This project does not spread itself.
Most people drift into mechanical engineering the way they drift into big life commitments: a mortgage, a marriage, a long commute, a “temporary” job that becomes ten years. It starts as the sensible default, and then it’s just what you do. Someone older tells them it is “stable.” Someone else says it keeps options open. The brochures are reassuring. The warnings are quiet. By the time the mismatch becomes obvious, the tuition is spent and the clock has moved on.
If you have read a few posts here and felt that familiar tightening in the chest, then you already understand why this should be shared. Not argued. Not defended. Just made visible. This is the part people skip, and then later they act surprised. They always act surprised.
There are practical reasons to do that.
One is simple fairness. A decision that costs five or six years of your life and shapes where you live, how much you earn, and what kind of workday you have should not be made on marketing copy alone. This blog exists because the negative information is real, widespread, and systematically downplayed. Making it more visible does not hurt anyone who is making an informed choice. It only interrupts the people who were counting on ignorance.
Another reason is arithmetic. Mechanical engineering is oversupplied, and it stays oversupplied because every incoming class is told the same comforting story. When more people enter a crowded field, wages flatten, leverage disappears, and “opportunity” quietly turns into competition with your own classmates. Sharing this site is one of the few ways that feedback ever reaches the front end of the pipeline, before the sunk-cost reflex kicks in.
There is also the matter of wasted effort. Many people who land here are not incapable, lazy, or unmotivated. They are simply pointed at a degree that does not reward what they are good at. A few well-placed links, passed along early, can save someone years of grinding toward a credential that was never going to deliver what they were promised.
You can do this without speeches. Drop a link when someone asks what ME is really like. Send it privately to the student who is deciding between majors. Post it in the places where the same anxious questions appear over and over. Print the QR flyer and leave it where engineering students pass through every day. Curiosity does more work than persuasion.
Universities have incentives. Employers have incentives. Career advice sites have incentives. Defense Contractors and Governments have incentives.
This blog does not.
If it has ever made you feel less alone, less confused, or less convinced that the problem was you, then make it easier for someone else to find. Not so you can say “I told you so,” but so they cannot say they were never told at all.
100reasonstoavoidme.blogspot.com
Print makes this real. Download the flyer, print it at 100% (no scaling), cut along the dashed lines, and hang the three panels where mechanical engineers actually pass through. Engineering buildings and lab doors for the students, but also plant break rooms, QA cages, tool cribs, test labs, and the hallway outside the design bullpen for the freshly minted MEs. One sheet can do more than a dozen comment threads.
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