What do you think of when you hear the word “engineer”? Math, science, smart, nerd, ideas, workaholic...the list goes on. During career days at school, the engineers always brought in some of the coolest projects. Perhaps because they were so tangible, so applicable and visible, that that drew many people’s interests, myself included. WIthout a doubt, I thought they were super amazing people who just knew things. Ever since starting the engineering track in college, I’ve long been faced with the truth: it’s no easy route, like when this happens:

1. Chemistry != Chemical Engineering

You ask budding chemical engineers why they’ve chosen this major, and a good chunk will say something along the lines of “in high school, I really like chem and was good at it, but I didn’t want to study chemistry/wanted something more applicable/wanted more math/wanted more money…”
Haha, that’s funny because this is chemical engineering:

2. You also expect a normal college life, you know, with a normal social life and sleeping at somewhat normal hours.

Aaaaand then this happens

So you’re effectively up until the wee hours doing this:

3. Yeah, that smartness? Here's also an accurate representation

4. You do expect a lot of this in your classes, because you’re ykno, an engineer…

But Princeton has a 37% female population in its engineering department, which is much higher than the sub-20% national average!

5. Not everything is like this:

Oil refinery and agriculture are just parts of the many options we have. These are also options for us:

6. And while we may be psetting, that doesn’t mean we can’t do this:

Or this!:

or THIS!

(look closely at this picture)

7. And contrary to popular belief, we don’t make bombs and want to blow up the world.

8. And yeah, math is important and all, but this comes in handy every once in a while as well:

9. We don't all hate the humanities...

Speaking from a person in engineering who graduated from a classically humanities high school

10. But maybe we are slightly masochistic...

We sometimes wonder about these tendencies as well, and I don't think anyone wants an image for this point.