Real Life Examples of My $100K+ Education At Work
I’m convinced that in my job, I use 95% of the material covered in engineering school less than 5% of the time. Most of what I do boils down to on the job experience or falls in the category of project management. In many cases, not much would separate me from a talented hobbyist or tinkerer. Of course, this makes me question the value of my education. Why did I spend all that time learning all that stuff? I’ve considered it for a while, and I like to tell myself that the 5% of the time I really use my degree is what makes me valuable as an employee. In a tangential line of discussion, there’s also been a fair bit of talk in the news recently about the workforce, the number of engineers trained in the US, and why so many STEM students change majors. One line of reasoning…
Preparing for…everything!
I’ve probably mentioned before how I never intended to get a degree in engineering. I started college with the notion of being a research scientist, but initially decided I wasn’t scientist material. I spent a couple years switching through various majors and ended up in journalism for a while. I managed to even bag a couple awards for my writing. Fortunately, I ended up being second in line for a journalism position, and when I didn’t get it, decided that I missed physics and should go back to school. One unexpected side effect of this detour in my education is that I got a lot of very valuable experience writing. I didn’t realize it until much later, but a lot of science and engineering revolves around writing, and that background, as useless as it seemed at the time, has come in very handy. As an undergrad back in physics, I…
I have it all figured out
When I was a kid, I used to take things apart to see if I could figure out how they worked. I realize I’m probably like every other engineer in that regard, but I was also one of those who failed to put things back together many times. I suspect I may have been more successful with time, but my parents put the kabosh on that particular behavior pretty quickly. Thus, I was doomed from the get-go as an experimentalist. I learned to program when I was 9, and it turned out I was actually pretty good at it. Ironically, I never considered a career involving programming until college. I had wanted to go into physics after having a great time in high school physics classes. I love figuring things out, and that’s what physics was: non-stop problems that you had to figure out. It wasn’t until I enrolled in…
Getting started is hard to do
I have a confession to make: I’m a recovering perfectionist. In high school, I was able to breeze through most of my classes. I could procrastinate and still manage to do really good work, even if I didn’t manage to start my homework until the morning it was due. I started taking university classes in high school, and this was only marginally more difficult…I could often get by with starting things the night before. And then I went to a big name college, and found out that I couldn’t procrastinate at all. My perfectionism became a problem in college. Deadlines became terrifying…and still are. It turns out that procrastination is a sign of perfectionism, along with several other signs. People don’t like to start things that they are afraid they can’t do, well, perfectly. I didn’t know I was a perfectionist, however, until I had kids and found out that they were…