The Degree

What did I want to do for a career?

I asked myself this in high school as we were all sending out our applications to colleges. Which major? I hadn't a clue. I had very good grades, usually top of the class. I also knew that my above 4.2/4.3 GPA, due to a lack of AP classes offered, still couldn't compare with that of many in the larger public schools.

Engineering was obvious. My father was an engineer. My uncles and aunts were mostly engineers. My mother had wanted to be one when she was younger but picked the humanities. I had always thought of myself through this lens.

Beyond that I had no thought.

A friend a school had a very successful father who had been a Civil Engineering. That kind of money sounded good. Of course, I later understood that Civil Engineering pays very poorly and that his father was an outstanding businessman. So you want to own your own engineering firm if you want that money.

I played with computers a little, but this was for fun. Building them, designing them was not on the radar.

Civil Engineering it was when I listed my intended major.

I chose UCLA when the time came. USC had the better program at the time, I was told, but UCLA was cheaper even with USC scholarships offered and they had non-engineering courses I wanted to take.

I made it through my first two years until I had my first civil engineering class. The teacher was shaped like a large egg on toothpicks, spoke with his back turned to the class, and wrote down every single word he said on the blackboard. And his topic was soil samples. I didn't even make it through a single semester.

I transferred into Mechanical Engineering. At least they built engines. Engines sounded fine.

A few classes in and I knew I was different from the other engineers. They liked engines. They liked the mechanical things. It spoke to them. But not to me. I considered that mechanical engineer would pay the bills while I did other things.

I had a job at the university library. I started shelving books. When I had a problem with networking at home, getting a LAN gaming party working, someone suggest I speak with the resident IT guy at the library. I did. That man concluded I knew something about computers, enough at least, and requested my transfer to him. Book shelving was done and he trained me as his happy minion supporting the 30 or so workstations in the building. I took on web design and shell scripting and VB programming to automate maintenance tasks. This I loved.

My thermodynamics class I didn't. Computer engineering was still not on the radar. I had a solid teacher for thermodynamics, but as much as I understood the material, it was pulling teeth to do the homework and study. I was mediocre until the final which I bombed thoroughly. I knew it. It was quite a shock from my high school valedictorian days. I had such shocks in a physics class and a math class, but I always rallied at the final exam and emerged no worse for the wear.

I knew this was bad.

I also had a roommate who was an Electrical Engineer. A portly Chinese fellow, amiable but culturally night vs day for me. We got along very well nonetheless. He was of the mindset that you don't expect to like your work, you just push yourself for the success and the money. So he did and so he is very successful to this day.

He came home every day complaining about how difficult Electrical Engineering was for him. I spent numerous conversation marveling at how interesting his work was. Shortly before the thermodynamics final exam I bit the bullet and requested my transfer.

Still not Computer Engineering/Science, but I believed I didn't have the grades given how competitive it was. Electrical was closer. And I still believed the job and passion would generally live separately.

Several excruciating weeks passed after my final. The results should have been in. I bit my nails wondering why no one had their results. Other classes did. I knew I had bombed. This was damage control. I needed to know how bad. What would this change?

The letter came welcoming into the Electrical Engineering program. Days later, the results came in for my final. I hadn't failed outright, but if I was in the MechE program I would be retaking that class.

Providence, then. The professor had delayed while I was being accepted elsewhere.

EE was different. I got to learn things I enjoyed. I didn't care much for resistances or robotic applications. But I ate up those dark room, projector fed sessions where I found out how electrical biases and voltage changes made a transistor what it was.

My grades were still only tolerable. But I ate up the material. Digital logic, I was now the nitwit in the front of the class carrying on with my professor.

Adding Computer Engineering as the Option/Minor was inevitable.

I have a good friend who was a humanities major. Very smart. Not an engineer. One day, while traveling to new and unknown places, we got lost and it was an hour+ detour. We were talking about computers and I explained how it worked, from the silicon/transistor layer to the processor all the way up to programming language. I understood it, A to Z. Moreover, he understood it for those few moments. It was exhilarating.

My degree and my library work were the closest they were to coinciding. I loved the network administration part more. After graduating BSc EE with the CE option, I took a break in Poland to teach English (something, anything that was not math or physics). I ended up programming an academic records and payment application as my first paid contract.

I've found EE to be indirectly relevant to everything I do. I don't do the chip design I had practiced for so long. I certainly use the smallest fraction of the math I learned. But the learning curve for so many new technologies is substantially reduced. The math comes easily. So I've used it indirectly. And it's a terrific asset to undergird a career as a network engineer. A lot of us have come from the EE path although I know many who didn't.

And I like how when I see equations in the physics an economics books I now read for fun my eyes don't glaze over. If it takes some effort to understand, I'm still in familiar territory.

I'm convinced a good engineering program, beyond specific training, reshapes how we think, focuses us on material results, quantifying problems. The bad news is engineers often see the world as finite problems to be broken down and solved. But that's also the good news because where the problems are ultimately finite you have people eager to attack and solve them. I like being one of those people. I am learning to appreciate that not every problem is quantifiable, finite or solvable. There are outright solutions and there are solutions by increments.

So I've done well on an engineering path. The degree has helped. The journey was also likely worth it as well since I'm not on some default path, but one as much stumbled onto as consciously chosen.