Mechanical Engineering
Major
The objective of the undergraduate program in Mechanical Engineering at Caltech is to produce graduates who will attain careers and higher education that ultimately lead to leadership roles in academia, industry and government in areas of rapidly advancing interdisciplinary technology related to fluid, solid, thermal and mechanical systems. The outcome of the undergraduate program is to prepare the student to build on a fundamental education in physics, mathematics, chemistry and biology and to apply those principles to the solution of open ended engineering problems; to design, analyze, measure, and evaluate fluid, thermal and mechanical systems; to work effectively as part of a team; to communicate effectively; to apply ethical considerations; and to understand the broader impacts of engineering developments, including societal, cultural and environmental concerns.
Mechanical Engineering Coursework at a Glance
ME 72 ab. Engineering Design Laboratory.
A project-based course in which teams of students are challenged to design, test, analyze, and fabricate a robotic device to compete against devices designed by other student teams. The class lectures and team projects stress the integration of mechanical design, electronics, mechatronics, engineering analysis, and computation to solve problems in engineering system design. Critical feedback is provided through a series of formal design reviews scheduled throughout the ME 72 ab course sequence.
Back in the late 1990s, when we were designing the 'seismological wind tunnel,' we could never have imagined its success in discovering such a rich spectrum of physical phenomena relating to frictional earthquake source processes and that such phenomena could rigorously be scaled to explain natural earthquake behavior occurring at massively different length scale around the globe... This is a testament of the tremendous power of the discipline of mechanics.