Exploring Engineering Ep. 09: Mechanical Engineering

Michael McNabb
I remember, in kindergarten, I told my parents I wanted to be an inventor, because my grandfather was an inventor. That kind of was my inspiration, and I didn’t really know what that entailed till I got to high school. I started tinkering with various different projects. That’s sort of when I fell in love with mechanical-type work, which I later found out to be under the umbrella of mechanical engineering.

Laura Vogt
I’ve really enjoyed hearing how and when our students, alumni, and faculty became interested in their majors. Michael McNabb, who we just heard from, is an alum in mechanical engineering, and was the only person I spoke with that shared he could trace his interest back to kindergarten. So we’ll hear more from Michael later in the podcast.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Exploring Engineering at UC Berkeley. Our conversations today are all about the study of mechanical engineering. I’m Laura Vogt, the host and producer, and I’m also the Director of Student Communications as part of Berkeley Engineering’s Marketing and Communications team.

During the conversations I had with this episode’s guests, I learned that mechanical engineers really like solving complex problems for society. It was actually a theme that ran through every interview I did.

Mechanical engineering is also the major that has students talking more about hands-on projects that they worked on in classes and with student organizations. Our first conversation is with Aashray Manchanda, who graduated with his bachelors of science in May. Congratulations, Aashray! And now here are his thoughts.

Aashray Manchanda
My name is Aashray Manchanda. I’m a senior in mechanical engineering, and I’m from Fairfax, Virginia.

Throughout high school, I had a lot of experiences with different clubs and extracurricular activities, and for me, robotics and math were just something that stuck out to me. That’s something I just wanted to keep doing, and I had the fortunate opportunity to continue doing it throughout high school. So coming into college, I just knew that’s what I wanted to do. I had some people older than me who studied mechanical engineering. I heard great things about the major. I knew kind of what the career trajectory looked like. So that also helped.

I think one thing that’s very unique about mechanical engineering specifically is how project-oriented it is. I’ve been able to work in a lot of different project teams, work in a lot of different project-based clubs, and also work on a couple of projects in my free time too, to really elevate the mechanical engineering experience and make the most of it. And that’s something I’m really proud of, and I think has taken me a long way into who I am now as an engineer.

Mechanical engineering has a great breakdown, I think, in that it goes very, very broad, but can also go very deep in subjects that you want it to go. Very interesting too, because there’s a lot of things in that which I would have never thought about when I came in. I had expected it to be very math-heavy, and that’s kind of what I was going with, and that’s what I thought would take me all the way.

But in reality, ever since coming here, I think the Jacobs Institute of Design and a bunch of other resources on campus have really shown me that project-based learning is a huge, huge advantage for mechanical engineers because so much of our work is very physical. I have tons of projects where I’ve worked with electrical engineering majors. I think that’s the most common supplement.

So EECS, our Electrical Engineering and Computer Science program, has a ton of really good classes that supplement the mechanical engineering major. And I think another really good blend is things like energy engineering, civil engineering, bioengineering—there’s just tons of majors that really well supplement mechanical engineering.

I’ve been a part of ASME all four of my years here. ASME is the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. It’s like a nationwide organization that has chapters at different universities and even professional chapters all around the country. I joined the chapter here at Berkeley. I was in it for a year and a half, two years, and then I became president of it. I have been really involved with it throughout my time here. We’ve always had different events trying to inspire and educate mechanical engineers. Here, we’ve hosted educational workshops, technical workshops, everything in between to make sure that mechanical engineering is as complete as possible.

When people graduate out of mechanical engineering, they either go into their full-time job where, typically, they’re working on very great engineering projects—and ultimately that helps a lot with sustainability—and they can make a big impact on a lot of people. So through industry, I think there’s a lot of ways that students can end up in positions where they are able to put in their own design freedom, their own creativity, and make projects that will ultimately impact a lot of people.

And on the flip side of things, through research, I think a lot of master’s, Ph.D. students and even undergrads are able to work on these projects that will have a lot of future implications—maybe 5, 10 years down the line.

Laura Vogt
I was so excited to be able to interview Lydia Sohn, a professor of mechanical engineering, and I thought it had nothing to do with engineering because she’s a baker like me. Instead, I found out that she has a course that she was able to put her own spin on and brought the principles of cooking into engineering.

Lydia Sohn
And another course that I teach right now is the Science and Engineering of Cooking, which is quite an unusual course. But my whole theme has really been to tell people that even though you think you’re not doing STEM, you really are when you’re in the kitchen, when you’re cooking. Even if you think you haven’t had any experience in the lab—you are when you’re in the kitchen making things.

That is all about laboratory work, thinking on the fly, and trying to make things work well and everything like that. And that’s also just another course that I teach that I’m really, really passionate about, and I really enjoy.

Laura Vogt
Okay, side quest over. Here’s Lydia telling us about her journey to mechanical engineering and the exciting ways research is hoping to make people’s lives better.

Lydia Sohn
I’m Lydia Sohn. I grew up in New Jersey. I’ve always been interested in science and would do experiments at home and everything. I actually started as a chemistry major at Harvard as an undergraduate there, but I will say that being a chemistry major there—it’s very intense—and I was sufficiently scared. But I discovered math and physics.

My math professor was amazing, and he brought whatever he was talking about to applications. And my physics classes—all of us were lost together. So I probably am one of the few people who chose a major based upon who I was hanging out with versus the actual interest of the material. And so I majored in chemistry and physics at Harvard. It was a double major, and then I stayed on at Harvard to get a Ph.D. in physics. That was all about making microscale radio antennas and various other things and using superconducting devices.

So I’ve had a very different background in mechanical engineering. I am in the mechanical engineering department, as I mentioned—been here for, I think, over at least 21 years. My research is really now focused on biology. It’s really focused on developing platforms. So I leverage everything that I’ve learned since being a graduate student at Harvard, and I use these different techniques and measurement techniques to build platforms to assess someone’s susceptibility, for instance, to breast cancer or to other diseases, and to diagnose and monitor patients with different types of diseases.

So it has very much a biological bent in my work. But at the same time, I still remain true to my core being an engineer/business person, and making devices and platforms. Mechanical engineering can be anything that you want. I think in our department, there are so many different exciting things that are going on, from people who are working on developing new methods to do additive manufacturing, or doing 3D printing and so forth.

We have an aerospace engineering program. And of course, my work—many people think about me as an engineer, people think their contributions could be sort of monitoring and diagnosing disease, which is what I do. But then this whole new area, which I’m very excited about, is really: how do you know someone’s going to develop a disease? How can we predict that? And so sort of changing that question a little bit—how much is someone susceptible for disease? I think that’s a new wave of research that can be done. And so I’m trying to focus on that.

I still encounter people who just have this sense that mechanical engineering is just about gears and wheels. And then when I tell them about what I’m doing, I think it’s pretty interesting to see people’s jaws drop—”Oh, I didn’t know that.” And I think that there’s just so many different areas in mechanical engineering. You could say this is in the applied science area, as is most engineering. But we have electrical engineering involved. We have bioengineering, like me. We have people who are looking at the business aspects of things. So there’s a lot of different things going on in mechanical engineering.

I see students going to work for the aerospace industry. I see students jumping off to work at a startup. It’s just amazing how students come up with all these different job opportunities. I’m like, “Oh, I didn’t know that existed.” In terms of investigating majors, I think it’s really just talking to people. There’s only so much that I think that the College of Engineering can communicate with written words and on the web. But I really still very much want to encourage people to just reach out and talk to people—talk to departments. It’s our job to try to tell you what it’s all about.

Laura Vogt
Our final conversation this episode is with Michael McNabb, a mechanical engineering alum who you heard from at the top of the episode. What I found interesting in his mechanical engineering journey is that he found his niche by working with different student organizations and competition teams. Here is Michael telling us more about his experiences.

Michael McNabb
My name is Michael McNabb. I studied mechanical engineering and business administration at Berkeley, class of 2022. I was in the M.E.T. program. I was in the second year of the program, in the first class that did mechanical engineering.

I’ve always loved mechanical engineering. I think I didn’t really know what it was at first, but ever since I was sort of little, I had this penchant for invention. When I went to Berkeley, I was honestly pretty surprised just by how extensive mechanical engineering really was, though. When I first got there, I thought it was because I had some vague understanding of designing things to solve problems, but I had no idea how wide that umbrella could be.

There’s a lot of different fields that fall into the category of mechanical engineering, and I got to have a really good exposure around the board in different sectors of it. My experience in mechanical engineering was different than what I expected, because I didn’t really expect to have as nonlinear of a path as I did.

And I guess what I mean by that is, you know, when I was looking at the course catalog, I was looking at these prerequisites, and I thought, okay, yeah, I’ll take this class and then this class and this class, it’ll all build on the same train of thought, the same knowledge that I have been building on, because that’s kind of how, for the most part, education was for me beforehand—in high school and whatnot. You’re always building on the previous year’s worth of work.

But in mechanical engineering, there’s so many different directions you can branch into that I was a little bit surprised just how much you’re able to steer the ship, so to speak. Sure, there are requirements and there are classes that you need to take to have a well-rounded view of engineering and problem solving as a whole, but once you find a focus or a topic that you really are interested in, really the sky’s the limit.

For students who are interested in mechanical engineering but aren’t really sure which direction they want to take it in, my best advice would be to explore.

I mean, there’s so much information online about various different topics, and that can only get you so far. I think the best way to really learn about what you’ve enjoyed doing is to work on projects. I started building a robot chicken that I would teach to play fetch. It had some cameras on it that I would, you know, throw a tennis ball for. It would detect where that tennis ball went within a room, hunt it down, and bring it back to me. That was always the goal.

So I worked on that for probably the last year and a half of my undergrad and after I graduated, actually took the robot with me. I wasn’t affiliated with any professor, and continued working on it even to this day in my free time. It definitely falls into the category of projects that push the limit of what I could do.

That was one area that I was truly surprised about because I had no idea it fell under the category of mechanical engineering. Control systems and dynamics is—at least from my perspective—not something that seemed like it would fall under mechanical-type work, but there’s a lot of analysis and a lot of theory that people have developed largely within the past 150 years.

But even more recently than that, there are some cutting edge techniques that are really fascinating to learn about and are very directly relevant to mechanical engineering, because once you design and build the thing, you have to keep in mind how people are actually going to use it and how people are going to control it and get it to do what it needs to do.

So by having some understanding of the full process—well, even if you don’t specialize in it—you’re able to design for it in a way that enables it, whatever application you’re working on, to be more effective.

I hope that students who are considering Berkeley and mechanical engineering are open to learning about many different fields of problem solving, because to me, that’s what engineering is all about: solving problems in a robust, reliable, and good way.
I think mechanical engineering is the place to be if you like solving problems.

Laura Vogt
A mechanical engineer’s career choices are immense, borrowing their description from the College of Engineering website. You might want to test materials or machines in real-life applications to ensure they’ll withstand design requirements or invent fantastic devices to sort cells and aid disabilities—or any number of possible careers involving the design or application of thermodynamics, turbines, reactors, engines, energy—and the list keeps growing.

This episode of Exploring Engineering is just one stepping stone in learning about mechanical engineering, and we encourage you to continue learning more. You can begin by visiting our podcast webpage, engineering.berkeley.edu/exploringengineering, to check out resources, links, and videos, such as the ones produced by our summer program Girls in Engineering.

And as I ask every episode, please share this podcast series with your friends, classmates, and counselors so others can learn and explore what being an engineer means.