Reason #9: You Will Spend More Time in PowerPoint Than in Design

If you went into mechanical engineering because you imagined yourself sketching machines, building prototypes, and watching your ideas turn into reality, prepare to be disappointed. Your real job is PowerPoint.

The modern mechanical engineer is a project liaison, not an inventor. You will spend your days formatting slides for design reviews, writing emails to “align stakeholders,” and updating status trackers. The fraction of time spent on actual design is tiny, and even that design is usually about minor tweaks: a tolerance here, a bracket there, a material substitution for cost savings.

And here’s the kicker: the presentations matter more than the work itself. Managers and executives will never understand your analysis, but they will absolutely judge your slide deck. You will be told to “make it cleaner” or “add a bullet about risk mitigation.” You will learn to obsess more about fonts, margins, and color coding than about equations or mechanics.

This is not a minor nuisance. It is the job. The engineers who move up are the ones who can “communicate value to leadership,” which is code for make pretty PowerPoints. The ones who cling to technical depth get sidelined. The dirty secret of mechanical engineering is that most of your effort goes into non-technical labor that any mid-level manager could do.

By the time you realize this, you will laugh bitterly at the hours you once spent learning thermodynamics or machine design. You were trained for equations, but you were hired for slides.