What I study at the University of Waterloo.
It’s a bit too mechy than it should be, but provided context on Mechanical Engineering, electrical and computer engineering, computer science, and systems design.
A Retrospective
I originally enrolled in mechatronics engineering because I was trying to decide whether I study mechanical engineering or computer engineering at Queen’s University. I originally didn’t like how mechanically focused some of the earlier terms were (thank god I didn’t go through with mechanical engineering).
When I first was getting Pumped to study engineering at the University of Waterloo, I read that mechatronics was a mistake, this has some truth to it. My interpretation of this quote, is that since mechatronics is such a broad subject area, people end up finding that they like one component more that others and choose to pursue that specific discipline developing a specialty. Therefore, why study mechatronics when you could have just studied mechanical, or electrical, or computer science? Because of context.
Reflecting from 4B after going through the mandatory degree structure, gaining context on multi disciplinary engineering problems through Structured Education is something very valuable in an undergraduate degree where you don’t really learn too much about anything anyways. I feel like I have the broad engineering context required to communicate and understand problems and solutions across disciplines. For example, for the problem of debouncing, you could implement a software timer, or a Schmidt Trigger. When I was at Tesla, I understood the pipeline of instrumenting a vehicle to designing systems to store that sensor data, to why that data was useful from a mechanical perspective. Having good fundamentals makes picking up new skills and learning new things easier. Could I have done this on my own? Probably. Would I have? I doubt it. Context isn’t just a technical skill that you can instantly pick up, it needs to be built over time like intuition.
That being said, I also think that mechatronics engineering isn’t a career path that scales. Hiring a mechatronics engineer makes sense as a startup, or a small experimental team within a larger organization where they need one person to span multiple fields (maybe due to budget constraints, maybe due to other reasons), but if you have $10M to hire a team of engineers to build something, why would you hire one generalist to do the work of three engineers (kind of well?) when you could just hire three really good specialists and a tpm to bridge the gap if they can’t communicate with each other (which they should be able to in the first place). Do one thing well, not three things in mediocracy. Remember, it’s hard to be good at everything.
This is why I tell incoming students to explore their interests, but understand that it’s not practical to do everything.
… undergraduate degree where you don’t really learn too much about anything anyways
This is obviously a bit hyperbolic, but there is also some truth to this. This is why you see people with english and history degrees go on to become corporate executives. Undergrad is primarily about learning cool shit (minus the fields that require specific education at the undergraduate level which I think is almost exclusively engineering? i.e I think you could go to law school / med school with any undergrad degree, it just might be tougher?). If that cool shit happens to overlap with your career interests, then even better.
Because of this, you end up seeing a decent amount of people going to grad school to build focus on the discipline they want to pursue. This is also why I don’t think a mechatronics degree is a mistake (but pursuing mechatronics as a career is lol). Being forced to gain context is valuable as long as you understand that the onus is on you to spend extracurricular time learning domain specific things that will make you competitive and a competent engineer (same goes for other degrees as well).