What I believe college is good for.

There are a lot of people thinking that a college education is useless and you can learn online. That sort of is where I am but also not exactly. It’s not 100% where I stand, maybe 20%. I’m probably a very good example in a weird way why even if you know what you want to do as a career, you might still benefit from college. Even though you might have ideas that you can practice, start googling to learn a new skill, there is a catch about college education.

If you haven’t read the about page of this blog, you might not know that I study at Rochester Institute of Technology, and before that, spent a year studying at the Eindhoven University of Technology. I had two totally different majors, that focused on different ends of product development. At RIT, I do Computer Engineering Technology, and in TU/e (Eindhoven), a lot of psychology and user research. Both are great schools, with different styles of teaching. Aside from both being hands-on education.

Something that I have started to realize starting the fourth year of education at RIT was that first of all you are on your own on everything. Everyone knows that, but no one will voluntarily help so you have to chase them strategically.

Location

This is one of the most important ones, as the surroundings are important for your view of the world. Seeing what opportunities you may have in the industry, and what type of city you might want to live in in the future is very important. For me, I realized I’m for sure a city person. I would not be able to live in a place like Rochester, NY. The fast pace life in larger more modern cities is the place where I belong to.

Occupation

There is a lot of talk about how what you study is not what you will likely end up doing. I believe that is very true. Doing computer engineering at the moment, and learning hardware, and low-level software is very interesting and fun. However, the question that started coming up is do I really want to work on hardware? The answer is pretty simple, definitely no. I love software development, especially web development both backend and frontend.

I kept building these small projects that I think it would solve problems I was having in classes or in general technology usage. For every project, I constantly found myself in user experience research, on how to make things more accessible. Eventually, I would fall back on school work and had to catch up to the course schedule. This was the indicator of maybe this is not the right track for me. I may be happier finding a Human-Computer Interaction related degree.

That brought up another dilemma which is whether I should move to the major I thought fit me better. If I stay, I learn more about hardware and have different perspectives on solving problems. If I switch, it is doing a bunch of coursework that may be easier to read up by myself.

Inspiration

In anything you might plan to study, which you may or may not pursue, there is always a huge perspective change. You’ll need it for everything later on. If you study engineering, you probably will benefit from taking back a step and solving a problem one problem at a time. Checking every parameter that helps you solve a problem so that what you do runs without a hitch. Any problem you encounter, later on, you know that skill is something you can count on. Every specialty has something that will give you an advantage that some other person may not have.

I believe this is something to take advantage of if you know what you’ll do, but you don’t know what opportunities you have later. Assume you decide to follow another career path. Those previous skills and knowledge from your studies will provide you a view that very likely someone who has studied it won’t have. Keep the advantage, and use it to identify stuff that others may not have realized. Why does the Shinkansen bullet train look like a bird? Because it was inspired by one! To be exact, it was taken inspiration from Kingfisher birds. The reasoning was that, as the train moved through tunnels, at high speeds that it operated at, the air got compressed and created sonic booms. Here is the article about this specific biomimicry engineering. This is how you might have an edge by just having a different background than everyone around you.

Summing up

I have one year left in college, knowing I don’t want to do computer engineering at very low levels designing hardware or software for it. I’d rather be a person working on different human-centered computing topics where there is very much to explore and discover. Because of the three reasons I mentioned, I’m pushing through the last year of my undergrad, creating multiple projects that I like to work on. I’ll share them on this blog soon.

If you are good at something, it may just help to stick with it as you can learn more advanced techniques or methods, but your passion will push you to get to that same advanced level in some other focus. Keep it up!