Senior year of high school, the most common phrase I would hear from my friends was always: "You want to pursue engineering? You? An engineer?"
Yes, in fact, I do.
Cue my exasperation while explaining for the umpteenth time on why and how I ended up wanting to follow a career that doesn't suit me at all.
Their reactions were a given— anyone who knew me from back then, knew I wasn't suited for civil engineering, even if they didn't know what civil engineering was. I had hated Calculus in high school and felt tortured throughout high school level Chemistry. I had taken Latin and French for three years and every class relating to writing, history, and geography. My heart and mind screamed "liberal arts and humanities" and yet, I had gone and chose something that didn't seem to define me at all.
Fast forward to freshman and sophomore year of college, and I'm struggling more than ever. I cried every day from my inability to pass with higher than a C or C+ in all my engineering-related classes — save for every Calculus class I've taken, which inexplicably, I loved and got an A in. I would study for hours on end with my peers and friends in the major to teach me, and yet my mind couldn't wrap around the concepts as quickly or as well as them.
It was salt in the wound.
I felt inferior. I still feel inferior. All my friends barely studied the same amount of time I would dedicate myself to, with the numerous hours they would spend going out to hang out or play League, and yet here I was, staying in and staring at a textbook reading over and over and looking up examples until, something, anything, stuck in my mind. Nothing made sense to me— while it would take me 3 to 4 hours to complete a homework problem, it would take my peers around 30 minutes to an hour. I was always, and I still am, towards the bottom or average percentile of the class. It was embarrassing.
I couldn't pass my classes, I couldn't land an internship...I felt worthless.
No matter how many interviews I had, no matter how much people liked me, I couldn't find success anywhere. I was okay, but I was never good enough. Everyone I knew was so confident, and their confidence was supported; they knew things. I felt all my knowledge was invalid and I was simply clinging onto the coattails of my peers.
The current me, a second-semester junior, still struggles with her upper-division engineering courses. I still feel as if I somehow got lucky or blessed by some higher being enough to barely pass my classes. I was constantly instilling in my mind that I don't deserve to be in this program, I don't deserve to be here, I don't deserve to have made it this far. Yet, here I am, so close to graduating, at exactly a 3.0 GPA. Here I am, doing research under a professor doing something I was good at, something I loved.
