Unhappy with my career, tips?

[Luke]

Anyways, my point was that it doesn't matter what you make as long as it's enough and the work is satisfying and enjoyable.

You've got the right frame of mind. Not sure who said it first but "If you enjoy what you do for a living, you never work a day in your life". Of course that's a half-truth, but there's nothing like coming home and responding with "Work was Great!".

[Erik_Twice]

Sorry, for taking so long, I didn't want to post something only to contradict it a week later.

I'm scared shitless right now. I talked with my parents, considered the options and I feel all of them are bad. I told them I want to stop with the Engineering career, get onto those courses and then get into Audiovisual Communications but after a shower I think I shouldn't do it. My parents are worried about a jobless future and this is artistry stuff we are talking about, not something completely neccesary so just getting there must be really hard and competition for even a poor job quite intense. They are right when they say that it's not an official career and just a short course that leads to something uncertain.

I'm really having second thoughts and Luke's advice resonates deeply:

I'm a "Change the world" guy, and Kevin is right, that shit doesn't fly unless you are the one writing the checks. [...] Even if you KNOW you have the right answer, wait, and sooner or later you can implement your decisions, but when you break it down to brass tacks you have to play the game.

My mom keeps me telling me that. That I'm one of those guys and that it's not just about loving your work but that, at the end of the day, there are five million jobless workers in my country and that I have to feed myself.

But I don't even know how to study. I have been three years at it and I have seen constant failure. My work ethics are terrible and I don't even know how to start, getting on it again will probably mean a good start that soon crumbles because I can't keep myself straight. And I'm doing fine now but Industrial Engineering which is where I'm heading is well-known for being a slaughterhouse. I'm already three years behind schedule, through a combination of bad luck, horrible teachers and my own lack of effort on what really matters.

Also, if you really enjoy writing, keep doing it whether it's professional or not. If it's something you enjoy, you'll only get better over time. Maybe it could evolve into something even bigger? I have another friend who does game journalism as sort of a side job and runs a website. It's not his main job and he does it just because he enjoys it. I think it makes a small bit of money, but he is able to go to big conferences and get early releases of games. Granted, he also has to play through terrible ones too.

It's something to keep in mind. After all, it's not like I can control it, I will write, I can only try to make it of any use.


My mom tells me to work up in translation or teaching but I'm sure it would be a fate worse than Engineering, which I like in theory even if the problems bore me. I simply couldn't get so much humanities and literature which seems what those careers are composed of.


I simply know I'm taking a life decision here, three years after I should have had, and I don't know shit.

[Limewater]

There is a bit of a difference between doing actual engineering and more fundamental stuff - the latter will lend itself more to more original research. But even if you were doing a course on some fundamental science, you can't be expecting to solve "new problems" on your undergraduate studies - that is to learn what is already known, right?

First, a defense of creativity in Engineering:

I'm quoting this because it's just really true. I'm an Electrical Engineer. During the first few years of undergrad, I was solving canned problems and nothing seemed real. However, my last year I got to take some courses that let me really be creative.

A couple of examples:

I took a senior-level class in digital logic design. Most of it was based around Atmel (I think) FPGA prototyping/education board. By the end of the course we were cut loose with the directions, "Make a game." So, we got to create pretty much whatever we wanted and could achieve within the hardware constraints. We didn't have a processor, or registers, or a screen buffer, or libraries to call. We just had a few k of memory and a bunch of connected logic gates. One team made a simple minesweeper game. Some Chinese students made a simple egg-drop game.

We went went kind of nuts and created a game based upon random things that a really weird guy we all knew had said. We created "KORN KONG!" The game where you attempt to "destroy yourself" by getting to the top of the screen and crushing yourself in a giant piston. However, in your way are Kondorgs (giant walking corn dogs) and giant blue babies. We decided we wanted to have multi-colored sprites in the game, so we created the logic to allow us to do that. We hadn't been taught how to do that-- we decided we wanted to do it and came up with a creative solution. We also had to discover how we could do sprite animation, simulate physics, and perform collision detection. Our colision detection method was actually inspired by the hardware-based colision detection in the Atari 2600.

The whole thing was a blast, and at the end we had a board where we could plug in a keyboard and monitor and play a video game.

After that, we had senior design class, where we were literally told at the start of the semester, "come up with something to build and propose it. If it seems complicated enough, we'll let you build it for credit." We got to decide what we wanted to build and then make it happen. What's more creative than that? Working on these projects excited the heck out of me, and I have fond memories of them still.

I now work as an engineer, and I get to be creative all the time because I get to work in a research environment. Not everyone gets that luxury, though.


Now, a more direct discussion of careers:

All that said, General Norris, it sound like Engineering just isn't for you. If the building blocks of engineering are so painful to you, you probably won't enjoy using them build bigger and better things.

Regardless of what you choose, consider how lucky you are to be able to choose you career. In most of the world, people don't get that luxury.

In all seriousness, you may want to consider something a bit further off your register, like a trade school. Depending on what you are doing, working with your hands can give you a lot of time to think.

[Ivo]

To Norris: Spain has huge issues with youth unemployment right now (it's like over 25%, right?) and I don't know what the future holds. You don't want to go to another country so you certainly should consider seriously what you are going to do. I still think you should try to go for something you enjoy doing, but when I say that I do assume you are counting on the likelihood of getting there. For an extreme example if you'd like being an astronaut, I don't advise you to pursue that at all but rather something else you'd like doing as only a tiny minority of people get to be astronauts (same for football player and stuff like that).

And also if you can get a modest but decent salary doing something you don't hate I think that is better than forcing yourself to suffer through an undergraduate degree you don't like.

Teaching is not bad (although you seem to rather dislike it) but I'm not sure if there are good prospects for employment for you in Spain. Presumably there aren't many open positions for young teachers given the huge unemployment rate.

First, a defense of creativity in Engineering:

Don't get me wrong, there is certainly a lot of engineering creativity, and the most important is to stress the different between the undergraduate course (where you are supposed to learn stuff that already has been done to death!) and actual work. That said as you point out yourself, you have the luxury of being in a research environment. I figure that a huge percentage of engineers are just doing the same old stuff over and over - but perhaps getting paid quite decently - and possibly more? - than the minority of research engineers.

There are also a bunch of scientists doing rote research, maybe even the majority, I just expect the % of those is smaller compared to the % of engineers.

Ivo.

[Erik_Twice]

To Norris: Spain has huge issues with youth unemployment right now (it's like over 25%, right?) and I don't know what the future holds. You don't want to go to another country so you certainly should consider seriously what you are going to do.

I'm not opposed to it but it would be piling an important change over another and that's risky for someone barely decided like me. As in, I don't want to go to another country only to get fucked over in a different place

And yes, youth unemplyment is astronomical. With so many people getting fired there's no reason to hire an unexperienced newbie over someone that knows their stuff.

This is worsened on Audiovisuals because most of the availble jobs shouldn't exist. We have dozens of TV channels nobody watches that were created by regional goverments to look cool and they are all going to be shut down. The Spanish Cinema Industry will die in a couple of years when the Goverment stops throwing money at it and the corrupt circle dies.

And also if you can get a modest but decent salary doing something you don't hate I think that is better than forcing yourself to suffer through an undergraduate degree you don't like.

Teaching is not bad (although you seem to rather dislike it) but I'm not sure if there are good prospects for employment for you in Spain. Presumably there aren't many open positions for young teachers given the huge unemployment rate.

Actually I enjoy teaching and have done some of it in the past but to be able to teach in a public enviroment I would need to get into something far worse than Engineering so I would rather stay there.

There aren't a lot of jobs availble for me to teach, that's for sure. With the current unemployment rates there is not a lot of people that want, or rather, can study.

In the end I don't hate Engineering. After thinking about it I think I'm simply stuck learning the same things over and over and I get bored because I already know how to solve this stuff even if I can't crouch the numbers. I lack consistency and that hurts me greatly.


So far I think I will keep myself here, get into the writting courses and try to get someone to teach me how to study and that useful shit. In the end, I think it's a good compromise, as I can get a reliable career done while exploring other options.

Thanks a lot everyone. Feel free to commen something else if you feel like it

[Ivo]

If you have a cool Professor in your Engineering undergraduate who you think you could talk to about this stuff I would really suggest trying that.

I'm a bit unsure what is going on for you to be doing so badly in the degree (only one course done) as you seem to like it and claim to know how to do the exercises.

If you solve the exercise correctly but make a mistake in crunching the numbers I can only suggest a scientific calculator that shows the operation you asked it to do as well as the result - in basic calculators I used to do the same calculation twice and get different results, possibly because I wasn't respecting the order of multiplication to addition or something when entering the stuff. One with graphing display can show you what you are asking it to do and edit it.

I know people that had bad / average grades in high school and excelled in undergraduate and vice-versa. I think it is also very possible for someone to do relatively badly in undergraduate studies and then be a good professional (interested in what he is doing and so on). So maybe for you you will need to suck it up, focus and get your undergraduate over and then try to land a job that keeps you engaged in what you are doing so that you can thrive.

Ivo.