Undergraduate Students | Graduate Students
What is Mechanical Engineering?
Mechanical engineering is broadly concerned with energy, manufacturing, and design of machines. Mechanical engineers conceive, plan, design, and direct the manufacture, distribution, and operation of a wide variety of devices, machines, and systems—including complex human-machine systems—for energy conversion, environmental control, materials processing, transportation, materials handling, and other purposes. The field includes thermal-fluids engineering and mechanical systems engineering.
What do MEs do?
Mechanical engineers (MEs) find a wide variety of career opportunities in industry, government, and education. Mechanical engineers form an integral part of most industries, including aerospace firms, biomedical equipment manufacturers, energy-generation utilities, automobile manufacturers, food- and metal-processing industries, petroleum refineries, electronic equipment and computer manufacturers, heavy construction and vehicle manufacturers, HVAC manufacturers, and farm implement companies.
Where do our ME graduates get jobs?
Our ME graduates have careers that take them all over the world and allow them to do all sorts of different things. Most undergraduate students get their first job in the
- Consulting—Accenture, Siemens Transportation, Shive-Hattery, Stanley Consultants
- Energy—Alliant Energy, MidAmerican Energy
- Food—General Mills, Nestle-Purina, Quaker Oats
- Government—Department of Defense, Oakridge National Lab, NASA, Rock Island Arsenal
- Manufacturing—Alcoa, Allsteel, Boeing, Caterpillar, Centro, John Deere, Emerson Process Management, General Electric, Hon, IBM, Maytag, Micron Tech., Pella, Rockwell-Collins, Silgan Plastics, 3M