Reason #57: The Entry Ramp Is Built for People With No Life

You think the hard part is the coursework. It’s not. The hard part is fitting the shape the hiring pipeline was built around. Of course Mechanical engineering doesn't “discriminate by age” so much as it selects for the conditions that usually come with being young: unencumbered, available, and cheap. The moment you show up with a mortgage, a spouse, a kid or two, a second job, or even just a spine, the path narrows to a slit. The field is already crowded, and the one bridge into the first real role is the internship bottleneck. See how that’s going in Reason #5.

And the internships that do exist are rarely where your life is. They are in plant towns, two time zones away, on schedules that start before sunrise, doing sustaining work no one wants to staff year-round. “Relocation friendly” sounds like a perk until you realize it means you are expected to uproot yourself for three months to earn the right to apply for a job that still calls itself entry-level. If you cannot pick up and vanish for a summer, your résumé is treated as a character flaw. Your course projects do not count as experience, and the postings quietly confirm that. See Reason #12.

The geography is not incidental either. ME ties you to factories, and factories do not move to accommodate your daycare pickup. See Reason #20

This is why “going back for a BSME” can feel like a trap for non-traditional students. School is the only socially acceptable reset, but mechanical engineering does not reset cleanly. The gatekeepers still want the same stamps: recent grad status, internship logos, and a story that sounds like you had nothing better to do than chase a rotating series of plant badges. If you are older, you get squeezed from both sides. You can be “overqualified” for internships and still “underqualified” for engineer roles, and you get told to be patient while you bleed time. That patience is competing against an oversupplied pipeline and a hiring stack that never stops refilling, see Reason #1 and Reason #24. And if you lose a year just getting to the starting line, the clock does not stop for you, see Reason #29.

Then comes the real punchline. Mechanical engineering loves to advertise itself as practical and grounded, but its hiring funnel is built for people with the least grounding. The profession that claims to reward responsibility quietly selects for people who can postpone responsibility a little longer. You will call it a career move. The system will call it an internship, and invoice you accordingly.