What is Mechanical Engineering?

Almost everyone comes into contact with the products of mechanical engineering on a daily basis, but very few people—including some engineers themselves—can provide a succinct explanation of what mechanical engineering is. Even ASME, our field’s professional society, offers no written description of mechanical engineering as a field. Someone looking to understand what mechanical engineers (MEs) do might be left cold by the definitions provided by reference books, Wikipedia, or ChatGPT.

That’s a problem, because it can be difficult to attract students into engineering programs if they don’t have a clear understanding of what they would actually do once they get a degree.

We are eight ME professors, leaders of our respective departments, who are eager to share our forward-looking perspective about the excitement, breadth, and social impact of our chosen field.

As academics we have a unique vantage point on the frontiers of university education, as well as the cutting edge of advanced research that is shaping our world for decades to come. To be sure, mechanical engineering has its roots in the engines and vehicles of the Industrial Revolution, yet today it encompasses so much more: from 3D printing to AI-driven autonomous cars, from greener aircraft engines to lab-on-a-chip medical devices.

While we know that MEs tackle society’s greatest challenges head on, we also realize that too many people don’t have a clear understanding of what MEs do. To remedy that, we would like to define our profession through four perspectives: the societal challenges we are solving, the core knowledge that MEs have in common, the creative and collaborative nature of engineering design, and the amazing diversity of career paths available to someone with an ME foundation.

What do mechanical engineers do? One way of looking at it is that MEs create the physical interface between what needs to be accomplished and the people who are charged with accomplishing it. To put astronauts into space, to provide electricity to cities, and to provide food to millions, mechanical engineers created spaceships, power plants, and agricultural equipment. Mechanical engineering is behind lifesaving medical devices, more powerful and energy efficient cars, industrial robots that take on the most dull and dangerous factory work, and the jetliners that knit the world more closely together.

Simply put, mechanical engineers are the master designers of devices that improve the human condition.

As we look to the next 50 years, we see a new set of societal challenges that will require mechanical engineering to take on an even broader footprint and engage with new types of design challenges. MEs will need to develop solutions for making renewable energy economical, engineering better medicines, providing access to clean water, reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and developing the tools that will make tomorrow’s scientific discoveries. For example, in service to our aging population, MEs seek to develop low-cost robotic devices to maintain the independence and quality of life for older citizens. Likewise, MEs are working to make the movement of people and the transportation of goods fully autonomous and carbon neutral.

Mechanical engineers not only imagine the future, we make it a reality in service of society.

In addition to understanding MEs by the societal problems we solve, the profession can also be appreciated by looking at the knowledge all MEs have in common.

Engineering broadly rests on the pillars of mathematics, physics, chemistry, and computational science. The mechanical engineer adds knowledge in the basics of circuits and materials, and further study in the fundamentals of thermal sciences, solid and fluid mechanics, and dynamics and controls. Our foundational training is rounded out in design and manufacturing.

From that common core, MEs can branch out into a vast array of application domains, including energy and environment, health and biosystems, security and defense, transportation, advanced manufacturing, data science, robotics, automation, and complex systems and machine learning. Because the challenges MEs take on are highly specific, mechanical engineers can become extremely specialized.

Yet across all of these domains, the fundamental understanding of interacting objects in motion and of the flow of heat and fluids unites all mechanical engineers.

Because the challenges of the 21st century are so wide-ranging, the teams that tackle them must be a collaboration of professionals with different strengths and perspectives to develop creative design approaches and technologies. What makes mechanical engineers so important to solving these challenges is that MEs are trained early in their education to work in teams. This begins in team projects throughout the undergraduate curriculum and continues as they practice rofessionally. In an analogy to the medical profession, MEs are sometimes called the “general practitioners” of the engineering profession. After all, we must understand and capture multiple physical phenomena to apply them to new problems and systems. This enables MEs to bridge the gaps that often separate professionals in other engineering fields or sciences.

Teamwork is such a critical part of the engineering process that ME researchers also study how to make teams even more effective. MEs not only thrive in teams, we are actively working to make teams better.

Mechanical engineering training provide students with transformative learning experiences, preparing them to be leaders in a wide range of fields. Because of that, an ME degree empowers graduates to pursue a remarkably rich range of career paths across a wide variety of industries as well as fundamental research. For just a taste of this breadth please see the career vignettes at the end of this article.

While recent ME graduates often apply their new knowledge and engineering practices to closely related fields, they can also leverage their critical thinking and problem-solving education in medicine, law, and other professions. For instance, at the universities where we teach, many graduates have gone on to lead businesses in industries as diverse as aerospace, automotive, and telecommunications; while others have become public communicators, high level lawyers, and astronauts. skills learned by MEs are so important and widely The applicable that two mechanical engineering graduates serve in the U.S. Senate.

No matter whether they are on traditional or non-traditional paths, ME graduates continue to grow professionally throughout their careers and strive to acquire new skills and knowledge throughout their journeys. An ME degree enables them to make a positive impact on their communities, the nation, and society as a whole.

While the four perspectives above don’t lead to a quick and easy definition of the mechanical engineering field, that should be expected. Any definition for mechanical engineering must be as dynamic and evolving as the profession itself.

Even more important than what MEs learn and do today, is where we are heading tomorrow. The profession is future facing, and that perspective has never been as valuable as it is today. As global resources continue to shrink, out-of-the-box thinking will be imperative to tackle the present and impending challenges. The most powerful tools MEs possess are their fundamental

versatility and creative problem-solving skills. The next generation of MEs will not only need to master the core disciplinary knowledge but also position themselves to work in highly interconnected engineering systems. This will entail the creative use of state-of-the-art data tools and openness to rapid changes in consumer trends and societal needs.

The future will offer countless diverse and challenging career prospects for mechanical engineers, and their strong foundation will provide tremendous opportunities to work together to make the world a better place.

MARY FRECKER is Riess Chair of Engineering, Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and director of the Penn State Center for Biodevices at Penn State University, University Park. CHRIS DAMESis Howard Penn Brown Chair in Mechanical Engineering at the University of California Berkeley. JONATHAN CAGAN is David and Susan Coulter Head of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. DONALD J. SIEGEL is chair of the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. MINA PELEGRI is chair of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J. ANTHONY JACOBI is head of the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. DAVID ERICKSON is S.C. Thomas Sze Director of the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. DEVESH RANJAN is Eugene C. Gwaltney, Jr. School Chair in the Woodruff DEVESH RANJAN is School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.

To learn more about what MEs do, read these career vignettes for nine remarkable graduates.

Michele serves as the Deputy Program Manager at NASA Stennis Space Station, where she manages chemical rocket testing across NASA. Michele received her BS and MS degrees in ME, while she studied combustion and propulsion as a graduate student and was part of the conference championship women's basketball team as an undergrad. Michele's ME degrees allow her to engineer exploration, as featured in this short video https://vimeo.com/794211118

President and CEO, Wi-Fi Alliance (retired). Car mechanic, Navy jet engine specialist, engineer at 3M, Ridgeway Systems, and ultimately at the Wi-Fi Alliance. Credits his ME education with teaching him the critical thinking skills that have been the hallmark of his career.

Thomas is the founder and CEO of Hyliion, which aims “to be the leading provider of electrified powertrain solutions for the commercial transportation industry.” While a student, Healy was a varsity football player, and active in student leadership. In 2017, Healy was named to Forbes 30 Under 30.

CEO CPS Energy (retired). Forty year career in the electric energy industry, including time at General Electric, Texas Public Utility Commission, Lower Colorado River Authority, and Austin Energy. “Don’t be so absorbed in your work that you forget to see what is going on out in the world”.

As Chief Engineer and Executive Vice President of Engineering, Test & Technology for the Boeing Company, Howard leads more than 63,000 Boeing engineers worldwide and oversees the company’s technology vision, strategy and investment. Howard began his career in aerospace with an internship at McDonnell Douglas while still a student, and has continued to grow into more challenging roles over 36 years ever since. He shares two Patents on wide body commercial airplanes. Among his many honors are Lifetime Achievement Awards from The Black Engineer of the Year Organization as well as the National Society of Black Engineers. Howard reflects often on the critical role that engineers serve in society and believes undoubtedly that engineers in general, and mechanical engineers in particular, change the world.

Mohan explained the navigation system during the landing: "Perseverance will be the first mission to use Terrain-Relative Navigation. While it’s descending on the parachute, it will actually be taking images of the surface of Mars and determining where to go based on what it sees. This is finally like landing with your eyes open — having this new technology really allows Perseverance to land in much more challenging terrain than Curiosity, or any previous Mars mission, could." Mohan works at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and is the Guidance & Controls Operations Lead for the Mars 2020 mission. Mohan began her path into space engineering while participating in space "project teams" while pursuing her BS in ME.

Sara Brand is the founding general partner of True Wealth Ventures, a venture capital fund that supports women-led businesses that are improving environmental and human health. Sara chose to study mechanical engineering because she liked to learn how things were made and how they worked. She considers mechanical engineering the “liberal arts” of engineering, and wanted to gain a broad understanding during her undergraduate education to inform which career path she would ultimately persue.

Bruce is a highly respected and trusted business leader with more than 30 years of leadership experience in manufacturing operations. He is the chairman and CEO of Detroit Manufacturing Systems, a certified Minority Business Enterprise that employs roughly 1,500 people, primarily from underserved areas, and builds over 2 million large-scale products for the auto industry per year. Bruce credits his ME education for lifting him up and ingraining the mindset that bringing the community together is pivotal to solving real world problems.

Brian Pandya is a lawyer representing technology, manufacturing, and healthcare companies in intellectual property, antitrust, and white-collar litigations and investigations. Brian also advises companies on privacy, cybersecurity, and national security issues, and legal issues related to emerging technologies and artificial intelligence. He is currently a Partner at Duane Morris LLP and previously served at the U.S. Department of Justice as Deputy Associate Attorney General. After receiving his BS in ME, while he served as president of the ASME student chapter, Brian went on to receive his JD in law.