How proficient do i need to be in CAD for a mechanical engineering internship?

[Erf Doblin]

How proficient in cad should someone who is applying for mechanical engineering internship be? I am teaching myself solidworks and i would like to have a benchmark to progress towards so when I began applying for a mechanical engineering internship in the near future i will feel prepared.

 

[berkeman]

Can you post some links to representative internship position descriptions? I doubt we would use an EE intern to do SPICE simulations of any of our circuits, unless they were a real whiz at it already and we had a Mentor work very closely with them watching for mistakes. OTOH, Schematic Capture skills could be used, especially for helping with our technical writers and documentation.

I would think that if you had experience with 3-D CAD and 3-D printing (even relatively simple projects), that would be looked on favorably by potential internship employers...

 

[jrmichler]

It depends where you intern. In my experience, the ability to quickly learn the job is the most important thing. A machine design company will expect that you have a basic knowledge of solid modelling. They will teach, and expect you to quickly learn everything else.

There are also mechanical engineering jobs where the intern does no CAD at all. My first job was a mechanical engineer in a paper mill doing a plant engineering job. I had a number of interns working on a mass and energy balance for the entire paper mill. One came in on a Monday morning and complained that I had ruined him: "I was in the bar the other night and found myself looking at the air conditioning vent calculating BTU's". Another intern on that project was using smoke bombs to study air flows. Unfortunately, he set one off under a 5 MW hydro generator. The smoke came up thru the generator to the operating floor. The hydro power offices looked down out over that floor. They got quite excited to see smoke pouring out of that generator. He had neglected to warn them before the test. And then there was the time I designed a heater that worked so well that it set off two fire sprinklers on a cold night. No water damage, and the general consensus was that the heater worked really well. Fun times.

 

[gmax137]

It depends where you intern. In my experience, the ability to quickly learn the job is the most important thing.

You got that right!

Where I work, managers will "put in" for an intern by filling out some request forms. Six to nine months later, they get the word: "you have an intern for the summer." Whatever tasks the manager had in mind are long forgotten, or the ongoing projects have morphed and the needs are different. So a week later when the intern arrives, the conversation is more "what can you do?" If you mention solid modeling maybe that's what you will do. Mention something else, that's what you might get. Or you mention something that doesn't need doing just then, and you will learn how to do something else. The managers understand you (the intern) are there to learn; but you're also there to help. So what you end up doing depends on what needs to be done at the time.

I don't know if that's the way it goes at other companies, but I wouldn't be surprised. OTOH, I am also sure there are companies much more organized.

Just to go off on a tangent, this disorganization isn't just for interns. When I got hired (39 years ago) my supervisor was a little too busy to have a plan laid out for what my assignments were. About my third day, he handed me a big green pad that had handwritten computer inputs; each row was a card to be punched, with the numbers in columns digit by digit. "Do you know how to run the keypunch machine?" he asks. Sure I do. About two hours later I hand him the deck, a couple hundred cards punched. "Don't tell anyone you are that fast," he says, "you'll get stuck doing it all the time." Fortunately he soon had me doing real work.

 

[analogdesign]

You got that right!

Just to go off on a tangent, this disorganization isn't just for interns. When I got hired (39 years ago) my supervisor was a little too busy to have a plan laid out for what my assignments were. About my third day, he handed me a big green pad that had handwritten computer inputs; each row was a card to be punched, with the numbers in columns digit by digit. "Do you know how to run the keypunch machine?" he asks. Sure I do. About two hours later I hand him the deck, a couple hundred cards punched. "Don't tell anyone you are that fast," he says, "you'll get stuck doing it all the time." Fortunately he soon had me doing real work.

That reminds me of a story my father tells. He had just gotten out of graduate school in the mid-1960s and started at a civil engineering firm. The project he was working on needed some extensive simulations of a city's wastewater system. The initial thought was to hire a contractor, but my Dad had learned how to program in FORTRAN so he decided to write the simulation himself. He spent a few months on it and it worked great. One of the firm's partners called my Dad into a meeting, praised him for the success of the project, and then gave him some advice: "Don't do that again or you'll be the computer guy for the rest of your career". My Dad got the message and never programmed again during his long and successful civil engineering career.

That always make me smile when he tells that joke for some reason. Programming is so common today even I do quite a bit as an electrical engineer. But in those days, apparently, it was poison.