“Entry-level” in mechanical engineering means three to five years of doing the job already. You learn this the week after you graduate. Hiring managers are allergic to training, so experience becomes the real credential, not your degree and not your curiosity.
Postings ask for your exact niche, your exact software, and your exact industry. If you ran fatigue on rotating machinery, they want fatigue on rotating machinery. If you laid out HVAC, they want HVAC. Anything else is treated as irrelevant. As hard as it is to build a specialization in this field, see Reason 8, the cruel part is that you must already have it to walk through the door.
Where are you supposed to get that experience. Internships, you were told. Then you discover the punchline: the internships that matter are scarce, padded with make-work, or handed to students with three prior rotations, See Reason 5. The bridge that was supposed to carry you from class to work is missing, and you find out only after you jump.
So you aim lower. “Junior” roles quietly demand senior output. Contract work ends the moment you become useful. A recruiter suggests graduate school as a substitute for experience, and you consider it, even though more letters rarely open the door that a single year on the job would open in an afternoon.
By the time you finally collect the experience that entry-level demanded, you realize you trained yourself on your own time and your own dime. The industry did not invest in you, it filtered you. That is the real function of “entry-level” in mechanical engineering.
No comments:
Post a Comment