Suhas Tamvada

Career FAQ

I get a lot of DMs and emails from students and early-career engineers asking some version of the same question: How do I break into the industry? How do I get a job at a company like Tesla? Instead of repeating myself, I decided to write about it.

The One Thing That Matters Most: First Principles Thinking

If I had to pick a single skill that creates the biggest mental shift in an approach to problem solving, it’s this. Not CAD proficiency or the ability to memorize formulae. It’s the ability to break down problems from fundamental truths rather than reasoning by analogy.

What does that look like in practice? When encountering a design problem, you don’t just copy what’s been done before and tweak it. You ask: what are the physical constraints here? What are the fundamental limits? What does the physics actually allow? You decompose the problem into its most basic elements and build your solution up from there.

This isn’t just abstract philosophy. Farnam Street has a great primer on first principles thinking that’s worth reading. Elon Musk has spoken extensively about this approach – this conversation is a good example of how he applies it to engineering decisions at scale.

Why does this matter for getting hired? Because interviewers at top companies, especially the ones who have had to go through many iterations of solving real world problems, can tell instantly if you understand fundamentals or are just memorizing formulas. When someone asks you why a design choice was made and your answer starts with “because that’s how it’s usually done,” it’s usually a red flag. It is virtually impossible to fake depth, especially in physics. Either you understand the physics or you don’t, and that understanding comes from training yourself to think from first principles.

Hands-On Experience Over Classroom Theory

Classroom knowledge is necessary but not sufficient. What separates engineers who get hired from those who don’t is hands-on experience – the kind you can only get by actually building things.

Build things. Break things. Fix things. Join a Formula SAE team, a robotics club, a research lab. Personal projects count – maybe even more than coursework, because they show initiative and curiosity. If you’ve designed and manufactured a part that went on a real vehicle, that tells people more about you than a 4.0 GPA ever could.

The best engineers I work with have an intuition for how things behave physically – how a part will deflect under load, where a casting will shrink, why a bearing is running hot. That intuition only comes from touching real hardware.

I also don’t want this to be a philosophical rant. There are some actionable skills that will push you over the edge and get you recognized.

ME specific Skills Checklist

If you’re a student or early-career ME, here’s what I’d focus on:

  • CAD proficiency – the exact design platform doesn’t matter, but the ability to convert an idea into a tangible part you can see is a valuable skill. CAD teaches you to consider dimensions, tolerances, and how different parts interact. Not just modeling – assemblies, drawings, surfacing. Be fast and fluent. Speed matters when you’re iterating on designs daily.

  • GD&T – Geometric Dimensioning & Tolerancing. This is the language of manufacturing. Learn somer tolerancing standard (eg. ASME Y14.5) inside and out. Here is a good place to start. If you can’t read or create a proper drawing, you’ll struggle on day one.

  • Manufacturing methods – Understand CNC machining, injection molding, sheet metal, casting, 3D printing. Know what’s feasible and what each process constrains. The best designs are the ones that are actually manufacturable.

  • Materials science fundamentals – Know your steels, aluminum alloys, polymers, and plastics. Understand why material selection matters and how processing affects properties.

  • Thermal/fluids fundamentals – Even if you’re not in thermal, understanding heat transfer and fluid flow helps you think about real-world systems. Everything generates heat. Everything has flow paths. Further, thermal and fluid analogies help you understand other broader concepts like electromagnetism because most physics can be distilled down to field theory.

  • FEA basics – Finite element analysis. You don’t need to be an expert, but you should be able to set up and interpret a structural or thermal simulation. Know enough to sanity-check results instead of blindly trusting the solver.

  • Communication – The ability to explain a complex design decision in plain English (or a clear drawing) is wildly underrated. Technical writing matters. If you can’t communicate your ideas clearly, it doesn’t matter how good they are.

  • AI tools – Lastly, there is immense leverage in harnessing AI tools to make your life easier and learn faster. Learn how to learn using AI. Learn to treat chatbots as experts and mentors (wherever reasonable). If you are completely new to a concept, a 5 question conversation with a chatbot can get you to the 60% familiarity much faster than combing through 10 different articles on a google search. Absolutely use original material (like textbooks and peer-reviewed articles) to go deeper, but let AI bridge the gap between “I don’t know where to start” and “how do I dive deep into this niche topic?”

Start Building

The path isn’t about checking boxes on a list. It’s about being genuinely curious about how things work and building the judgment that comes from experience. Stop optimizing your resume and start building things. The rest follows.