Occupations for 40+ yr old, new BSME grad besides designing?

February 6, 2011 6:49 AM

Occupations for 40+ yr old, new BSME grad besides designing? (Details inside.)

I'm 40 years old, and am around two and half years away, if all goes well academically, from getting a BSME from an accredited college. It will be my first/only degree.

I chose this major because it was the only one I thought could get me into contention for higher level, respected, and well-paid jobs I would enjoy, especially after all these years of struggling. I've always liked machines, production, problem solving (proactive and reactive; physical and conceptual), and system optimization. I plan to take the FE, but I haven't decided on the PE yet.

I'm here because I'm finding 3 of the 4 classes I'm taking, especially Physics 2, quite difficult, which has for the first time made me question whether I will be able to get the degree, or even want to get into this field after all. I'm not sure I'd enjoy constantly have to do the kinds of things I'm doing in these classes. However, I do see the possibility that if I do learn this stuff, and if it was to become (some form of) "easy" to me, I *might* not mind it so much.

Also, separately, I don't feel myself particularly drawn to designing things. I had thought before starting school that ME's did things other than design. However, design jobs are pretty much all I hear talked about.

So, with these classes being difficult (and me currently not relishing doing those things daily for the rest of my life) and preferring a non-designing career, are there other good occupational options that the BSME will make me eligible for?

Thanks very much.

posted by atm to Science & Nature (10 answers total)

Just to clarify, are you talking about mechanical engineering or medical engineering?
posted by hydropsyche at 7:03 AM on February 6, 2011

I'm guessing Mechanical, since my dad took the PE and is a Mechanical Engineer.

But he designs machines and always have, so I don't really have any useful tips in that regard.
posted by naturalog at 7:28 AM on February 6, 2011

Best answer: If I understand you right, you're asking about jobs you can do with a BS in Mechanical Engineering that don't necessarily have Engineer in the title.

With that much math & physics under your belt, you could always be a high school math and/or physics teacher. My high school physics teacher was a Geology major I think, and I think only one of my math teachers majored in math.
posted by AMSBoethius at 8:06 AM on February 6, 2011

Best answer: A BSME gives you lots of options that don't involve designing. For starters:

- Applications Engineer. A sales support role, where you basically help customers figure out how to apply your company's products. Requires good "people" skills, working knowledge of your company's product, ability to ask the right questions, and problem solving.

- Sales Engineer, technical sales. High tech companies need people with a tech degree who can understand their products and sell them to other engineers. Depending on where you work, this can be very much like a traditional sales job with base salary plus commission, or it can be a more consultative role similar to an applications engineer. Requires high motivation and usually extroversion.

- Production or manufacturing manager. You will be responsible for building what the design engineers design. Often going back to them and collaborating on how they can make design changes that will make the product more manufacturable. Requires team leadership, organization and planning skills.

- Quality manager. I don't know as much about this one, but you learn about and implement quality programs such as ISO 9000-type things, do test and measurement, make changes to maintain quality.

- Marketing. If you're good at communications, there is a sweet spot for people who understand the technology and can also explain and market it.

I guess you knew going in that ME is not an easy program. A lot of the classes are going to be quite difficult. Some of them you're going to absolutely hate. Unless you really hate the overall program, I would encourage you to stick it out and finish the degree. (Keep in mind that a lot of students find the second year kicks their butts.) You won't be *doing* a lot of engineering or physics in any of the above jobs, but it's important that you understand it enough to know what's going on.

If your school offers an internship program, take it. Try to find an internship on the manufacturing (vs. design) side. If not, see if you can get a summer job in production - even if it's just low-level assembly work, you'll have a chance to look around at the different things people do. Check out ASME ... if there's a chapter near you, you might find people who can tell you more about the other career opportunities.

Best of luck to you!
posted by evilmomlady at 8:36 AM on February 6, 2011

Best answer: One broad career field open to newly minted BSME folk is testing, in a number of forms (product certification for standards, manufacturing process and quality assurance testing, packaging testing, etc.) To be a good tester, you do generally need to have a certain personality/character, generally described as highly resistant to boredom and capable of great patience and dedication to a task, as you may spend weeks setting up and supervising tests, that culminate in a few dramatic seconds of failure data, that you won't easily get another chance to get.

On preview, seconding evilmomlady that another occupational area where you can put a BSME to work outside mainline product design is in technical product sales support, typically supporting a sales team with pre- and post-sales activities, such as technical product specification, configuration management, technical communication, and installation/customer training. Often there is a significant travel component to such jobs, which creates a constant turnover of employees who tire of the regular business travel lifestyle, but if you thrive on being a road dog, you can quickly rise in many organizations on this career track.

Many organizations also have what are loosely called "product managers" or "process managers," who are typically technical personnel who come to straddle the bizdev chasm into marketing, insofar as finding new applications and markets for existing or slightly modified products/processes. Successful PM types can sometimes be pivotal in turning a company or even an industry upside down, when they find hitherto unconsidered new business opportunities, and this often an unconventional route to C-suite jobs.
posted by paulsc at 8:59 AM on February 6, 2011

Best answer: Okay, so I'm still just a student in engineering, with only internship experience when it comes to careers. That said, here are a few thoughts I have:

- If you're still 2.5 years away from a degree, and you're taking classes like Physics 2, realize that you're still just learning the basic building blocks of the field. All the things you said you like are in engineering, but you need a good solid foundation of basic science and math to do them well. So you might not have classes in things like machines or systems until the last year of your degree - or maybe not at all, for your B.S.

- Along the same lines, a lot of the fun of engineering isn't really in your classes, but instead in applying what you're learning in those classes to a project. While you're still in school, you might be able to do that through student design competitions like Formula SAE, or through research in a laboratory, or by getting an internship or co-op position. Since you're an older, nontraditional student, I don't know if any or all of those options are open to you (are you a full-time student? are you working part-time?). But even if you don't do any of those things right now, remember that working as an engineer is generally quite a different experience from sitting in physics class.

- You probably hear a lot about design jobs because that's the angle that draws most students in to engineering, and that's what they're most excited about. But there are a lot of other aspects of engineering that don't get talked about as often: testing, analysis, production, systems (both of which you mentioned), safety, sales, etc. (On preview, evilmomlady and paulsc hit a few of these quite well already.) There are plenty of engineers who find themselves doing something other than design; I'd actually think you might have a leg up knowing you'd rather do something else already.

- I've heard several times that the most important thing a degree in engineering tells potential employers is that you've been taught to think about solving problems in a rigorous way - which can be attractive in a lot of different fields. If you only step a little bit away from engineering, you could end up on a research path that pulls you closer to basic science, or go the other way and do things like technical writing and communications. Or you could go farther - someone's mentioned teaching, but that's just one option. Lots of engineers go into consulting firms. Back before the financial crash, a whole bunch of investment banks were hiring engineers out the undergrad classes graduating ahead of me. I knew people with engineering degrees who went to law school and ended up working in patent law. And that's just what I've got off the top of my head right now; I'm sure there are plenty of other options too.

Most of this is stuff I got from my school's career services office. Does your institution have one? If your school of engineering has one (as opposed to just the college/university as a whole), that would be a good place for you to go. They've probably been asked this question or a variation on it a million times, and they should have resources for you. Alternatively, can you talk to an instructor or two? A professor could give you one opinion; an adjunct lecturer or someone like that who teaches only part-time and also holds a job out in industry might be even more applicable to your situation.

Good luck! Studying engineering is tough, but I happen to think it opens up a whole lot of interesting possibilities.
posted by sigmagalator at 9:08 AM on February 6, 2011

Best answer: I'm not and engineer and wasn't ever an engineering student, but I recommend you read this. Like sigmagalator said, you're only in the basic part yet, and you don't have enough info to make a decision. I know ppl who dropped out of engineering and still believe they couldn't hack it, but I know ppl who went through it, had to work very hard and study so hard to make a decent 3.0 GPA, and they're better off than the ppl who quit, even though the ones who quit believed they would fail.

Don't choose to quit something unless you have all the information necessary to make a honest assessment of your abilities. Nothing worth having is easily gotten.

As for the what you can do with a BSME, start googling "earned a BSME" and see who and what's out there. Lots of folks in business have engineering degrees.
posted by anniecat at 9:30 AM on February 6, 2011

Best answer: I always recommend knowing exactly what you want to do before starting college. It is such a gamble otherwise to waste four years and thousands of dollars learning something you find out later is not what you want to do. Colleges, of course, love people like that.

When I went to college to complete my engineering degree in my late 20s I had already worked as a technician in the field for 6 years. I knew exactly what I wanted to do and am back working at the same place where I started 25 years ago but now as an engineer.

Being an engineer is not necessarily always about designing things but you will have to know how to design. You will have to work as a designer for a few years to move beyond that phase to be an inspector or project engineer. Without knowing the process thoroughly you will have very little value as an employee. Without value you will not get a job. As a 40-something year old graduate you better have a lot to offer with experience or knowledge to even begin to compete with younger graduates. Older graduates are at a serious disadvantage unless they are exceptional.

You don't say what you are currently doing for work but you should probably start now as a CAD technician in the field to have a first-hand view of what mechanical engineers are doing and to make contacts in the field. You absolutely need to put yourself in a definite career path as soon as possible before you take any junior or senior level classes or you are wasting your time and money.

If you are having problems with a class, drop it. Audit it but never take a class then fail.
posted by JJ86 at 9:46 AM on February 6, 2011

Best answer: For what it's worth, I am a practicing mechanical engineer with a degree from an accredited university in the US.

First off, I think it's useful to know that, as a mechanical engineer, the likelihood of you applying anything you're covering in Physics II (which, at my school, was electricity, magnetism, and some very basic optics) is pretty much zero. It's only a prerequisite for Circuits at most universities. Once you get into circuits, you'll be learning lots of interesting methods of analysis that will leave Physics II in the dust.

Secondly, there are a ton of jobs out there that don't involve design. My particular field of interest is in troubleshooting and repair of large complex equipment. I spend lots of time looking at past performance of equipment, current indicators (temperatures, vibration profiles, flowrate/pressure curves, thermal imaging scans) to determine the viability and expected life of pieces of process equipment. I also have friends who have gotten jobs writing code, acting as petroleum/reservoir engineers, or designing test procedures for weapons systems. Basically, there is a whole big world out there aside from boring behind-the-desk design jobs waiting on you. We need more mechanical engineers working in industry who want to get their hands dirty. Best of luck to you!
posted by conradjones at 10:00 AM on February 6, 2011

Response by poster: Thanks everybody for the great info. I'm reading and rereading your posts.

Anybody else that wants to add, please do.
posted by atm at 1:05 PM on February 6, 2011