Reason #49: You’re Probably Not On the Good Track

You hear the same reassuring chorus every time a nervous C student posts online about jobs. “Grades don’t matter.” “Just graduate.” “My cousin’s roommate had a 2.7 and works at Boeing now.” No one mentions that plenty of employers quietly use a 3.5 filter from certain schools to thin the stack, because it is the easiest way to shrink an oversupplied pool of engineering résumés. You are not competing in one big fair market. You are quietly being sorted into two tracks. The reason that works at all is simple oversupply. Your field produces more mechanicals than the good jobs can absorb (See Reason #1).

On the first track, the desired prestigious one, are the roles everyone imagines when they pick mechanical engineering. Name-brand aerospace, EV and robotics labs, serious R&D, elite rotational programs, the “design actual hardware” jobs with decent pay and interesting problems. The gates into that track are front loaded. Campus recruiters filter by GPA and school brand because “3.5+ from these programs” is an easy way to turn a thousand applicants into fifty. High-end internships are the feeder system; if you miss them, your résumé is never even in the pile for those openings later. None of this is personal, it is just how you manage a pipeline that was built to overflow (See Reason #25).  

The second track is everything else. Regional manufacturers, job shops, tier-n suppliers, generic “Mechanical Engineer I/II” postings that could describe almost any plant. These roles are still competitive, but the criteria are fuzzier. A middling GPA from a no-name program can land one of them with enough persistence, relocation, or luck. The catch is that this mass of jobs is remarkably flat. Someone with zero years of experience and someone with fifteen can end up within the same narrow salary band, doing the same mix of ECO cleanup, sustaining engineering, and production support. You already know how early and how hard your salary plateaus in this field (See Reason #27).

Once you start on the generic track, it is very hard to cross over. Your first job sets expectations. Future employers read it as proof that you belong in that same band of work. The dream roles that once looked plausible start asking for things you do not have: brand-name internships, pedigree projects, a different network. So, you try to compensate with more school and certifications, only to discover that even those credentials are shared, generic, and often help you leave mechanical engineering more than they help you advance within it (See Reason #19 and Reason #48). 

By mid-career you may have a solid life, a decent income, and a résumé full of “Mechanical Engineer” titles that all look the same. This is not failure. It is the default. The dream track still exists, but for most mechanical engineers it might as well be a different profession that just happens to share the same diploma. You did what everyone told you to do. You kept your head down, graduated, took the offer that came. The system simply never planned for you to end up anywhere except the track you are already on.