I mentioned in my previous post that you should quit engineering school because you'll never use math or science in engineering. That was an over simplification.
My experience in University was an overall positive one. I worked very, very hard but I felt very gratified in the end.
I believe that we all need structure in our lives. When I finished high school, I applied for electrical engineering (EE) and computer engineering. I got into the former and after finishing first year realized that I preferred my program to the other. The computer engineering program in my university was a chimera of low level computer hardware courses and some low level programming courses. It seemed like the worst of both worlds... you could neither get into pure hardware development nor were you learning decent theory and application of programming. So to be sure I didn't want to get into software engineering, I completed some programming courses on my own and did not enjoy programming. So I stuck with EE.
The intense math in third year was very satisfying for me. The appeal of this challenge is what got me into engineering in the first place. Everyone around me was struggling to keep their head above water but I enjoyed the complexity of DSP systems. Third year was tough and so was fourth year.
But in second year I did something very smart: I joined the Co-op program.
The co-op program was a 4-month job placement program that allowed students to try their hand in the field. I would alternate one work semester with one academic semester. By the time I got into third year engineering, I had already completed two job placements. In 1999 I got paid $12.50 an hour. I thought I was King Midas.
Now here's the dumb thing I did: When I realized I hated the work, I did not switch out of my program. I had something stupid to prove to an imaginary crowd... that I could finish what I started. That I wasn't chickening out. I pulled a Marty McFly. And the joke was on me.
I disliked my work. I noticed it was draining me. And again, my grim determination took over: I worked at my job and did well in it. After my first term, my employer asked me to come back for a second term. I sure fooled them! I built them a robust, practical and lightning fast non-graphical command line interface. I felt COOL using GNU Emacs. I programmed key recognition referencing classic VI key-strokes. My mentor was so excited to share his stories about his programming past. I loved the camaraderie with my co-workers. I thought maybe this is what I was meant to do.
My second term wasn't so cool. I had to re-build the interface using OO programming, accessing the enormous dynamic database. My mentor was a C++ genius. I'm not kidding. He was on every head hunter's list. He was a great guy.
But this is when and where I realized I didn't care about this stuff. I aced this term too but I started to realize that EE wasn't for me.
But did I listen to myself? No. I was afraid my parents would be disappointed. I was afraid the imaginary world around me would make fun of me. I was afraid of my own judgement - that I couldn't stick with one thing. So I stuck with it.
For my third term, in order to get a better range of work experience, I tried my hand at IC chip design/testing. Nortel gave me a job testing microchips. Gallium Arsenide Field Effect Transistors to be precise. While the lab was cool and the test procedures cooler, this was even less meaningful to me than the last work term. My heart was starting to sink. I secretly wanted to run.
Throughout all this, school was the only thing that felt like an anchor in my life. I enjoyed going to school and enjoyed the concept of getting a degree. But the closer I got to graduation, the more I was convinced that if you're not enjoying what you're studying and what you're doing, you will feel no pride in your degree. I got decent marks and graduated. But I did not feel happy and I did not look forward to looking for work in my field.
Fast foward 13 years. Would I have done anything differently? I would have still stuck with finishing my engineering degree. But I should have looked further into the one other area of interest that I discovered in school while taking one of three compulsory elective courses (non-engineering courses for broadening your mind). You could pick any non-engineering subjects so I picked Philosophy, Accounting and Psychology.
That one private area of interest has now blossomed into a total and unrelenting passion for me. And when I think back to that elective course, I remember reading the entire text book in my spare time even though we were asked to only read the first 10 chapters. I remember not even trying and getting an A+. I just never connected the two dots that my extreme curiosity of that field could have translated into a career.
My closest ones and I have discovered the beauty of Stoicism. It only makes sense to accept the path we have walked on (the past is out of our control) and thank ourselves for it. It was a long and tumultuous journey, and we did the best we could. I have learnt my lesson and so what am I going to do with that?
We can control what is in our hands now, which is the present moment and the decisions we make today.
What are you going to do?
No comments:
Post a Comment