Mechanical vs Mechatronics Engineering | What's the Difference?

Video Statistics and Information

Video
Captions Word Cloud
Reddit Comments
Captions
so if i were in your position and i were to choose out of those two programs and what i think would be in this video i'll be comparing mechanical and mechatronics engineering if you're deciding between these two majors or maybe you're just curious to know a little more about each then this video is for you and if you're new here my name is thamer and i'm a final year mechanical engineering student at the university of waterloo also off by giving you a basic running of each program then i'll talk about the similarities the differences and what i think is the better option out of those two you'll also find timestamps for everything in the description in simple terms if you like working with things that move then mechanical engineering is for you this program will essentially teach you what you need to know to be able to design things like airpods cars you know or even phones in your first year these are types of courses you're expected to take you'll notice you have things like physics chemistry calculus algebra and it's pretty general overall but later on in your upper years you're going to notice that physics and calculus are going to be the main things and all the other courses will be derived from those the types of jobs you can expect to get after you graduate include first product design engineering and that's basically taking things like these phones and designing how it will look like what material will be made out of how it will be manufactured uh where things will go relative to one another how things will move relative to one another and things like that now manufacturing engineering is the second one that's a little bit more specific where you focus on how specifically this will be made at predicting when it will fail how it will fail and you also work on balancing building high quality products while maintaining the cost relatively low the third is automotive engineering that's basically dealing with things that are cars related so for example designing an engine that's more efficient or working on the overall mechanical design of a suspension system or even working on making a car more aerodynamic so it could move faster and now the fourth thing that you could you know that mechanical drink could lead to is working in hvac hvac stands for heating ventilation and air conditioning and basically focusing on maintaining you know comfortable room conditions for things like buildings homes cars etc and now all these combined you can expect to look at some pretty cool companies like apple tesla bmw or nasa like it's honestly really cool in mechanical engineering there are five main types of courses that you'll expect it to take that'll get you the jobs that i just mentioned now the first one is called statics and that's basically the physics behind things that don't move like buildings or bridges for example looking at the forces that a building or a bridge will experience and ensuring that it can withstand those forces and doesn't collapse is what stacks is all about second we have dynamics and that's the physics behind things that do move and probably my least favorite and that's because i like to think that physics is math on steroids and this course dynamics is physics on steroids and that's because you learn how very complicated systems move relative to one another and it can just get really confusing but a really important course nevertheless third we have fluid mechanics and that's learning how to control things like air or water to get it do what you wanted to do and in this course there's a lot and i mean a lot of calculus involved so you gotta be extremely good at that and with it it's really useful because you learn how brakes in your car work you'll learn how fluid systems in your house work and you'll also learn how you can make things like cars or planes more aerodynamic so really really useful course and fourth we have thermodynamics where you'll learn how to control and manage heat for example learner you can take advantage of heat to design a car engine or an airplane engine fifth we have mechanical design and material selection that's probably one of my favorite mechanical engineering courses because it's honestly one of the most practical courses for two reasons first a lot of the questions you get asked in job interviews come from this course so it's important to have a good understanding of it second is a lot of the things you actually do in your job will require information in this course for example i go understanding of all the different types of materials all the different manufacturing processes and what's the best way to actually build or design something so that's the reason you know this is probably one of my favorite course in my opinion one of the most important also throughout your four or five years in mechanical engineering you'll be expected to take a few electrical and software-based courses there's not a lot but maybe like four or five all right now let's talk about mechatronics engineering it's very similar to mechanical engineering except you reduce the amount of mechanical you're learning and increase the amount of electrical and software engineering that you're learning in your first year these are types of courses you can expect to take you'll see you have things like physics chem calculus algebra again but what you'll notice is a big difference is this course data structures and algorithms that's something that's not offered in mechanical engineering and only offered in like mechatronics and that gives you what you need to know to be able to get software engineering jobs so that makes mechatronics engineering really unique because it's kind of general like you can think about it as general engineering now that we have a basic understanding of each program let's talk about the similarities and differences between both of them first is both programs and get you to work as a mechanical engineer and that's because in each program you learn the fundamentals of fluids statics dynamics thermodynamics etc the third similarity is that both of them have very similar university acceptance rates this is the chart that i pulled from the university of varulu and you'll see if you have a grade 12 average of 95 or higher for both of the chance if you're getting in it's 82 which is you know pretty good pretty good now let's talk about the differences with mechatronics engineering you learn courses in electrical and software meaning you have a greater range of jobs and internships available to you see with a mechanical engineering degree you can expect to get jobs like product design engineering hardware engineering manufacturing engineering mechanical engineering or even a product manager but with mechatronics this year you have all these options that i just mentioned plus a few more like ios developers software engineer or firmware engineer so you'll see that your options are a lot broader all this stems from the fact that there's slight changes between the course you're expected to take in each program let me show you what i mean i'll compare them both side by side but first let me preface this by saying how engineering at waterloo works you have eight study terms and each term is about four months long and you're expected to take about five to six courses per term now that we know that let's have a look at the table that compares the courses you'll take in both programs we can start off by breaking down the courses in eight main categories fluids thermo solids materials design math programming and controls if we add up all the courses that you'll take in all four years in each category for both programs these are the numbers we get what's interesting here is that the number of controls and programming courses you take in mechanical there's only five courses but for mechatronics it's 12 courses one of these courses being data structures and algorithms which is an important course that teaches you the basics of software engineering now that difference of seven is because mechanical engineering goes into a lot and i mean a lot more detail with the mechanical courses you end up taking more courses in things like mechanical design fluids or thermodynamics and it's these courses that allow mechatronics students to work in really any field like mechanical hardware or software so now that we have all this incredible information what program should you choose first let's summarize both of them have an equal difficulty of getting accepted into university both of them will allow you to work as a mechanical engineer and will allow you to basically get jobs as a mechanical engineer now what makes them different is for mechanical engineering you go into a lot more detail learning mechanical during concepts but with mechatronics engineering you should have brush off those details and replace those detailed courses with things in electrical or software engineering this allows you to work either in the hardware or the software space as a mechatronics engineer the average pay for a recent graduate of mechanical engineering is around 50 to 120 000 the higher end being jobs in california while the average pay for a mechatronics engineering student recent graduate is around 80 to 150 000 the higher end being jobs in california these numbers are just rough and it really depends on what you're doing uh where you're working and what company you're working for but you see that you know the difference isn't really that big so if i were in your position and i were to choose out of those two programs the one i pick would be mechatronics engineering and here's why if you're unsure about what kind of engineering job you want to be doing after you graduate you know maybe you like software but you think mechanical is also really cool and you also like working with electronics and you just can't decide on one then this program is a lot better for you because it will allow you to keep your options open but but if you know you really like mechanical and you know you're not that interested in coding or programming then mechanical stream will be a much better option for you because you actually go into more detail with the mechanical engineering concepts if there's one thing i want you to add this video is that mechatronic engineering is broader and you have greater jobs available to you while mechanical engineering is just really focused and narrow on just a mechanical aspect of engineering as the name implies that's it for this particular video if you want more videos about me comparing other engineering programs check out this one where i compare computer science computer engineering and software engineering or if you want to learn more about how you can actually get an internship in engineering check out this video where i talk more about that that's it for this video i hope you brought your value if you did make sure to like and subscribe and i'll see you in the next one peace
Info
Channel: Tamer Shaheen
Views: 21,976
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: what is mechatronics, mechatronics engineering, mechanical engineering
Id: 0NzmyDPj1Kg
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 8min 47sec (527 seconds)
Published: Mon Jan 18 2021
Related Videos
Note
Please note that this website is currently a work in progress! Lots of interesting data and statistics to come.