Is Predictive Maintenance a Good Field to Pursue as a Mechanical Engineering Student?
Edited post*
When I was thinking about my graduation project three months ago, I wanted to choose something different from the usual projects around me. I wanted to work on a field that felt modern, important, and valuable for the future, and I also wanted to distinguish myself from my classmates by doing something more unique.
At that time, I did not have an engineer or someone experienced around me whom I could ask for guidance, so I turned to ChatGPT to explore possible project ideas and understand which direction might be worth pursuing. It suggested predictive maintenance, and the field sounded interesting to me, especially because it combines mechanical engineering, data analysis, and real industrial equipment. I became genuinely interested in it.
After that, I went to a power station in my country and was able to obtain turbine data from them. I started working on the project, but I should clarify something because I expressed myself poorly before: I did not mean that I was just letting AI do everything while I did nothing. The time was very limited, and I did not have strong programming experience, so I used AI mainly as a coding assistant.
I had already learned the basics of Python, Pandas, and NumPy, and I also completed a Pandas certificate from Kaggle. My focus was on understanding the engineering side, the data, and what I wanted to do with it. I was guiding the AI, explaining the steps I wanted to apply, asking it to help write or fix the code, and then trying to understand the result. I know that predictive maintenance is a broad field and cannot be fully learned in one month, but I was trying to build something useful for my graduation project while also learning as much as I could.
The reason I became confused is that when I talk to AI, it often says predictive maintenance is a growing and in-demand field. But when I search on LinkedIn and other job websites, I do not see as many opportunities as I expected. Even here on Reddit, I could not find much discussion about it.
So I wanted to ask people with real experience: is predictive maintenance actually a strong field to pursue, especially for someone with a mechanical engineering background who is trying to learn data analysis and programming? Or is the demand more limited than AI makes it sound?