Valuable Tools to Add to Your Portfolio as an Aerospace Engineer

So you have straight A’s, you’re starting to meet a lot of new people in your field and you’re on your way to a great academic career. When applying for a job it all comes down to who can do the job best. So what other key tool can you add to your portfolio? Well, from my experience I can tell you that the best thing you can do is get your hands dirty. Build it! For example, let’s say you’re designing this amazing solar powered UAV and have the best looking 3D renderings and colored FEA images and everybody is amazed when they see your report page and the annexed images. While that may be great, there’s nothing to showcase and have some hands-on fun with. So what’s missing? The hands-on built product. So build it! First of all, you should go into this with no fear of failing. Regardless if your plane will fly great or will crash the first time it takes off, you still have the experience of building it from scratch and learning from rebuilding it. When I was in college at SDSU we had this yearly competition organized by AIAA, called DBF (Design, Build, Fly) http://www.aiaadbf.org/. That was by far the best thing I could have done to obtain experience as a young professional. We had to design an RC aircraft, build the entire thing from scratch, test it in the wind tunnel and on a local dirt runway made for these kinds of aerial vehicles and fly it at an international competition. Although, we didn’t win first prize, the entire team learned so much from every problem we ran into. We learned everything from avionics, to cutting the airfoil, to carbon fiber layups. This kind of experience makes you very valuable on the aerospace engineering market. FEA tools such as FEMAP and NX which make 3D models are very valuable especially when you need to test an expensive product. There’s a definite need for FEA in the design process of the airplane you will build and it can save you a lot of time and re-builds. Not only will you learn by making mistakes (when they should be made and not when you’re on a serious government project later on), but it gives you a certain confidence that if you can do that you can do anything. That being said, go think of something you can do to gather some hands-on experience and be proud to put in in your resume. Happy flying!

Labels: 3D Models, 3D renderings, Build, DBF, Design, FEA, FEMAP, Fly, Hands-on, NX, UAV