Shop-floor skills that inform every design decision — understanding how things are made changes how you design them.
Time in a machine shop changes how you think about geometry. Once you've turned a part on a lathe and chased a thread by hand, you stop designing features that are impossible to actually make. That's the real value of shop experience for a mechanical engineer.
Developed hands-on machining skills through RPI's machine shop courses and project work. On the lathe: turning, facing, boring, and threading. On the mill: face milling, pocketing, drilling, and reaming to tolerance. I understand feeds and speeds, tool selection, workholding, and how to read a part drawing and execute it in metal.
I can read and produce engineering drawings with proper GD&T callouts — flatness, perpendicularity, true position, runout, and tolerance stacks. This bridges design and manufacturing: knowing what tolerances are actually achievable with a given process, and specifying only what the function demands.
The most useful thing machining experience gave me is DFM intuition — draft angles, minimum wall thicknesses, access for tooling, avoiding undercuts, choosing the right material for the process. I review CAD models with an eye toward how they'll be fabricated, not just whether they're geometrically correct.
"Every machining hour is an investment in better design decisions. You stop designing things that are geometrically valid but physically impossible to make."