Difference between Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering

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Q. I am a first year manufacturing engineering student in Ontario at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, which has just started this year. I need help distinguishing which engineering field is better: mechanical or manufacturing. Initially, I was told that there was a good chance that second year mechanical engineering would be set up and run in the university's second year of operation, however, I have now found out that it is not. The mechanical engineering program will be up and running next year only in it's first year. I have also been informed by a professor that the first two years of the manufacturing engineering and mechanical engineering program are the same. From reading articles on the Internet and talking to a few professors it seems as though mechanical engineering is a better choice, as mechanical engineers can do a manufacturing engineer's job and more. Furthermore, one professor told me that manufacturing engineering is relatively new to the industry and many companies do not know completely what it is. I have the same impression about it. One option I have is popping into business either next year or the year after that to do management courses. After I come out of the business, I would then be able to enter mechanical engineering, as it is a year behind. I would then graduate with a Bachelor degree in Mechanical Engineering with Management, and it would take me five years. So here I am stuck in a dilemma. I could finish off manufacturing engineering, but then my career options would be focussed, or I could take a year of business, which I am not really thrilled about, and enter mechanical engineering. As a sidebar, if I went into mechanical engineering I could possibly do energy engineering or mechatronics or stick with pure mechanical engineering. It would be much appreciated if anyone could tell me if there is a significant difference between manufacturing and mechanical engineering, and if it is worth taking a whole year of management to make up for this difference?

A. Within a manufacturing plant, mechanical engineers spend their time documenting what to make, and manufacturing engineers spend their time documenting how to make it. In both cases, their actual work product is images and text on paper, or in more recent years, images and text in computer files. Mechanical engineers worry about stress and strain and weight and cost and function of the product. Manufacturing engineers worry about the production process, the capital cost, machinery lifetime, consumables, maintenance, and cycle rates of every machine involved in the process, eliminating bottlenecks and single points of failure, balancing parallel production streams, adjusting the task content of jit stations to equalize the cycle time along a line, minimizing wasted effort and time, minimizing in-process inventory, and costs associated with manufacturing the product but not part of the product itself. The two kinds of engineers interact with each other throughout a product's life cycle, because the details of a product directly affect, and are directly affected by, the process that makes the product. I'd rather do most anything, including pick up garbage, than endure a year of business school. I mean that in the nicest possible way, but the few business courses that I had to take in mech. eng. school drove me crazy. Hour after hour of some guy droning on about how everything affects everything else, all the while drawing graphs and charts on the chalkboard (it was a long time ago), and never, ever, putting a single number on a graph. He's trying to teach engineers how to extract meaning from graphical data, and the data that's being graphed has exactly zero statistical significance. He could have been pulling it out of his ... well, making it up on the fly. The textbooks were just as bad; full of assertions, with no backup, other than unscaled graphs. At least the exams were easy; spit back the same mumbo jumbo, back it up with unscaled graphs. On the other hand, if your stomach can deal with business school, maybe that will give you a leg up on getting an MBA someday, and you can make some real money. After 37 years, mostly in mechanical engineering, my pay, adjusted for inflation, is about 2/3 of what I started at, as a manufacturing engineer. Manufacturing engineering new to industry? Depends on your perspective. I'd say it was new in about 1840, when interchangeable parts were a new idea.

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