Hi,

I’m an engineer in its late 30s and I sometime go to high-school talking about my job, my scholar background, etc… I remember being very stressed about my future at that time, so I try to tell them what I wish someone had told me 20 years ago.

If any teens are reading this (or people in contact with teens), what topics or advice would you want to hear from some random dude like me ?

Thanks for your help

ps: I know most of lemmy users are middle age, but there is no way I create account on shitktok, Insta or stuff.

  • Croquette@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    17 hours ago

    Not OP but I can share my journey through my career.

    Depends on where you are in the world and your work ethic.

    I was a terrible student with a hard time understanding harder maths (due to my schooling, but that is something specific to my region), and I was still able to graduate with a 3/4.3 score. It was a lot of hard work that I wasn’t prepared to do due to my work ethic. I had to learn to be at least decent fast and the first year was brutal.

    My experience is that university is a lot harder than the work after university. But the corporate world can be soul crushing. In big corpos, you usually do the same part of a process where as during university, you do a lot of interesting and varied stuff.

    My electrical engineering program was generalist with each semester being a different domain of electrical engineering and me being interesting in embedded electronics. So doing a semester of power transmission lines was brutal because I wasn’t that organised and didn’t like the courses.

    Society tend to romanticize engineering, but there is a lot of busywork and project management and you get caught in administrative bullshit just like any other job (ask a software engineer thoughts on stand-ups and agile and be ready to hear horror stories).

    But, if you really like engineering, there are those moments of pure engineering that makes you forget all the bullshit around and make the career worthwhile.

    So life rambling aside, engineering is a worthwhile career. It is not an easy path, but the work is manageable though sometime overwhelming. Treat university like a 9-5 job with some overtime and you’ll do fine.

    I didn’t have to worry about the financial side of things because I live a place where school is cheap and student financial aid is plentiful. So keep that in mind when making your decision because I cannot comment on that part.