My first actual job was coaching preschool gymnastics during my senior year of high school. I was always the type of person to work hands on, and I had experience in the sport that I could share with others. Thus, I volunteered my time to get up every Saturday morning and work.
By my senior year, I had already decided I was going into engineering. While I did enjoy my coaching job, I knew that it wouldn't be able to continue forever. I was always more drawn to school than people, anyways. Engineering theoretically seemed like a good fit. Yet, like any experimental scientists, it's always best to test the scenario in a real life situation.
Yes, actually attending a tech school was what made me sure that I wanted to be an engineer. There's a certain lifestyle that you get accustomed to when you actually start studying to be an engineer. Anyone who has ever received a degree in the STEM field will tell you that the work load is much more difficult than in high school, yet somehow more manageable. Or perhaps that's just WPI alumni, who are used to moving at double the pace of any other institution.
As a student of WPI, I can say that part's true. Because WPI is on a quarter system, we take classes that most people would take over the period of a semester in seven weeks. Considering most of these classes are science and math focused, it usually means you have labs on top of your regular classes. For the non-engineer, this seems like heck to live through.
However, it hit me one night as I was cramming to get a lab in. I really viewed this work as fun, instead of a burden. I was actually more relaxed just analyzing the data I had, and even more fun trying to decipher it. That is what science is all about. Data collection, and seeing what it means.
Honestly, what I enjoy most about science is applying what we learn to real life situations. In the real world, everything will need to be fixed somehow. Everything can be improved, especially as we better understand the world around us.
That's the beauty of engineering; we always have problems to solve. I want to solve problems, I want to make the world a better place, I want to better understand the world we live in. As a result, engineering is a seemingly perfect fit for me. The midnight lab reports, the visit to the labs to collect more data; I think that's the life I want. And that's a small bit of what comes with studying to be an engineer. And I love every bit of it.
