Good Minor Options for Mechanical Engineering?

[TransEngCC]

<p>I'm going to transfer to a Mechanical Eng. Program very soon, and what really I want to do exactly is basically to get into the "Product Design" path more than anything else. so I was just wondering:</p>

<p>What sort of minor(s) would go along well with a Mechanical Engineering Major?
I know a minor in Industrial Design would be ideal but neither of the Universities I'm planing to attend do offer that degree so what other minor besides that would actually work in this case?</p>

<p>I know that at the end of the day I'd probably have to go for a Masters in Product Design (or some other related area) afterward anyway but I think a Minor would be Ideal to get me started</p>

[boneh3ad]

<p>Why do you need a minor? A degree in MechE will give you all you need to know about “product design.” The real question is what part of product design do you want to work in? The whole point of undergraduate engineering is product design; it isn’t really a branch on its own. If you are doing mechanical engineering, the three main branches are solid mechanics/materials, thermal fluid sciences, and dynamics/controls. There are hybrid branches and smaller branches, but those are the three main ones, and all of them are used for “product design” at some step along the path.</p>

<p>There isn’t really a particular branch that lets you design every part of a product from start to finish at a company. If you want to do that, you have to start your own business and build your own stuff. At a major company, you will likely end up working on one part of a product at any given time and you will likely work on a portion that has to do with the area you mostly specialized in during school (though at the undergraduate level you are pretty qualified to work in any of the three major areas).</p>

<p>Bottom line, try and decide what kind of products you want to help design. Airplanes? Cars? Power tools? Heavy machinery? The possibilities are endless, and you will just have to tailor your studies to try and get into the industry you want.</p>

<p>Also, for what its worth, there is no such thing as a Masters in Product Design in the sense that you seem to be looking for.</p>

[cyclone10]

<p>u need to be careful as to what engineering vs. ‘industrial design’ entails, very different animals</p>

<p>in the context of the college of design, product design/industrial design, is artsy, like drawing, aesthetics. so actually it would be an MFA in Product Design…</p>

[TransEngCC]

<p>cyclone10 we are not talking about the same thing neither did I ever mentioned or implied that an Industrial Design/Product Design is the same as a B.S in Mechanical Eng.
I only said that I wanted to work mainly in The Product Design part of Mechanical Engineering </p>

<p>Look this is the type of program I’m referring to:

<br>
The focus of Stanford’s Design Program is exploring the intersection of technology with human needs and aspirations. This program is a collaborative offering of THE DEPARTMENT OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING and the Department of Art & Art History. It provides students with a design experience that synthesizes technology, human need, business, cognitive science, etc. At Stanford we are particularly interested in the front end of the design process where we frame the question “What should we create?” Students are taught to use design processes such as need-finding, ethnographic field work, rapid prototyping, and iterative user testing to approach design problems.</p>

<p>Students can apply to either the School of Engineering or the School and can graduate from the Design Program with an MS in Engineering - Design from the Mechanical Engineering Department. The degree program that fit the students who have technical backgrounds (typical a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering, physics, etc.) </p>

<p>Typically students who are engineering or science graduates from other universities apply to the Mechanical Engineer Department. Detailed requirements for the application are below.</p>

<p>Both the MS and MFA students complete essentially the same sequence of classes: a series of Design Thinking, methodology and strategy courses in their first year of graduate study and a second year dominated by a self-directed Master’s Thesis project that can be completed individually or in self-formed small teams.</p>

<ul>
<li>The Design program combines the elements of art, engineering, psychology, ethnography, and business. </li>
</ul>

<p>Admission to the MS program without a Bachelor of Science degree is by exception only and students who wish to apply in this manner must have an interview with the Executive Director to determine their eligibility.

</p>

<p>this is from Standford’s Website</p>

<p>Also found this from Penn University:

<br>
Integrated Product Design Master’s Program
The University of Pennsylvania’s Integrated Product Design program provides the skills to rethink, reinterpret, redesign and reconstruct a wide range of products and their complementary business models. The program draws on the strengths of three internationally recognized schools within the University: the School of ENGINEERING & Applied Science, The Business School , and the School of Design.
The graduate courses that make up the program adopt an interdisciplinary point of view, and are taught by professors from all three schools. Collaborative team projects and student-driven independent projects complement the core courses to give students both a solid grasp of the fundamentals and a deep understanding of the nuances of these fields.</p>

<p>The guiding philosophy of the program is not only to teach students to create products, but to understand and address the social, environmental and experiential contexts of those products, so that product design can be harnessed as a force for the greater good.</p>

<p>A Master of Science in ENGINEERING degree in Integrated Product Design requires ten courses, including the master’s thesis. Students who do not have the requisite background in the three core areas, ENGINEERING, Design Arts and Marketing and Finance, may be required to enroll in additional background courses.

</p>

[cyclone10]

<p>TransEngCC, read more carefully what u posted. </p>

<p>For Penn,
one of the core areas is “Design Arts” and you can be enroll as an art/design major by taking some background courses. </p>

<p>For Stanford
“Both the MS and MFA students complete essentially the same sequence of classes”, same thing for artists (MFA) or Engineers (MS) backgrounds just different name of titles </p>

<p>These programs are interdisciplinary Art/Engineering/Marketing/Psych but the output is still industrial design. If ur into this stuff check out IDEO, most design firms do hire engineers because it can be interdisciplinary. But it’s still artsy side of things.</p>

[TransEngCC]

<p>cyclone10 </p>

<p>I think you may be underestimating the difference between Product Design and Industrial Design a bit. I mean, P.D. is part of I.D. but isn’t P.D. more inclined towards the mechanics/controls/functions of the design than the artsy side, compare to I.D.? I may be wrong, but that’s what I thought.</p>

<p>Anyways, what I basically want to work on is in applying the principles of materials science to design and manufacturing products and their performance, such as machinery and tools, at big scale and in a cost efficient fashion.</p>

[boneh3ad]

<p>TransEngCC, what you just described is a typical job for a mechanical engineer with just an ordinary B.S. degree who focused on the materials branch of mechanical engineering. You don’t necessarily need a graduate degree for that and you don’t need to take any sort of artsy hybrid program unless you want to. The ordinary ME curriculum will teach you plenty of materials science and mechanical design courses and you can just further your materials knowledge with your electives and get a job immediately working somewhere in the design process of pretty much anything doing materials science related work. An FEA class would probably also be very useful to you.</p>