And with that, the 2025 academic year has come to a close 🥲. We have truly locked in, crashed out, and discovered all of the joys that mechatronics engineering has to offer. And now it is time to say goodbye.
Well, at least not for the next 3-ish minutes because I’ve still got some yap left in me 😁.
Writing these blogs for y’all has truly been a highlight of my semester, so as I sit at my desk right now with an unfinished group report I have written one sentence for, a software assignment due in four days that I haven’t even opened the brief of, and a half-marathon in a week that I should really be training for, I’m honestly at peace because the feeling of joy and fulfilment of writing a blog post overpowers the crushing dread of procrastination 🫶.
For the last time 😭, let’s get into the blog.
a year of mechatronics in photos
I’m gonna be so for real, my gallery is like 80% hanging out, 10% screenshots 💀, 5% tiktoks, and only 5% engineering, BUT I scoured my phone for all the engineering pics I could find from this year to present them to you in the form of a screenshot of a google slide 😀✊.
I highly recommend joining any competitions/challenges that your spec association holds because 1: they are very fun, 2: you get valuable practical experience that you can also talk about in interviews, 3: (if you’re not already convinced) the prizes are usually money LMAO. And – if you join a mecha comp, you can beat my friends and I since we are clearly allergic to getting first place!!
my advice for YOU in pII mechatronics
Here is my advice based on my experiences in each class this year!
- Consistently do the MECHENG 242: Mechanics of Materials 1 tutorial sheets, ESPECIALLY in the second half of the semester. In the second half of sem 1, you will be swamped with MM2 assignments, your 235 group project, and your 201 labs. You might want to neglect anything and everything related to 242, but that will only stress you out when exams come around and you realise you haven’t done a single 242 question in a month 😭
- If you don’t know anything about Arduino and electronic components, do your research and, better yet, order an electronics kit and start a project yourself! This experience will prepare you perfectly for MECHENG 235: Design and Manufacture 1, and you can be the person who actually understands what’s going on instead of the person who has no idea how to do anything.
- For the MECHENG 201: Introduction to Mechatronics VEX project, write your code outside of the labs so you can focus your lab time solely on debugging your code. You only have a set number of labs (AKA a limited amount of actual time with the VEX robot), so you don’t want to waste a single second.
- MECHENG 211: Thermofluids and MECHENG 222: Dynamics are both very content-heavy like 242, so my advice is to consistently do the problem sheets and make sure you UNDERSTAND the content.
- In MECHENG 270: Software Design, just know that lots of people (ESPECIALLY ME OMDS) find GitHub and the first few weeks very confusing at first. Just hang in there and it will become second nature really quickly I promise.
looking to the future
My search for a summer internship has quickly turned into a search for a part-time job for the summer 😭 Wish me luck as I battle thousands of teenagers for a job literally anywhere that will hire me 🙏🙏🙏. If you see a job in the Nov/Dec 2025 experience section of my LinkedIn, then that means I won the war guys 😭🙏.
As y’all finalise your specialisation choices, I wish you the best along your engineering journey. Your next three years are where it gets REAL 😎. Thank you for following along on my mechatronics and blogging journey, and for the last time:
Goodbye!
– Arren Guanzon