Five career tips for mechanical engineers: 1) If it sounds too good to be true, 98% of the time, it is, thousands of clever people spent their lives researching how things are now, incrementally. Success is almost entirely by small steps, and not whacky tricks. 2) We are all VERY stupid, drop your ego, nobody is more despised in an engineering firm than the loud mouth who everyone on the shop floor knows is full of s**t. All you have to be is smarter than you were yesterday, and be happy to throw your calculations in front of everyone for scrutiny. 3) I do not really like the "university" idea in terms of how it has become thought of, getting your bachelors, masters or doctorate is just the start. I can tell you that in nearly every major project I do, I spend sometimes weeks reading the work of other people before I decide I know what to do. Almost never, unless it is a very trivial problem, do I say, "oh I have a degree I know what to do". Every day for the rest of your life is "literature review day". Never does it end, and if you step off this elevator, you can become so lost you may never get back on it again. 4) If you have a very difficult disagreement at work, its up to you to prove you are correct with data and numbers. Even if you KNOW you are right, you must do the work to prove it to everyone else, being right is only the first part of the job, persuading everyone else that your idea is the best path forward is the next part, and if you really CANT prove it, you may have to accept that being right within the confines of your own mind is not sufficient proof in the real world. In other words, if someone else has an inferior idea to you, but explains it with greater clarity, you deserved to lose. 5) If you spend one month, deeply intensively researching ONE specific technical problem, with all your effort, you will find that you graduate to the pantheon of mechanical engineering, where you and a select band of fellow devotees can all gather and agree you still don't know the answer. All you have to do is realise that your worst answer is now better than 99% of everyone else`s answer. You are now to those people who didn't spend that month researching the topic, an "expert". Which is just someone who is wrong to a smaller degree than most people on one specific question. If you can do all these things for years, and work hard, people will start asking YOU for advice, and you will need to remember that "working hard worked", and all the clever nice things people ever said about you, were because YOU worked hard, and never once stopped reading.