Mechanical Engineers of TSR

What CAD software did you guys and girls use at your university? I used Solidworks, which seems to be the most common one to use from what I have heard.

We use SolidWorks as well!

There's also Creo and AutoCAD but I haven't used those yet. Probably won't even use them though.

What other software do you get to use? I used ANSYS for FEA and CFD. I also used Mathcad too, which was especially handy for courseworks.

So, stupid questions time, who pays the academic fees? Does accommodation come out of your (minimum) pay. And are you applying with an MEng, or BEng + MSc?

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What CAD software did you guys and girls use at your university? I used Solidworks, which seems to be the most common one to use from what I have heard.

The EPSRC pay the tuition fees, research equipment costs, and your stipend. I'm currently doing an MEng, but have to undertake another masters course (paid for by the EPSRC) before the PhD. Accommodation costs are your responsibility. The minimum pay you are given should cover this and other living costs. PhD students will also be allowed to apply for government loans from 2016/17 academic year according to the announced budget.

Thanks.

Is it typical to have to do another Masters on top of the MEng before a PhD? Presumably you could have "saved" a year doing BEng + MSc?

Are you intending to stay in academia or go into industry when you complete your PhD?

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Umm instead of Mathcad we use MATLAB (& Simulink). In third and fourth years we can use ANSYS too (depending on what optional modules you choose, usually for CFD/FEA modules).

Recently I've used ElecNet and MagNet also, these are simulation computer packages particularly for electrical device modelling (i.e. electromagnets and all that stuff)!

The EPSRC pay the tuition fees, research equipment costs, and your stipend. I'm currently doing an MEng, but have to undertake another masters course (paid for by the EPSRC) before the PhD. Accommodation costs are your responsibility. The minimum pay you are given should cover this and other living costs. PhD students will also be allowed to apply for government loans from 2016/17 academic year according to the announced budget.



Solidworks, although our uni are now starting to teach Autodesk Inventor as well. If you do the naval theme of mech eng, you learn rhino as well. Ansys for CFD, haven't used it for FEA though. MatLab and Python for computational methods.

What CAD software did you guys and girls use at your university? I used Solidworks, which seems to be the most common one to use from what I have heard.

As a side note, I'd say that Excel is probably one of the most widely used and useful tools in engineering, so I would definitely recommend becoming at least reasonably good at it.

I'm a prospective engineering student. Just wondering what kinds of things you use excel for? and do you need to be able to be good at calculations in excel and stuff? (If you are talking about the spreadsheet software that is )

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Sorry, I should have noted that I was talking about my experience of being in industry, not necessarily university.

In industry Excel is used a lot for calculations. At my current company we have a large amount of design tools (basically standard calculation packages with the equations already built in) for performing common calculations.

For university you don't need to be good at Excel at all. I used it for producing graphs for reports, but that's about it really. Essentially nothing more complicated than multiplying one cell with another. But then again I would also say that I did not appreciate its power or usefulness, and did not know enough about how to use it; had I been aware of what it could do then I would have probably used it more.

I had classes on Matlab too, although haven't used it outside of those classes.

Just curious, do any of you guys work on a computer in a cubicle (all day) and have a lot of paperwork to do on top?

I work on a computer all day, but not in a cubicle. I've never been in an office where there are cubicles. And there's paperwork to do, too.

Have you had site visits/international travel during your time? Do you feel like you would ever change industry at some point?

I'm hungry to work for a company that offers decent development on an international stage...thus a few international visits (that are paid for) now and again would be nice.

Haven't had any of that yet, but it is available later on down the line, if you can show that you are actually a decent engineer. It also depends on what type of engineer you are. If you're in design, then you're office based and don't tend to visit sites much. But if you're doing projects or operations or something then you'll probably get to spend more time onsite.

I'm assuming you're more of a design engineer then from your description!

Do you enjoy it on the whole?