You click a page titled “Debunking Myths: Why Mechanical Engineering Is Not Bad” and it reads like a defense brief wearing a guidance counselor’s smile. The point is not the optimism. The point is that someone felt compelled to publish optimism in the first place. Nobody writes “it’s not bad” unless they are hearing “it’s getting bad” often enough to worry about the pipeline. See Reason #1.
But this page matters because that someone matters. DiscoverE is not a random commenter with a grudge. It is the outreach infrastructure of the profession. It sits inside the engineering establishment as the backbone behind Engineers Week, pushing out the annual theme, toolkits, classroom activities, and event “kits” that companies, universities, museums, and societies reuse to sell engineering as upbeat, necessary, and attainable. It runs pipeline programs like Future City and Girl Day that turn engineering into a branded, repeatable experience for K–12 students, and it keeps the whole thing funded and amplified through corporate partners and coalition relationships. And they just happen to be the creators of DiscoveringEngineering.org That is the machinery. Its job is to keep engineering legible, desirable, and socially approved, especially to people who are about to choose a major and lock themselves into a track they do not understand yet. See Reason #25.
The branding fog does the rest. The article lives on DiscoverEngineering.org, "your gateway to the wonders of engineering", a name and slogan that function as an official front door, the kind of site you trust because it came from the people who print the brochures. It functions like the party line because it is written in the party line voice, and the whole point of that voice is to steady you when you hesitate. See Reason #39.
Look at the “myths” they choose to fight. Limited job options. Boring work. The response is the highlight reel: renewables, robotics, space, medical devices, “more in demand than ever.” That is not a rebuttal, it is a sales pitch aimed at the exact moment you start noticing the daily reality is coordination, validation, and release. See Reason #23. You are not hired as a prophet of innovation, see Reason #14. You are hired as overhead who makes someone else’s product survive procurement, testing, and warranty.
And when they point to the “new” industries, notice where mechanical engineering is positioned inside them. The strategic money and the career leverage live in chips, software, and chemistry, and you end up packaging the novelty and eating the integration pain. See Reason #7. In a crowded market, the institution still needs bodies to do that work, so it has to keep selling the identity even when the work itself has thinned out and the applicant math stays ugly. See Reason #34. Later, when you try to “go independent,” you learn how much of your credibility was rented from the institution the entire time. See Reason #56.
So yes, treat this as the party line. Not because it admits anything outright, but because it shows you where the pressure is. The institution does not publish reassurance when everything is fine. It publishes reassurance when it needs you to keep walking forward anyway.
References:
DiscoverE. (n.d.). About DiscoverE. https://discovere.org/about/
DiscoverEngineering. (n.d.). Debunking myths: Why mechanical engineering is not bad. https://www.discoverengineering.org/debunking-myths-why-mechanical-engineering-is-not-bad/
Fluor Corporation. (2006, November 3). For 2004, National Engineers Week takes on the world. https://newsroom.fluor.com/news-releases/news-details/2006/For-2004-National-Engineers-Week-Takes-on-the-World/default.aspx
DiscoverEngineering. (n.d.). Discover Engineering: Your gateway to the wonders of engineering. https://www.discoverengineering.org/
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