Mechanical Engineering & Drafting

College Majors Engineering Majors
1

<p>I am a mechanical engineering major and I will be a junior this fall. I landed an internship at a medical device company for the summer and so far I've found it to be pretty boring. I sit in a cubicle doing CAD all damn day. </p>

<p>I'm not very good at CAD / drafting either. I am okay at making solid models but take a long time to do drawings and I always seem to do them wrong. </p>

<p>Thing is, I never took a drafting course. I did take a CAD course but all we learned was how to make solid models and made very little drawings and did little dimensioning. There was never any lecture about drafting / drawing standards. I talked with the guys I am working with and they said they do about 50% designing and 50% drafting. </p>

<p>I didn't really think mechanical engineers spent this much time on CAD. I honestly thought it was more like design, analyze designs & do calculations, give presentations / write technical specifications for your designs and then drafting was a completely seperate profession. Maybe because I am an intern I am doing drafting?</p>

<p>I guess my two major questions in summary are:</p>

<p>If I hate drafting have I made a mistake in deciding on mechanical engineering as a career ?</p>

<p>Do mechanical engineers typically spend alot of time drafting ?</p>

2

<p>In my intro to engineering class my professor was a mechanical engineer and she told me that she had to do alot of CAD work. That took up a chunk of her time. She worked for some sort of agriculture tech company.</p>

<p>But I guess it depends on your speciality.</p>

3

<p>Depends on your job function. Large organizations will have draft(wo)man or CAD designers. Small organization, you may have to do schethes and drawings youself.</p>

4

<p>Yes, although it depends on your specialty, it’s pretty fair to say that ME in general involve design and computation.
One specialty would be analyst - your main focus is more about computation and data analysis, although you might pair up with a designer throughout the process.
Moreover, there are definitely ME that are business-oriented.</p>