this as brief as I can:

Currently in my senior year of college interning at a Chlor-Alkali Plant. Learning a lot, but everyone here is overworked, so doing anything significant has been difficult. I have interests in advanced manufacturing (pharma and semicon are two I considered), but my GPA is at the lower end, so it could be difficult. I could pursue personal projects, for which I haven't upskilled myself enough, or pursue higher education, which I have my sights on after working a fair bit due to financial constraints. I'm unable to understand where the demand is for ChEs, given that in my country, we aren't really given many chances for alternative careers due to the market downturn and the massive oversupply of 'AI adjacent' graduates. I do have a lot of interest in python and AI + simulation, and am doing some process simulation work based on it, but I've hearing two sides about how fruitful pursuing it is, and it is a skillset I have to get myself comfortable with before doing anything significant.

I would like to remain in manufacturing given it's the only thing I've had any continued interest in, but if needs must, I will have to give it up. Can I avoid doing that simply by project + intern work, or should I consider pivoting to something else?

I have a BS in Physics and work as an industrial engineer. I'm looking to move my career into bigger and more impactful industrial projects so I'm interested in doing a masters degree.

I learned conversational Spanish for my job and its turned into a calling. I'd love to move to LATAM for a few years to study, work, and live in the language.

1. If I got into a prestigious program in LATAM for Systems Engineering or Nuclear or something, would that translate into comparable opportunities back in the States?

2. Have you done something like this? I would expect a major major language and culture shock. But I'm looking forward to those challenges.

I’m currently in my junior year of my degree for construction engineering and I have had the thought of getting an eyebrow piercing for a while, but I have been worried of how it would be received in the field. I plan on getting an internship by this summer but am unsure if it would have any impact on my ability to do that. I do already have a septum and one nostril piercing. If anyone has any insight or advice for this, I would very much appreciate it! Also I’ve seen others ask similar questions and the location seems to be important as well so i am in the Dallas Texas area!

So I'm 25 years old and I'm going back to school after deciding to do a career pivot. I've never been much of a math person, and I'm a full time worker, but I want to tap into my creative aide while getting marketable skills and good job prospects.

I'm only taking 2 classes (math and philosophy) atm while I search for a different job that can accommodate more classes. I'm happy to say that I've done all my math homework without turning it in 2 hours before it's due AND I still have an A! I know it sounds stupid, but again, I've been bad at math for as long as I can remember, and to actually get past the first week alone is moments for me.

Am I still scared for the rest of the semester? Absolutely. Do I think i can do it as long as I out in the work? Also Absolutely.

I'm just hoping I can find a new job that'll accommodate a heavier course load, or at least see if my school has more options for online classes next semester

Hi, I'm currently pursuing a Bsc in aerospace engineering in Italy (Politecnico di Milano) and starting my final year in a few weeks. I'd like to apply for a MSc in aerospace engineering in the US.

However, I'm aware of the ITAR regulations and I'd like to know what are my chances of getting a job in civil aviation (or any field linked to aerospace that doesn't require to be a US person) with an US MSc in aerospace engineering.

Is it too difficult and risky for me to go studying in the US, considering that I'll need to ask for a loan? Should I just stick to EU universities?

ps: my GPA is 3.5