Engineering Students Need To Join An Engineering Club

Everyone complains about needing experience to get the first job but the first job to get experience. It’s only this way if you make it this way. One of the awesome things about college is your free access to amazing and unique learning experiences.

Join an Engineering Club!

I know it sounds like a cheesy advertisement but I’m serious about this. Joining an engineering club is as close to on-the-job experience as you can get with none of the hassle. You don’t need to apply or interview or dress up nice or put on a show in any kind of way.

You just walk in the door.

I didn’t really want to join an engineering club my first couple years of college either. I just wanted to show up to class, do the work, get good grades, and graduate. I kind of just assumed that was all you needed to do to get a job. This may be true for some majors but engineering is not one of them.

Here’s the Reason Why

The classroom certainly has its place. When else are you going to sit down and learn complex differential equations unless someone makes you do it? While this is valuable information and will certainly get you thinking, the odds of you using what you learn in a classroom is low.

Now, every job is different. There’s no arguing against that. I’m sure jobs exist where you apply the theoretical stuff you learn in college but for your first engineering job, that’s a little harder to come by. I say this because while I was in college, I worked three internships for three well-known engineering companies and I rarely if ever used all of that theoretical knowledge I learned.

That’s the problem with theoretical information — it’s theoretical. What about the practical stuff? Sure, some college classes have mandatory labs but that’s still such a controlled environment. The professor and the TA have done all of the hard work for you. They’ve provided you equipment and determined the procedure for you to use. You merely have to follow instructions.

The practical education is what you learn from internships and engineering clubs. I highly recommend trying to get as many internships as you can while in college but for this article’s sake, we’re focusing on clubs. That’s because, as I noted earlier, in order to get one you merely have to walk in the door.

What You Will Learn

Among many of my tasks at my job, I interview interns and work with new hires. The amount of college students I see with high GPA’s that have never used a saw or a drill astounds me. Sure, you can do complex equations about mechanical vibrations but can you cut a piece of metal? How can you be trusted to design complex machinery when you’ve never done some of the basic tasks required to CREATE that complex machinery?

I have seen students (myself included) design mechanical pieces that, while good in theory, were impossible to make. This is because they don’t know how a piece actually gets made. Think about this design for example.

This is an intake manifold for a car.

How would you design this?

What materials would you use?

Should this be one piece or several?

This is Practical Experience

Designing parts is a very complex task, all things considered. Because along with form and function, you also have to consider the process. How will this piece get made? The reason for this is because another lesser side of engineering is considering cost. When you’re sitting calculating how much a mass has to weigh in order to compress a spring X amount, did you ever consider the cost of that mass?

I didn’t think so.

But cost is a very real part of engineering. The automotive company General Motors (GM) sold 9.5 million vehicles last year.

If they can save just a nickel per vehicle by making a small change to the manufacturing process, they’ll save $475,000! Now the values of the savings are fairly arbitrary but the point is that a very small change can become a very large change over time.

This manifold was a part I designed for our schools SAE club, the Society of Automotive Engineers. We had a prototype 3D printed which was actually printed in two halves — a top half and a bottom half. We then glued them together for testing. The 3D printed piece didn’t last long but we got the test results we needed.

We then created the runners out of aluminum tubes, and the plenum was made of carbon fiber. It’s one thing to just design a part; it’s another to see what you’ve designed come to life. That’s an awesome feeling.

That’s what you can do by joining a club. And you don’t need to worry about getting fired if you do it wrong. In a club, you’re expected to learn. If you make a mistake, just get back up and try it again. Everybody fails at one point or another and their way to success.

Applying the Theoretical Knowledge

Here’s where the classroom meets the real world. It really makes all of those tests and all-nighter study sessions seem worth it when you actually get to use what you learn.

Not a single part of this manifold is arbitrary. Not the radius of the tubes, not the length of the intake runners, not the volume of the plenum. Every part of it was carefully calculated out and measured.

One of the important considerations was how long the runners should be. In engine operation, air is sucked from the runner’s one at a time. As this happen, pressure waves are created in the runners that bounce back to the plenum. The length and diameter of the runner is a large factor in determining the turbulence that is seen in the plenum.

One way we calculated these values was with the Helmholtz equation. Another was through the use of a computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulation like this.

The pressure is greatest as the air enters the manifold from the tube on the right. The air pressure is lower inside the plenum which is what you want to avoid too much turbulence. This simulation shows what would happen if cylinder 1 (on the far left) opens and sucks in air. The pressure in that runner rises as it gets sucked out of the plenum.

This Is When Theoretical Experience Meets Practical Experience

This is why you join a club. Designs like this are as close to on-the-job experience you can get without getting a job. And guess what? I didn’t have to apply to get in. I didn’t have to interview. I didn’t have to get experience in a different club before joining.

I just walked in the doors.

Being able to talk about a project like this at a job interview always impresses the interviewer. The knowledge I gained from doing this project makes me a much better engineer. You would not believe the amount of work that went into getting this exactly right.

So I really urge you, if you’re looking to gain experience and don’t know where to go, join a club. Try and make a commitment to attending their meetings at least once a week for a month. If you still don’t like it after that, try a different club.

Just go out and gain that experience while it is so freely available to you.