Mechanical Engineering

What are common early career problems for people with degrees in mechanical engineering?

1. Mistaking product design (CAD) and manufacturing technology for Mechanical Engineering.
2. Mistaking colorful FEA plots for actual mechanics of materials.
3. Mistaking basic machinery design for work that Mechanical engineers do.
4. Mistaking Mechanical Engineering as being all about 'intuition' and ignoring concepts from applied physics and mathematics.
5. Mistaking machinery design for something simple and straight-forward.
6. Mistaking prototyping costs as being reflective of high-volumes costs.
7. Skirting QA and pushing it downstream/Ignoring tolerances/finish as being non-issues that can be tackled when we get to production.
8. Designing based on theory and not manufacturing practices. Mathematical optimization is great on paper, but volumes production requires constant eyeballs on metrics.
9. Assuming that Mechanical Engineering is only about mechanical things.
10. Assuming powerpoint >> product. It does seem that way when most of the senior engineers seem to just push powerpoints with facts/figures no one pays attention to. Ignore those people. Just about everyone else does. They are a great tool used by management to show supposed progress, but products are best at showing progress anyway.
11. Assuming that Mechanical Engineering is not sophisticated and easier than EE or CS and that it has far lesser opportunities.
12. Then getting an MBA because they made all the above mistakes/assumptions and thought that ME career opportunities are limited.
13. Trying to cut costs during prototyping. Biggest mistake ever.
14. Assuming fixture design (specially in optomechanics) to be something trivial or inconsequential. Poor engineers screw this up all the time.
15. Assuming CAM is straight-forward because running a hobby router looks easy. It is easily one of the most sophisticated/under-appreciated fields I know; The CS in CAM lacks maturity mostly because of the black magic/alchemy descriptions that surround the complex process (CAD+CAM/scheduling+post+control+actuator+tool+real world). Most of the big 5 CNC manufacturers simple push their products from Robotics into products for 'computational machining'. A positioning problem is not the same as a material removal problem. This creates all the black art that surrounds CNC.
16. Assuming that one CAM run is sufficient to predict the next 1000 runs.
17. Assuming that the most important part in CAM is getting to the post. (It is actually knowing how to rework a part after repeated job interrupts. But this mostly applies to prototyping/LRIP).
18. Getting confused between that rendering/scale in the Solidworks screen and the real object. Don't fall in love with your .sldprt file - that's not a real object and those are not real colors/appearances or finishes. In fact, avoid rendering at all. And if you do, don't get fancy with your color/light/camera choices - people will complain that the real part does not look as fancy.

There's another mistake made by design engineers that started out with a mechanical engineering background - They think it is easy and that they have this fantastic 'natural' talent for making parts and  assemblies and moving them around in a CAD environment or playing around with screwdrivers. The truth is, there's only about 5% of you that understand 2D rotations/reflections/symmetry inversions intuitively, and less than 0.1% of you that understand 3D geometries and stacks. Using a CAD environment makes you think it is all simple - because the software lets you visualize all that - but it also takes you about 2 hours to get there.

It's a skill you pick up only if you try; or you could get it for free along with other spectrum disorders.