I'm a Chemical Engineering student in my fourth out of five years in university, and am currently working an internship in power electronics. I've also worked internships in oil/gas and chemical coatings R&D, among other non-engineering jobs that I've held, but I'll keep this to my current job. If you have any questions about what follows or of the other two jobs, definitely let me know. Even course work and other college things are fine.

I'm yet to have a math intensive job, schooling has been much more math intensive than work. Most math can be automated through spreadsheets and programs so after the initial set-up things get routine. But this makes sense because you don't want to spend all of your time doing the same calculations. Statistics have proven much more important than purer mathematics, as it allows us to model our processes and see if they are within controls and determine efficiencies.

My day-to-day tasks vary a lot in this job, varied a lot in the R&D job, and didn't vary much in the oil/gas job. In this job I do a lot of work with automating processes from a material perspective and also with new product development. I could be working on one project in the morning and another in the afternoon. It's been a good mix of hands on work, material research, and doing some of the more mundane paperwork. I've worked in anything from an analytical lab to a production line here, and it's definitely been interesting for the most part.

I'm not always challenged creatively, the greatest creative challenge has been when somebody has said "we need a material that can do x, y, z, and is from a company we like", that involves some research and imagination. The other creative side of things is doing root-cause analysis for when things go wrong i.e. issues with cores and adhesives on a well-established product, ratio issues with a two-component epoxy, or trying to remove an unknown substance from a batch of chips.

One thing that has held true of all three jobs is that meetings are plentiful and...occasionally...important. Meetings with engineers, managers, consultants, vendors, you name it and there's a meeting associated with it. Along this route, your technical writing ability becomes very important. I've learned how to take a week-long project and condense it to a single powerpoint slide while still getting results across. It's important because all the management I've dealt with loves concise summaries that tells them something. Your ability to communicate a technical idea to them and to non-technical employees is a good skill to have.

I'm sure kleinbl00 can give you a much more interesting answer than mine, as one of his many, many professions is MechE.

As a last thing, you appear to be from Ireland? If you are, I once met a PhD student from Cork who was studying at a university in France that I spent part of a summer at. Really great fellow, if you are from that part of the world there are conferences and gatherings all over the place should you get into the research side of things.