Shadowing Practice: Here's Why Mechanical Engineering Is A Great Degree - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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Is a mechanical engineering degree worth it?
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That's what we're going to be talking about today.
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But before we get into that, make sure to gently tap the like button in order to defeat the evil YouTube algorithm.
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On this channel, we talk about personal finance, college degrees, careers, and opportunities that are going to lead you to success.
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And we also go over how you can avoid some of the common financial traps
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that so many people end up falling for.
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Now, if that sounds like something that interests you and you haven't done it already, go ahead and hit that subscribe button and ring the notification bell so that you never miss out.
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So first of all, what exactly is mechanical engineering?
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Well, mechanical engineers are going to design, develop, build, and implement mechanical devices and systems.
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It's one of the oldest and most broad categories of engineering.
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Your classes are going to focus quite a bit on material science, engineering physics, and mathematics.
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Now, this is one of the most common engineering degrees with around 35 ,000 graduates per year.
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Now, when it comes to salary or earning potential, engineering degrees tend to do really well.
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With a mechanical engineering degree you're going to start off making $67 ,000 a year in early career
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and then in mid -career pay you'll be making around $111 ,000.
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If you decide to become a mechanical engineer they make around $88 ,000 a year
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but mechanical engineering is one of the most versatile types of engineering degrees
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and so they end up working in all kinds of different engineering related professions.
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For instance you could become a materials engineer
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and they make around 93 000 now
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if you look at the earnings of an engineer over a
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lifetime compared to other types of degrees the average degree is going to earn around 2 .4 million
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and engineering degrees earn 3 .5 million over a lifetime that's
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by far the highest out of any type of degree out there
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and of course this was census data that's been taken like you know the last 40 years
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or so so that might not be true 40 years from now there might be a better one
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but right now engineering is the best And the best thing about engineering degrees in general is that they're very well respected.
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So even if you don't end up working as an engineer, there's tons of different career paths that you could potentially go down.
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It's because owners and hiring managers respect engineering degrees so much
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that a lot of the time they'll just hire someone purely because they think they're really smart and hardworking.
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And so there's so many different career paths that you can go down
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and the salary is going to be really good in a lot of them.
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On top of
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that, engineering degrees tend to become entrepreneurs where they have a
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chance of making much more than any salaried nine to five career.
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And I'll talk about that a little more later.
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Overall, I'm gonna give this one a score of 9 .5 out of 10.
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Now, when it comes to satisfaction, I always talk about job satisfaction as well as meaning.
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Job satisfaction is how much you enjoy doing your job on a day -to -day basis, and then meaning is how much you think your job positively impacts the world.
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Now, when it comes to the meaning score, it's around 51 % for mechanical engineering graduates, which is pretty average.
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And when you look at a specific career, like a mechanical engineer you'll see that it's around 53 for the meaning score
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which again pretty average maybe slightly above average however
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when you look at the job satisfaction it's going to be around 69
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which is definitely above average you can compare
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that to a good one like clergy
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or a bad one like parking lot attendant according to zip
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recruiter engineering degrees are the third least regretted type of degree
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at only around 15 of people who get them who major in them end up regretting them
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and the reason for that is some of the best jobs are going to require advanced degrees.
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However, I will mention here that when it comes to engineering degrees in general, a lot of the time people are going to get a mechanical engineering degree
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and then they don't end up becoming a mechanical engineer.
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Engineering degrees tend to be really highly respected and also very flexible.
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So a lot of the time you're going to end up becoming a mechanical engineer.
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Maybe you decide you don't like it.
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It's very easy for you to switch careers, go into something else.
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I think flexibility is extremely underrated because, hey, let's say you have a plan, you know exactly what you're going to do, I would say 95 % of the time,
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even if you have a good plan, things are going to end up changing.
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And so flexibility is almost like a safety blanket for you in case your plan ends up not working out, you still have something to fall back on.
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With that being said, satisfaction is extremely subjective.
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It could depend on all kinds of different things from the industry you work in, the business you work for, the people you work around, the area of the country you're in, the company you're working for,
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all kinds of different things can basically have a huge effect
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on your quality of life as well as your job satisfaction
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and your meaning
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so this is the most subjective section by far it could be 1 out of 10 for one person
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and 10 out of 10 for another one
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but overall i have to be as objective as possible here
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and look at the statistics as well as my research i'm
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going to give this one a 7 .5 out of 10
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when it comes to satisfaction next we're going to be talking about demand
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and this is all about how much the market is currently
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at this time in history wanting some of the skills
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that you are going to learn with your particular degree
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so this one is all about supply and demand
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so businesses need to hire certain types of people
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that have certain skills and there might only be a limited number of people out there
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that can do those things and so if
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that happens then they're probably going to have to raise their prices
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and pay people more That's the great thing about being in a job in demand.
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One of the downsides, though, is sometimes if it's too in demand, then you're going to be forced to do a lot of extra work just
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because there's nobody else that can do the things that you can do.
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So if you decide to become a mechanical engineer, there's 316 ,000 jobs available, and it's growing at 4%, which is average.
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Now, the 316 ,000 is pretty impressive.
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The 4 % is not that great.
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Keep in mind, though, that there are a lot of different career paths, especially engineering career paths you can go down with a mechanical engineering degree.
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A lot of the engineering degrees don't have extremely good job outlooks.
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For instance, materials engineering, there's only 27 ,000 jobs available, and it's growing slower than average at 2%.
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If you look at petroleum engineering, there's 33 ,000 jobs available, and it's growing around average at 3%.
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So again, it doesn't look all that great, but like I said before, there's tons of different career paths that you can go down with your engineering degree.
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A lot of engineers will end up becoming coders, they might go into a leadership role, working for a company, many of them will open up their own businesses.
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To be competitive as a mechanical engineer, you might want to learn some of the more modern skills like simulation, computational design, that sort of thing.
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Learning these skills will help you out quite a bit.
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It might also be a good idea to learn some coding
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and statistics as well as some business skills is never a bad idea either.
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Now according to the National Center of Educational Statistics, STEM degrees have the second lowest unemployment rate behind health degrees of course.
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And so that's always a really good sign.
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Low unemployment rate is generally a good thing.
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And if you look up the keyword mechanical engineering degree on monster .com you'll see that 13 ,000 job postings pop up.
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You can compare this to a really good one as well as a really bad one
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and 13 ,000 is actually on the higher side believe it or not.
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Now if you look at surveys of big companies on the types of degrees that they're looking to hire, engineering degrees come in at number one even more than business degrees.
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So even though they may not be actively posting a ton of job listings for engineering degrees specifically
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if you apply to a job you have a much better chance of getting an interview
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and likely getting hired so overall i'm going to go ahead
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and give this one a 9 out of 10 next we're going to be talking about x factors
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and this is anything that we didn't go over before
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but still important so for instance i like to focus on skills flexibility how easily automated
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or outsourced something is now one thing I like to look
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at is how much you end up earning over a lifetime with a degree
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and engineering degrees in general are going to earn a lot more than your average major.
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So all majors and all different occupations earn around 2 .4 million over a lifetime
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and engineering degrees earn on average around 3 .5.
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But it doesn't stop there because we already knew the engineering degrees
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and the careers you end up going down tend to pay pretty well.
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The amazing thing here is that it pretty much doesn't matter what career path you go down, you're going to be making well above average.
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So for instance if you become an engineer you'll make around 3 .6 over a lifetime
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and if you get into computer
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and math it'll be 3 .7 management you're going to see 4 .1
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and even if you go all the way down to something like community
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and legal service which generally is only going to make around 1 .8 over a lifetime you'll see
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that with an engineering degree you make 3 .2 million pretty
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much across the board no matter what career path you end
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up going down you're going to make really good money with
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an engineering degree now you can argue why this is it could be correlation causation it could be
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that people who are smart tend to go into engineering and
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so they tend to do better nobody really knows i don't know either my best guess is
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that it has a little bit to do with both
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but with that being said
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when it comes to the skills you learn as a mechanical
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engineer according to zip recruiter it's going to rank around 77 out of 100
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which is very very good you can compare this to the best skill on the list
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which is software engineering or the worst one which is industrial sewing
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and you'll see here
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that people who have the skill set of mechanical engineering are
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going to be very valuable to different companies now this doesn't necessarily mean that
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if you get a different degree you're not going to have
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a valuable skill set value is extremely subjective all i'm saying is
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that people on the open market to business owners
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and hiring managers how much value they have to those companies
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in terms of those companies giving them money to perform a service for them.
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So for instance industrial sewing might have been the most valuable skill you could know a hundred years ago
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but right now it's not.
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Now I also like to look at the likelihood of automation
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which is extremely low for mechanical engineering only about 1 .1 %
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and you can see that with all different types of engineering degrees the skills
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that you learn as an engineer are very very unlikely to be automated.
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First of all you have to learn how to communicate with other human beings robots are very unlikely to do
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that second of all when it comes to problem solving there's a lot of feedback
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that is involved so you know you've got a problem you have a solution
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or you think you came up with a solution
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Somebody else puts their input in there and then you have to put your input in there.
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It's just, it's very unlikely that a robot will ever be able to do that.
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On top of that, a lot of the time you're gonna be working with your hands and seeing problems, diagnosing those problems and then fixing them.
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Again, something very unlikely for a robot to be able to do, fine motor skills, things that you can do with your hands.
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Very difficult to program a robot to do that repeatedly.
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On top of that, the question of whether this career will be outsourced.
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Now, one comment I get a lot of the time on
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my videos is engineering degrees are not as valuable in some other countries
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so for instance India and the reason for this is
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because they're pretty much oversaturated everyone goes to college to become an engineer now it's possible
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that that could happen here in the US
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but highly unlikely in my opinion engineering has been around for a long time
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and it's not as good as it used to be
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but it definitely hasn't gotten saturated
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so in terms of being outsourced I think that's highly unlikely
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because a lot of the time the projects you're going to
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be working on you'll have to be there in person i don't think it's something
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that you could do over zoom now i've talked about this before
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but engineering degrees tend to create more millionaires than any other type of major
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and i think it has more to do with the fact
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that engineering is a great prerequisite for you to start your own business sure engineering salaries are high and
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if you learn personal finance skills you start investing at a
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young age you can become a millionaire in a few decades but
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if you want to get rich fast as most people on
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youtube want to then you're gonna have to start your own business And in my opinion, because of the fact that engineering is pretty much just practical problem solving,
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it's one of the best prerequisites to becoming an entrepreneur because entrepreneurship is all about solving people's problems.
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And you're going to be on the cutting edge of whatever industry you're in.
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You might even be designing some of the newest products.
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And so you're going to see big opportunities open up.
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So after getting a few years of experience and learning valuable skills, it's very likely you're going to see an opportunity and you're going to be able to jump on it.
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And I think it's much easier to teach an engineer business skills than to teach a business person engineering skills.
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And out of all the different types of engineering degrees, mechanical has got to be one of the most flexible.
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You can go into tons of different career paths and different industries with this type of degree.
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However, I will say, and this is something that's worth talking about because a lot of people don't mention this, engineering degrees are very difficult.
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I lived in a scholarship hall with 50 guys
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and I probably had maybe 10 engineers in the hall
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and they would basically be studying all the time especially during
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finals week like they would be studying all the time you'd see them with like black rings around their eyes
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and then the business majors would just be partying all the time okay
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so i know this is not a very nice thing to say
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because everything's subjective but there are some degrees
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that are just objectively easier than others and engineering degrees are tough
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so keep that in mind if you're thinking of going into engineering there's a reason
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that the dropout rate for certain types of degrees are
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so high so many people end up not finishing them
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and i can tell you
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that i probably would not have been ready my first semester for an engineering curriculum
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or if i did go into that i probably would have taken less credits so with
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that being said i'm going to give this one an x factor score of nine out of ten
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so some of the pros here great salary even a good
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salary at the entry level also a very low chance of it being automated some of the cons here are
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that you're going to have to stay on top of things
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everything is happening super fast automation is coming streamlining of processes
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so you're going to have to learn new skills all the time it's also very difficult especially
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when you're going to school engineering degrees are no joke
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and additional studies might be required for some of the higher paying
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and more sought -after careers
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but overall i'm going to give this one a score of
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8 .75 out of 10 it can be a great option for the right person obviously
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if you hate doing engineering you hate math you know you're
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not interested in it at all don't go down this career path just
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because I say it's good or just
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because the pay is good make sure you do something
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that you're interested in and it's also somewhat practical
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so you're not wasting your time and your money
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if you want more help doing research
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and you don't want to wait for my videos to come out
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because I've got like hundreds in the works right now go ahead
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and check out my college degree ranker down in the description below
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and my patreon this is the original version
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but i think it's the best possible resource out there at this point it's the resource
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that i would have wanted
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when i was 18 wondering what i was going to do with my life
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and if you haven't done it already go ahead
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and gently tap the like button in order to defeat the evil youtube algorithm hit
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that subscribe button ring the notification bell comment down below any thoughts comments criticisms etc
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that you have on the video sharing the video really helps a lot that'd be awesome
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if you share it with your friends
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and don't leave check out my other videos right here i made them just for you
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This video has 228 sentences and 3093 words to shadow. The speech runs for 14:34. The speaker talks fast, about 212 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 88% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is easy to follow.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| mechanical adjective | /məˈkænəkəl/ | Related to mechanics (the branch of physics that deals with forces acting on matter). |
| skill noun | /skɪl/ | A capacity to do something well; a technique, an ability, usually acquired or learned, as opposed to abilities that are regarded as innate. |
| earn verb | /ɝn/ | To gain (success, reward, recognition) through applied effort or work. |
| satisfaction noun | /sætɪsˈfækʃən/ | A fulfilment of a need or desire. |
| hire verb | /ˈhaɪɹ/ | To obtain the services of in return for fixed payment. |
| lifetime noun | /ˈlaɪf.taɪm/ | The duration of the life of someone or something. |
| salary noun | /ˈsæləɹi/ | A fixed amount of money paid to a worker, usually calculated on a monthly or annual basis, not hourly, as wages. Implies a degree of professionalism and/or… |
| unlikely adjective | /ʌnˈlaɪkli/ | Not likely; improbable; not to be reasonably expected. |
| robot noun | /ˈɹoʊ.bɑt/ | An intelligent mechanical being designed to look like a human or other creature, and usually made from metal. |
| subjective adjective | /səbˈd͡ʒɛktɪv/ | Formed, as in opinions, based upon a person's feelings or intuition, rather than upon observation or purely logical reasoning; coming more from within the… |
| compare verb | /kəmˈpɛɚ/ | To assess the similarities and differences between two or more things [“to compare X with Y”]. Having made the comparison of X with Y, one might have found it… |
| solve verb | /sɒlv/ | To find an answer or solution to a problem or question; to work out. |
| ton noun | /tʌn/ | The short ton of 2000 pounds (about 907 kg), 20 hundredweights of 100 pounds avoirdupois each. |
| mathematics noun | /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/ | An abstract representational system studying numbers, shapes, structures, quantitative change and relationships between them. |
| flexibility noun | /ˌflɛksɪˈbɪlɪti/ | The quality of being flexible, whether physically or metaphorically. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. | |
| go down verb | To descend; to move from a higher place to a lower one. | |
| go ahead verb | /ˌɡoʊ əˈhɛd/ | To proceed with; to begin. |
| check out verb | To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.). | |
| go down with verb | To catch or contract (an illness). | |
| go over verb | To look at carefully; to scrutinize; to analyze. | |
| open up verb | To open. | |
| come out verb | /ˌkʌm ˈaʊt/ | To be discovered; to be revealed. |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 75 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, don't, you'll. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, algorithm /ˈælɡəɹɪðm̩/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: satisfaction /sætɪsˈfækʃən/, notification /ˌnoʊtɪfɪˈkeɪʃn̩/, automation /ˌɔ.təˈmeɪ.ʃən/, potentially /pəˈtɛnʃ(ə)li/, occupation /ˌɑkjʊˈpeɪʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: mechanical /məˈkænəkəl/, satisfaction /sætɪsˈfækʃən/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, flexibility /ˌflɛksɪˈbɪlɪti/, unemployment /ʌn.ɪmˈplɔɪ.mənt/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like mechanical, skill, earn.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | if you become an engineer you'll make |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | been taken · being said · be forced |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | haven't done · has been · hasn't gotten saturated |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | graduates, which is · people who get · people who are |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.