In this month's issue of Frankly Speaking, Olin's newspaper, Meg Lidrbauch wrote about trying to do too much and the culture around that at Olin. It's a good piece, and I agree with its main point, but I'm going to go off of something that's a bit of a side argument in the article.
Meg talks about realizing that she's not a mechanical engineer, and in doing so she describes the typical Olin mechE as someone who does design in Solidworks, puts a lot of time into one of the large vehicle project teams, and can be found in the machine shop.
But this is far too broad a brush, even at Olin. Amelie, Erzsi, Ariel, and Antoinette are all mechanical engineering majors, and I've had major requirement classes with all of them. Amelie can CAD and machine but would much rather spend her time on sensor research. Erzsi builds and loves being in the machine shop, but she does not CAD. Ariel is interested in sustainability and helps lead the Human Powered Vehicles team, so she fits the description but has her own slant. Antoinette prefers conceptual design to hardcore mechanical design or CADing and is really interested in K-12 education. Actually, one of the people who conforms most to that image of the Olin mechE is much more of an electrical engineer; each month he chooses an integrated circuit of the month and writes a little bit about it in a newsletter that he distributes through the dining hall.
Of course there are mechEs here like the one described. The other two people on my MechAero team pretty much fit the stereotype. For that matter, so do at least two-thirds of the rest of the class. The image accurately describes a lot of people. That's how it originated! But this is not the only way to be a mechE. I identify less as a mechanical engineer at Olin than I do anywhere else because of the prevalence of this idea of what it means to be a mechE at Olin. Outside the Bubble, calling myself a mechanical engineer provides others with reasonably accurate information about my knowledge base, but that's not the case at Olin.
This idea of mechE-ness is not just something that students perpetuate. We're splitting up into teams for Principles of Engineering, a class in which the projects must involve significant mechanical, electrical, and software components, and my class is very short on mechEs. The professor had mentioned having to be intentional about putting a mechanical engineer on each team. As a result, I felt it was necessary to comment on my survey for team formation that even though I'm a mechE, my experience does not lie in mechanical design, and it's not something with which I'm comfortable yet. My strengths as a mechanical engineer are not those that are most useful in PoE, at least not without considering particular projects. If I happen to be on a team that needs a pump specced, I can do that! I'm more likely to end up learning a lot about how to spec a motor, though.
I'm a declared mechanical engineering major, but a lot of Oliners, if you asked them, would guess that my major was Engineering with Math. I'm not particularly good at CAD; though I'm working on getting better, I'm never going to enjoy it. I would rather be in a lab than a machine shop. I don't love to build things.
But I am still a mechanical engineer.
What I do love is describing how things work, figuring out what parameters matter, making predictions about mechanical behavior, and analyzing systems. I love learning how fluids flow and how heat is exchanged, and I would happily study turbulence or heat transfer in fluids forever. These all fall under mechanical engineering. It is mechEs who take Transport Phenomena and Thermodynamics, the two thermal-fluids courses. It is mechEs who should leave Olin with the strongest modeling skills; we take not only ModSim but also Dynamics and Thermo, both of which are modeling-heavy.
I don't look like the "typical" Olin mechE. A lot of us don't, and we shouldn't have to fit that image in order to identify as mechanical engineers. Olin's mechEs are not as uniform as we portray them to be.
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