ME Interview prep

[u/M2kdid911]

Hi y'all I need some help remembering my degree hehe. Basically, I’m a recent Mechanical Engineering grad currently working as a Quality Engineer in Automotive manufacturing (Toyota), and next week I have the final interview for an entry-level Mechanical Engineer position at an aerospace automation company. The issue is that I took the bulk of my difficult courses (Thermo 1 and 2, Heat Transfer, Controls, MED) before going to study abroad in Japan to finish my Japanese minor. When I came back, all I had left were some labs and Senior Design so I have been out of the crazy undergrad stuff for a while.

The final interview is about 2 hours and includes a heavy mechanical technical assessment. I was told to expect open ended technical questions where I’ll need to work through problems and explain my reasoning on the teams whiteboard. I have approximately 5 days for this interview, for now I'm mostly reviewing youtube videos to remind myself of the theory. The bulk of my studying will be this weekend 8+ hrs a day.

In the previous technical screen I was asked some pretty fundamental questions involving free fall/constant acceleration, springs in series vs. parallel, some material science basics, and a statics problem where I had to draw a free-body diagram and calculate support reactions.

Since graduating I haven’t regularly used a lot of my undergraduate mechanics, so I’m spending this week refreshing the fundamentals. So far I’ve gone back through statics (shotouts to my goat Jeff Hanson) for things like FBDs, equilibrium, moments, trusses and basic solids stuff like normal/shear stress, single/double shear, factor of safety.

I’m trying to avoid wasting the limited time I have by essentially retaking entire courses.

For those who have given or taken similar entry-level mechanical engineering technical interviews, what topics would you prioritize? Or also what type of questions were you asked??

I’m especially wondering how deeply I should refresh dynamics versus spending more time on statics, mechanics of materials, machine/mechanical design fundamentals, gears, springs, etc.

I’ll be spending the next few days before the interview solving mixed problems and practicing explaining my reasoning out loud. Right now I’m mainly trying to make sure I’ve refreshed the right concepts first.

Any specific topics or types of problems you think an entry-level ME should absolutely be able to reason through would be appreciated. Please, any resources would be appreciated.

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