[42-45; 239-248; 258-260; 263-269] Retrospectively, I think that it has been worth it because it’s made me a lot more adaptable and it made coming to college actually really easy because I already knew what it was like to start out with no friends, no one, to have to adapt to a completely different set of rules and standards and to just go from the start. For example, since my high school focused on science and technology, I really had that opportunity to sort of become a scientist but what I realized when working senior year on my research project is that scientist spend their whole lives delving into a problem, laying it out, describing it, but they don’t solve it at all and I don’t think I would be able to live such big issues on my shoulders that I could do nothing about. I feel like engineering is related to science in that you use science to solve problems. I absolutely live for the moment where you solve the problem. I couldn’t do that with such pressing matters like microplastics, oh my gosh, it’s absolutely crushing to have to think about that sort of stuff all the time. Although my mom still thinks that I should be a scientist, it’s just not for me although I really do value the experience of being able to try it out. She has made it very clear that she sort of sees me more as the scientist type then the engineer type. She also doesn’t love that I’m in a career that’s mostly men, but I don’t really care about that because anything they can do I can better. She really pushed me to be the best I could and be as creative as I could. I think she’s definitely the one who made me a bit of a perfectionist. As for other influential people in my life, definitely my senior research teacher. The best teacher I’ve ever had, really an amazing woman.
[101-108; 92-93] In high school, I also took a AP Physics course which was centered around electricity and magnetism and for the first half the year we learned about electricity and the second magnetism and then at the very last minute, like three weeks before the end of the year my physics teacher started teaching us about light and how it’s where electricity and magnetism come together and that’s the moment that it clicked for me and physics sort of fell into place and I had that brilliant aha moment. It made me really feel like an expert and I saw classes like electricity and magnetism in my college curriculum was like, I want to study engineering because that’s where science and design and math and technology all meet up. I feel like it’s such a varied field you can do whatever you want with it.
[93-94; 94-98; 195; 207-211] At the end of my freshman year, I decided to declare my major as electrical engineering. I looked at the curriculums for each major. I read the descriptions of the classes and I felt pulled toward the more electromagnetism classes, along with courses focused on computer architecture and digital logic design. I still don’t really know what I want to do as an Electrical Engineer. I have a lot of time to figure it out and develop that career path, but I really did like working with the hardware in front of me as I was trying to type out the software. I’m really hoping that my first co-op will give me sort of more insight into what there is out there because I don’t really know. My first co-op starts in April at a steel mill and my first project is going to be I guess assembling, installing, and coding/setting up a robot arm which stamps steel-plates with their identification number.