[536-547] Overall, I think the internship was crucial and it’s definitely a big stepping stone in my professional development, but I’m definitely not ready to step out into the engineering world yet. It’s helped me to narrow down what I desire from an employer and from a workplace culture. It’s also shown me what things I don’t want to deal with. If I do deal with them, how I want to deal with them. But it’s also shown me that there are a lot of things I have to learn. In any field that I go into, there’s going to be nuances and little things that’ll take years to learn. I mean, there are people at this place that are still learning new components and they’ve been there for 30, 40 years. It’s taught me to really value my education and to not be afraid to ask questions. Because learning more really only helps me. Because even if it’s not something that applies directly, maybe it’s a skill I learned that I can use elsewhere. I think it’s just been a significant stepping stone. Not the final stepping stone, but just a significant stepping stone towards that degree in my hand and a future on the road. Which my current plan, which is new as of a few months ago, I’m intending to look at PhD programs out of college.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
[583-607] Something that I’ve always felt in school is, I enjoy helping others or teaching others. I’m not sure what the best word to choose would be. I don’t always understand things quickly, but I can generally get a base idea of things in class. Once I understand something, I usually find it pretty easy to explain because I feel like if I can understand it, I should be able to explain it. Because of that, it’s brought the thought in my head. I’ve never really thought of being in education. I just said, I was like, “I don’t really like teaching people all the time.” I enjoy helping them occasionally, but I don’t think I have the patience to do it all the time. But that doesn’t change the fact that I enjoy what I’m doing at school. I thought, “Well, maybe it’s just education that I like. Maybe I just like learning.” Yeah, helping people is great in general sense. I’m sure anyone gets joy from that. But it made it difficult because I really didn’t want to go into teaching. I was like, “I don’t want to be a teacher. I just don’t see that being a future I enjoy.” Other than the social aspects, I just think it’d be too stressful. Then I started questioning, “Well, what do I really want to do after school?” I’ve always felt that if I stop going to school, I’m not going back. Because I feel like it’s a rolling stone, I’m going and if I stop, it’s going to stop. I guess if I take a break, I’m not going to want to go back. I’m going to get lazy and I’m just going to want to stay inside all day. I’d rather just bite the bullet and get education done so I can coast the rest of my life. I had always consider doing a masters. That had always been my next step.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Honestly, the change really happened when I talked to my friend. I had mentioned I went to the last road crew pit stop in January. That’s where I had the conversation with this peer of mine. It really was, right there, he said it. He said that’s what he was doing, why he was doing it. It kind of just set off a light bulb in my brain. Kind of it just felt right. I was like, “That sounds exactly like what I need.” I didn’t know it before, but it feels right. I thought about it more and more, and I came to the conclusion that I think that’s what I want to do. I don’t necessarily want to go into education, but if I get the doctorate, I think it allows me the opportunity on top of opening a lot of other doors that might be interesting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[536-547] Overall, I think the internship was crucial and it’s definitely a big stepping stone in my professional development, but I’m definitely not ready to step out into the engineering world yet. It’s helped me to narrow down what I desire from an employer and from a workplace culture. It’s also shown me what things […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[115,24],"tags":[34,93,102,116,54,32],"class_list":["post-1473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-josh","category-quotes","tag-encountering-difficulty","tag-graduate-school","tag-internships-co-ops","tag-josh","tag-round4","tag-why-engineering"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/engineering.purdue.edu\/STORIES\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/engineering.purdue.edu\/STORIES\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/engineering.purdue.edu\/STORIES\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engineering.purdue.edu\/STORIES\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engineering.purdue.edu\/STORIES\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1473"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/engineering.purdue.edu\/STORIES\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1474,"href":"https:\/\/engineering.purdue.edu\/STORIES\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1473\/revisions\/1474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/engineering.purdue.edu\/STORIES\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engineering.purdue.edu\/STORIES\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engineering.purdue.edu\/STORIES\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}