Photo by Vishnu Mohanan on Unsplash This blog is aimed at all the aspiring engineers out there. I feel like many people in high school fail to realize how many opportunities to gain experience in engineering there are. In this blog we’ll look at a few types of engineering opportunities there are. Going from the easiest to hardest in terms of how difficult it is to get into them they are:

• Engineering around the house
• Starting a club
• Open source
• Engineering company

Engineering around the house

Perhaps the most underestimated form of engineering experience. But to fully utilize it you need to change your perspective. If you’re reading this at home, just step back and look around. How many things do you see around the room that perhaps could be done better or need fixing? Maybe you need a new stand for your phone, or a closet handle is broken, if you have a caliper and optionally a 3d printer, all of these are issues you can solve. Open up your computer and you can use one of the number of free CAD software that are available to create a 3D model, which you can then print and problem solved. Not only can your parents appreciate the effort, but you can also build up familiarity with the tools that engineers use, a headstart that can prove invaluable later on.

In short, start looking at the world around you. There are a lot of things that can be fixed, or done better around you to suit your personal preference. Don’t just sit on these ideas, act on them. And even better, after you’re done designing, you can upload your creation on an open-source website like Thiniverse or many others, giving others access to your model, who knows maybe someone else is facing the same problem.

Starting a club

As I mentioned more extensively in my other blog, clubs can be another great way to build up your hands-on skills. Unlike the previous method, clubs transform to all fields of STEM and beyond, you don’t have to stick to strictly engineering. Starting a club can not only give you real-world experience in engineering but also help you develop your leadership and management skills.

Talk to your friends, teachers, and school administrators regarding the possibilities of creating a club if you have a creative idea. Odds are you will encounter some resistance along the way, but odds are in the end if you present persuasive arguments you will be given all the resources you need. Consider it getting experience in business negotiations!

Open source

This type of opportunity is much more common in computer science and software engineering, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist in other types of engineering as well. But what even is open source? Open source projects in the coding sense are projects that have their entire source code publicly available and are usually maintained by a group of volunteers. This means that if you know an open-source project that you find interesting, you can usually go to their GitHub page, join their Discord server and start coding. You might be wondering, how do I know what to code? When I started my open source project work I was wondering the same thing, usually, it’s best to just look for one active member in the group chat and send them a private message asking about the work. You would be surprised how willing people can be to talk and explain, you just have to ask.

The majority of open-source projects are in coding and development. And while these are to some extent crucial skills for any field of engineering, if you’re not interested in coding, there are other types of open-source projects that you can do. Websites like Thingiverse and many others that we talked about before provide a platform to upload your projects or some even host competition challenges for designing based on a set of criteria. Summing up, there are many areas of open-source projects where you can gain experience and learn to collaborate with like-minded people.

Working at an engineering firm

Arguably the hardest opportunity to break into, oftentimes considered next to impossible unless you know someone within a certain company. However, with that said, it’s not impossible. The odds of your success can vary greatly depending on the industry and role, but from my experience, the lowest barriers to entry are usually within coding and development. There are many online coding boot camps and similar ways you can gain knowledge of programming languages, something that is much harder to do reliably and verifiably when talking about other fields of engineering.

There are many steps to applying for a job, and we can’t cover all of them in this one blog. But stay tuned as in the coming weeks we’ll be working on a number of blogs on specifically this topic.

In this blog, we’ve looked at the few ways you can gain experience in engineering. Doesn’t matter which one of these you choose, what matters is the chance of mindset. Learn not to sit on problems, rather act on them. See a broken coffee machine? Maybe try inspecting it (without breaking it more) before sending it for repair, you’ll learn better how coffee machines work, or dozens of other potential “projects” you could work on.

What are your engineering projects? Hit us up on Instagram at @chanceinternships and tell us more!