Version 1 by Sajiv Shah | 1/22/2025
When I got to college I quickly discovered that there are tons of prep tools for recruiting in software engineering and nearly none for mechanical engineering. For the resources that do exist, some are behind paywalls and contribute to the further lack of democratization in the ecosystem of mechanical engineering.
I’m creating this guide (and will continue to improve it) to help combat this! Internships have helped me grow in many ways and are invaluable experiences, so I want to help you get one.
The first section of this guide covers technical content that you may be asked in interviews. It won’t cover all the topics you might encounter, but will reinforce the primary concepts that you should know. This is the part of the guide that will grow the most, as I will add in more and more fundamental MechE principles that you should stay sharp on. I wrote this section to explain many concepts from the ground up, so find what is useful for you.
The second section focuses on finding companies and tips on getting yourself past the sea of application portals and into an interview room.
Section three is about projects. I demonstrate my advice through a quick project I did this past winter break. Section four continues on some of these ideas and covers design presentations.
And lastly section five: question and solution walkthroughs. This section will also continue to grow a lot.
Time allowing, I aim to send out a question/answer walkthrough or post about an interesting MechE concept every couple weeks via a Substack newsletter. Those will also be appropriately adapted into newer versions of this guide. Each new version will be a new document so if you want to stay updated to the latest, subscribe!
The foundation of knowledge that you need to pass a mechanical engineering interview is within structures. The majority of technical questions you are likely to get asked (especially if you are a freshman or sophomore) will fall in this category. Let’s build up our knowledge from the ground up—starting at high school physics.
In your first physics class you learned that forces and torques exist. They are derived from momentum equations (one of the conserved properties of the universe).
$$ \begin{gather} p = mv \\[4pt] F = \frac{dp}{dt} = \dot{m}v + m\dot{v} \\[4pt] L = Iw \\[4pt] \tau = \frac{dL}{dt} = \dot{I}w + I\dot{w}
\end{gather} $$
You might be thinking, “hey, this doesn’t look like $F = ma$, you’ve got an extra $\dot{m}v$ term in there.” While it is generally true that we can simplify the derivation of force to $F = ma$ and torque to $\tau = I\alpha$ since we are dealing with rigid bodies that conserve mass, the true equation includes these other terms simply because of the product rule when taking a derivative. You may think of them as unimportant, but they’re actually how we derive **the rocket equations.**