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M E 202: Professional Planning

This guide introduces students in ME 202 to finding and using library resources for mechanical engineering research, and how library research skills support their professional goals.

Getting started: What are your goals?

To start, think about your goals. Are you just trying to pass your classes and get a job? Are you considering graduate school or a career as an academic? While basic information-finding (and information-vetting) skills are important for everyone, your individual career goals will impact the skills you will want or need to develop when it comes to doing library research.

If you are considering graduate school and a career in academia, you will want to develop very strong and thorough library research skills now so you can rely on those skills later. Even if you just want to pass your classes and move on to a career as an engineer, you should consider doing more than the bare minimum when it comes to library research—you are more likely to have a good project outcome when you've been thorough doing your literature review before coming up with your solution or design.

Let's consider the word defined below.

satisfice: to pursue the minimum satisfactory condition or outcome
–Merriam Webster

Thinking back to library-based research or literature reviews that you've done before, does this word describe your approach? (No judgment, by the way. We've all done this, including me.)

But what if it didn't have to be like that? What if you had the knowledge and skills to do better, more efficient research?

That's where the library comes in. The library isn't just a place where you can access books and databases, it's also where you can hone those information-finding skills and work with librarians to learn the best and easiest ways to find and evaluate the information you need.

Books of interest

Want to know more about why it's important to find, recognize, and use good information? The books below are a good starting point!