NASASpaceFlight.com Forum
General Discussion => Q&A Section => Topic started by: Davidthefat on 07/28/2013 08:16 pm
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Hello, I am a Mechanical Engineering student wishing to go into propulsion in the Space and Defense Industry. By propulsion, I mean space propulsion, but I'd love to work on other conventional propulsion systems. So, here are some questions I have for the Engineers who are working, or have worked, in the Aerospace industry:
When did you start working in the industry?
If you don't mind, which companies have you worked at?
Any specific projects you've worked on?
What is your favorite part about your job?
How did you first get interested in the field?
What was the hardest part of your job?
What's the general time frame of the preliminary design to prototype of a typical project you've worked on?
What qualities make an engineer a great engineer?
How much of the work goes into higher level math, like tensors and manifolds?
For those who have worked in the defense industry: did you have any moral qualms about your line of work?
Any advice to an engineering student wanting to go into this field?
Thank you for your time.
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The very higher level stuff isn't used super-commonly from my experience. But having the higher level degree DOES help make you more competitive when you're looking for a job.
I am currently a physics graduate student working as a research associate at a NASA center, and from what I can tell, what you work on in grad school does occasionally help, but what really helps is the problem solving strategies and time management skills you learn while dealing with a graduate-level workload. A LOT of what you need to do, if you're in a research environment working as a civil servant, you pick up along the way. I've talked to different engineers and scientists working at NASA for a while, and you tend to work on a lot of different things, not just one, and often simultaneously. So being flexible and having a broad experience base helps a lot.
In NASA, a lot of times you'll be working on a project that gets canceled after 5 or so years, but sometimes the project gets picked up again or becomes relevant again after NASA gets refocused, so it pays to have a long-term perspective and document what you're doing well in a way that helps others. And if you're doing research, that's really the point: to learn something and release it to the public, for companies and academia to pick up and run with it (or at least avoid having to make the same mistakes).
In my personal experience, it pays to have a "bias for action." Whatever you're building, try to get it built as quickly as you can. You should try to develop analytical tools to get the solution right the first time, but realistically you're going to need a lot of iteration until it actually works, so it pays to get a prototype as soon as you can. Unfortunately, there's a tendency to do paper studies in this industry. A lot of your work is writing papers, doing Powerpoints and presentations, so it's good to become proficient at doing such things. But the temptation is to do everything in a computer because it's cheaper that way and has no safety or environmental considerations. But don't give in to the temptation, make it real and make it as soon in the process as you can and then the ways you can improve it will be blatantly obvious.
And while I earlier mentioned that not a lot of work goes into higher level math, I have been using that knowledge somewhat. I've been doing my fair share of calculus and solving differential equations (a lot of it being done numerically, but not all). It's useful to be able to do such things, though a solid understanding of algebra and of orders of magnitude and dimensional analysis is far more important, in my opinion. But you'd be surprised at how often the tool for doing such things is Excel (because it's so ubiquitous and cheap, everyone can use it). And it's useful to be flexible in the tools you use, because it might be that you won't be able to use your favorite computational environment because of license fees or whatever. But be sure you have some experience in both Matlab and Labview, because both are used a lot (not as often as Excel), and often are included in job requirements.
(I shouldn't have to mention it, but this is all my personal opinion.)