Mechanical engineers are responsible for the design, manufacture, and proper maintenance of machines and mechanical systems. A machine is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “any device that transmits a force or directs its application,” but a less technical definition is that machines are simply anything that moves or has moving parts. When you consider just how much of our fast-moving world is dependent on these machines, broadly defined, it’s no wonder that this subfield of engineering has been critically important to society since the dawn of the Industrial Age.
Technology has come a long way since the earliest steam engines, of course. Today, mechanical engineers are creating incredibly complex machines to do work across a growing and diverse range of fields, from perennially important industries such as automotive and manufacturing to emerging high-tech areas like aeronautics, biotechnology, and robotics. Mechanical engineering is also shrinking in scale, designing microelectromechanical and even nanoelectromechanical devices and systems that may be invisible to us but are increasingly important to the latest technologies.
Regardless of the scale of the machines in question, the field of mechanical engineering requires core skills across several areas, including calculus, physics, fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, and more. This background, along with much more specialized knowledge in subject-specific areas, enables mechanical engineers to analyze the physical and environmental forces a machine will encounter during operation and then create designs to enable it to perform its function reliably.