How many Engineer(ooz) are here?

ROOZ seems to have an intelligent bunch of guys with sim racing as a hobby (obviously), so do any of you have an engineering profession?
If so, what field of engineering do you work in and do you have any careers advice to share?
Do you know of any job openings or available positions at yours or a colleague's work place?
Please don't hesitate to post anything relevant, e.g. experiences/stories/tips/etc thanks!

I'll start..
Technically I'm still a student (mechanical), however I completed all my subjects/classes a couple months ago.
I received a Distinction grade for my thesis on a multi-link front suspension assembly design.
Just need to convince somebody to take me on for 60 days of Industrial Training (IT) and should be able to graduate after submission of an IT report.

As for anyone who may be looking to study engineering at university, some advice from my personal experience:

• The key to achieving good marks is to start early. Marks from assignments and quizzes throughout semester are relatively straight forward (not easy) to obtain and you can often pass the subject well before the final exams, most of which just reassess your knowledge from said assignments and quizzes.
  
• Know how to convert between units of measure to make sense of larger formulae, e.g. W = J/s = N.m/s = kg.(m^2)/(s^3)
• Student projects like Formula SAE-A can provide a useful opportunity to practice/experiment/implement knowledge from class and your own research (e.g. thesis).
  
• Get in the habit of writing code (e.g. MATLAB) outside of meeting assignment requirements, it's an extremely useful and flexible tool for 'working out' or 'hand calculations'. Excel spreadsheets are not particularly well suited to perform engineering calculations with many different variables and large formulae i.e. it gets messy and confusing very quickly.
• Go through the course outlines and mark all assignment and assessments dates into a diary or something equivalent that's quick and easy to access at a glance. Doing so will allow you to plan and spread out the work load more effectively, hopefully reducing the number of late nights required (too many...).
• Replace notebooks and use a tablet/convertible laptop (recommend A4 size) with pen functionality (e.g. Surface Pro). Download/import lecture slides, lab notes, assignment sheets and annotate over them (e.g. with OneNote). I managed to carry around 3 years of class notes in a single device and often referred to them whenever I needed a quick reminder or reference; the bookcase turned into storage.
  *Disclaimer: I used Microsoft products but am not affiliated with them in any way.

Currently a student in Yr12 with about 3 weeks left of school. Currently studying Physics, Maths and Engineering Studies. My current engineering studies project is to build (in groups of 3) a fully functioning electric motorbike. Our bike uses 250W hub-motors connected to 2 12v batteries. Next year I am looking to further my studies by doing a bachelor of technology Motorsports and work full time at Uni on the Formula SAE/Schools car when not in a lecture etc. After the Bachelor of Tech, considering doing a normal mechanical engineering degree to further my skills from building race cars.

It counts how did you go about finding/applying for your IT?

Sounds like a good plan, just try not to become over committed/burdened with FSAE tasks that prevent you from keeping up with your academic studies. Designing and building (part) of a race car within the space of a year (or two) means spending a lot of time in the computer lab and the workshop. If it becomes too much then it's not uncommon to reduce your study load by extending the duration of your degree, however if you're keeping up just fine then go for it.

I have an Associate Diploma in Mech Eng.

Currently working for a large Aerospace company as a CAD designer.

Are you using CATIA or Solidworks for your CAD work in aerospace?

We have seats of both, but I am using Inventor at the moment. I used Solidworks for 4 years in my previous job, and Unigraphics (NX) for about 10 years before that.

What do your daily duties involve, is it all designing, drafting, a bit of both? Since you've been at it for over a decade, would you say it's an enjoyable and rewarding career path?

Your drawing reminds me of Bruce Willis in '12 monkeys'... have you kept all your stuff from uni days?
I learned to appreciate MATLAB when having to working with anything bigger than 3x3 matrices, not to mention whenever I'd have to do iterative calculations. Had a Finite Elements (FE) assignment where we were expected to show working out for a 10x10 matrix calculation; no way was I going to do that by hand

[Image source: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/running5]
That's quite a number of different jobs, how much of it would you say was learnt on the job and did you find yourself going through past lecture notes/assignments/textbooks to brush up on particular areas you may have forgotten about?

Another mechanical engineer here.. have been in the workforce for nearly 9 years now, mainly specialising in finite element analysis. I was also in the Formula SAE team when I was studying at Curtin. I agree with BspecBob, it was a lot of extra work that other students didnt have to worry about, but it was also very rewarding and prospective employers were very impressed to see it on my CV, shows teamwork, real world experience etc.

Being a car fanatic like I’m sure the rest of you are, I’ve always wanted to work in the automotive industry, however it’s not such an easy thing to get into in Australia, especially for me being in W.A where it’s almost non-existent. So one of my career highlights would definitely be having the opportunity to work as a consultant for Carbon Revolution, a Melbourne based company who design and manufacture carbon fibre wheels (aftermarket items for supercars etc).




I also worked in conjunction with them and Ford on the development of the OEM wheels for the new Shelby GT350R. It's pretty awesome to see them on a car like that and be able to say i worked on the design of them.


In terms of advice for guys who are still studying/just starting work, try to decide within the first 12 or so months of working which pathway you want to go down, either the management side, or the technical side and then try to focus on either one. For me, I found project management boring as bat, and I don’t really see it as a true form of “engineering” (hope I don’t offend any project managers there ).

Don’t be too daunted by all the technical stuff you have to learn at uni either, you won’t use the majority of it in the real world, and you learn most things on the job.Find someone you work with who is an expert in something, and pick their brains as much as you can. Don't be afraid to ask questions, even if they seem like dumb questions! I still ask dumb questions to this day! haha

BEng in Software Engineering here.

Was lucky back in the day whereby everyone in my course got paid 6 month internships to gain work experience and do their thesis at the same time for their finals. Did my thesis on safety critical software systems at a defence contractor.

I agree it's all about real world/work experience when you finish uni. I couldn't find work for 12 months after graduating until I moved interstate as part of a graduate intake program with a government agency in Canberra. Came back to Perth a couple of years later and been working in mining since.

Not so much drafting these days, as we move more towards 'paperless manufacturing'. Only really do drawings for defence based projects nowadays.

It has been a very enjoyable and rewarding career path Bob. Lots of exciting stuff happened for me around the turn of the century, including design of the Australian Olympic team's track cycle for the 2000 Olympics. It was very rewarding to watch the Australian team dominate the competition, and take home 4 gold medals . Not long after I travelled throughout the middle east and UK doing technical presentations for a product that I was Head Design Engineer for.

Yeah I know what you mean about the Aussie automotive industry.. I was looking at overseas manufacturers a couple months ago but the competition for internships/grad jobs seems pretty high, not to mention their high recruiting standards so figure I'd need to gain some experience locally first. Haven't yet given up on working in the industry but it may take a while before I'm experienced enough to even be considered, such is the short amount of time HR actually spends looking at CV/resumes.
That's a pretty cool highlight to have! How did you end up in the FEA field and how do you find the workload? It looks like your wheel analysis was done in Abaqus, did you use solid elements or 2d/shell elements to model it? I'm quite familiar with 3DS's Catia but have never used Abaqus because our school mainly taught with Ansys. Also how do you go about validating your analysis results? Do you conduct different types of analyses, compare with published data (e.g. from www.esdu.com) or something else entirely?

Haha I've been using Shigley's Mechanical Engineering Design throughout uni, not sure which edition you have though because mine is over a thousand pages and definitely not pocket sized. I do however also have it in pdf form, though both versions seem to mainly use imperial units, not sure if there was supposed to be an SI version. Haven't used VBA since first year and can't even remember how to access it.. always seemed like a lot of effort for the struggle. Guess I've just become used to Matlab's language because it feels more intuitive and I've had plenty of practice with assignments as well as a pen/paper replacement for 'hand calculations'.

Guaranteed internships with pay? Only heard of something like that with co-op scholarships. Some of my uni mates did their IT for free which doesn't seem quite right. I'd be ok with that provided the IT was varied and provided useful experience but all they got was menial and repetitive tasks. I think some form of payment, even if it's only minimum wage, should be required to not undervalue the work done during IT and of oneself as a (future) engineer. Finding local IT would be handy but I'll certainly be open to looking at interstate opportunities, particularly if it's a career path I think I'd enjoy.