The journey of becoming an engineer is long and more often than not, I find myself doubting what I’m doing, the classes I’m taking, the classes I will be taking. Recently, I just finished taking Calculus II, just a pre-requisite to the major specific classes that promise to be more difficult and intensive. As a freshman, I thought I would (naively) breeze my way right through the class since the first few weeks were review of Calculus I topics, a class I took in high school. Unsurprisingly, I was wrong. So, so wrong. The first problem sets I was assigned made it look as if I had never learned how to do basic math in my life.
The homework consisted of what the teacher described as “simple” problems that took me a total of about six hours over a span of three days, sometimes more depending on the topic. It was a blessing that the homework online let us retry the same problem multiple times before locking in the answer for a grade. All through the semester, I would find myself holed up in a tutoring center for hours and hours getting question after question wrong. Pages of my spiral notebook would be crammed with random numbers and equations in no order, and some days they would resemble hieroglyphics that I knew I wouldn’t be able to decipher later.
My frustration could only grow throughout the semester and I thought that if I was having trouble with this, then I was definitely going to have trouble in all the future math and science classes that were going to be more complex. I fell into this cliché tirade that I was a failure to all the engineers out in the world, but most of all, I felt like a disappointment to myself. I wondered if engineering was the right thing for me, that my love for science and research wasn’t enough to succeed. Some days I could only stare at the same problem for hours as if it was mocking me, telling me I was just setting myself up for complete failure.
One day, during a particularly hard week of math problem sets, I went to the bookstore to try to finish them up. It was after trying for hours on the same problems in the tutoring center to no avail, so I thought a change in environment would be good. So, another few hours later, three pages full of illegible numbers, and a few minutes of staring blankly at the computer screen, I finished the homework and managed to solve every problem correctly. And to be honesty, it felt like I just created world peace: Everyone was happy, no more hunger of death, no more war. A fantasy that lasted for about ten seconds. Of course, the bubble popped and I found myself back in the café section of the bookstore smelling greasy pizzas and coffee.
I packed my computer into my bag and was about to walk out, before I picked up a magazine that caught my eye. It was the MIT Technology Review and they were doing a special on 35 inventors under 35. I was blown away, through that could be an understatement.
Men and women all over the world were creating new computer programming languages, inventing ways to produce clean water from any kind of contaminated water, changing the medical scene, becoming entrepreneurs. These people actually were solving the world’s problems, from poverty to the environment. They were the future, the front runners to solve the issues we face today in their own way. It was so inspiring to read how all their inventions were changing the world and it reminded me of why I wanted to go into engineering and computer science.
And though solving ten easy calculus problems isn’t exactly on the same level as inventing a new digital reality system, it’s a step.
A reminder that if I want to go somewhere, I’m going to have to start somehow.
