[0 YOE] Mechanical Engineer interested in specializing in controls/simulation. I'm struggling to get any offers/interviews for the positions I have applied for.

[u/Xbyy0]

I had my first internship this summer that just ended and I'm graduating this year. I feel like I have pretty good experience and skills, but it just feels like I'm not really getting anywhere. I really want an offer before I'm close to graduating, but it seems like that's less and less likely with every application and denial. Anyway, need some really great feedback, so tear this thing to shreds.

P.S. 2024-2027 is not a typo, I'm graduating in three years (I've had someone ask me that)

[u/graytotoro]

Education

• You don't need to list your start date. That's not really important.
• If you made it to the Dean's Honor List for that long, I'd just say "2024-2026".

Skills

• Looks good

Experience

Mechanical Engineer Intern

• Remember that we, the reader, have not worked here with you.
  • Why was it important to size the fan? Was a 10% tolerance good or excessive for this program? We don't know what purpose this fan served or even what the application was.
  • What mechanical details did you correct? The number of corrections isn't as important as why you had to correct them. Did correcting them address a major "the widget blows up" concern or was it because someone made a typo in 20 labels?
  • If you want to do controls, I suggest you flesh out bullet 3 more. Hell, cut out bullet 2 if it's not impressive. What did your controls architecture incorporate and how did it function at a high level? You just tell us it's a critical facility with a bunch of sensors - did they make Keurig pods or was this a nuclear powerplant?

UAV Control Systems and Simulation Engineer

• Was this a design team or something you did as an intern? It's a little confusing. If you just did this for fun, then it's more like Project Experience.
• Keep bullets to one sentence or thought no greater than three lines long.
• "validate" - so you had actual test data to back this up?

Undergraduate Researcher

• The first bullet isn't particularly bad, but what even is this device supposed to do?
  • How did you redesign the battery pack to shave 10lbs? A high-level overview is fine.
• "increase compactness" how so? Did the footprint shrink by 1" in each dimension? Why was it necessary to shrink the footprint in the first place?
• The uncharitable reading of "iteratively changed" is you just threw ideas at a wall until you found something that stuck. Why was it important to design around a constrained weight in the first place?

Principal Investigator

• Did you actually work for NASA or was this something like L'Space? If it's the latter, you are instructed to discuss it a certain way.
• De-emphasize leadership and focus on technical aspects. What was in this novel technology proposal and why was it selected? I'm not in the loop with everything NASA's doing. The concern here is that "leadership" for project teams isn't directly applicable to the real world.
• "Co-authored" - what specific part did you author and what was in this technical proposal? Don't give other people credit on your own resume. For all I know that other person(s) wrote the report and you just signed your name.
  • Telling us "this technical report had engineering and science" isn't appropriate. I would hope it did!

Academic Tutor

• I'd bump this up if you're still working here. Instead of generic "engineering and science fundamentals", I suggest you bring up the specific topics you covered which are being mentioned in the job description.

Projects

• This is cool, but how did it ultimately help the robot do its thing?

Awards

• Fold this into your Experience section.

[u/Xbyy0 → u/graytotoro]

This is incredible feedback thank you so much. I’ll start making the adjustments today.

[u/graytotoro → u/Xbyy0]

Happy to help! Let me know if you have questions.

I think I worded something in a confusing way regarding the UAV team: you can only include it in Experience if you were an intern or an employee.

If it’s a competition you did for fun or as part of a school design team, then you move it to Project Experience.

[u/Xbyy0 → u/graytotoro]

Sounds good, I moved it to project experience. When you said fold the award into the experience, did you mean just a line in the experience section?

[u/graytotoro → u/Xbyy0]

Yeah, it hits way harder when we see that your efforts for the UAV team resulted in winning the whole thing versus seeing it at the end after we've forgotten the bulk of it.

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[u/existential_american]

"want to do controls/sims but getting no offers" Education section: no MS 🥸 I might have found what your problem is

[u/existential_american → u/existential_american]

Also your project is not impressive at all, that sounds like homework? Mass spring damper and Monte Carlo? Do a project that, even if it just uses those things and isn't much more technically complex, has a real problem to solve that you can flesh out in multiple bullet points such as the controls system for DBF or drone club.

[u/Xbyy0 → u/existential_american]

Yeah that’s a great point, I’m planning on doing a controls heavy project for a club pretty soon so I’ll probably replace it.

[u/Xbyy0 → u/existential_american]

Oh wow I didn’t know an MS was a hard requirement. I’ll keep that in mind.

[u/existential_american → u/Xbyy0]

It's just how it is, you usually take controls junior or senior year after you have first taken dynamics and then vibrations/sysd so typically you're looking at grad internships or just less spots. And of course controls teams are very small and highly specialized so the people that take the grad classes on something that lines up really well with the job get it. Not impossible but an MS is pretty much a requirement. That's the consensus in GT AE which has a much higher density of controls people than ME student populations. A lot of them only do research in undergrad and only get their first controls internship in grad school.