Reason #6: Your Colleagues Are Your Competitors

One of the loneliest truths about mechanical engineering is that your classmates are not your allies. They are your direct competition. You might spend four years, or longer (see Reason #2), sitting side by side in lecture halls, burning midnight oil on the same problem sets, or cramming together for dynamics. But the moment you graduate, every one of them is gunning for the exact same handful of jobs that you are.

Mechanical engineering doesn’t offer a booming new industry that can absorb fresh graduates the way computer science or biomedical engineering can. The field is stagnant, oversaturated, and geographically narrow. This means that every position at a manufacturing plant, automotive supplier, or HVAC contractor attracts dozens if not hundreds of applicants, many of them your old classmates. If you thought you were building a network, what you were really doing was collecting a list of competitors.

And because the field is already oversaturated (see Reason #1: The field is oversaturated), the competition is even nastier. You are not only competing with your classmates, you are competing with every other graduate from the last five years who never landed a real engineering job in the first place. Many of them are still floating around, desperate to claw their way into the same narrow pipelines of work.

Inside companies, the same culture repeats itself. MEs fight over scraps of promotion opportunities and cling to “ownership” of minor projects. You’ll quickly learn that mechanical engineers are replaceable. Management knows there are plenty more just like you waiting outside the door, and so do your colleagues. The result is a culture of quiet hostility. Don’t expect camaraderie, don’t expect mentorship, and don’t expect loyalty. Expect turf wars over who gets to update drawings on a bracket assembly or who gets to give the next PowerPoint presentation.

In other words, you are not joining a community. You are joining a crowded waiting room where everyone is hoping the other guy doesn’t get called in first. And when they are, you’ll be left smiling through clenched teeth, pretending you’re happy for them while quietly updating your résumé.