Studying eng despite being "better" at humanities initially

Jun 2023 | Reading time: 1 min

This is a very half-baked thought, but here are some things I’ve learned from studying engineering despite being initially (as in during high school) much stronger in humanities-adjacent areas to start this off:

• You shouldn’t necessarily study what you’re good at!! There is incredible value in figuring out how to bring aspects of what you’re good at into another tangential field/area that you aren’t as good at, but are still interested in.
• Study both what you are good at and not good at. At least my priors for attempting to figure out what I was uniquely good at were horrible. I still don’t really have it figured out, if I’m being honest. Also, things change a LOT over time (read: I need to work on my patience).
• Study something that you wouldn’t learn otherwise on your own time, because universities are kind of great for forcing yourself to learn things in this regard, some of which turn out to be quite useful. Also if you can learn it on your own very well, as in sufficient depth and rigor, then why pay to study it in an institution?
• Listen carefully (and don’t listen when it’s not nuanced enough) to others’ comments and judgements about what you’re good at and not good at. They are mostly judged based on their priors, which can be good or bad when applied to your unique context. And there are always rare instances when someone has strong intuitions about you and turn out to be very, very right (so listen especially diligently if this is the case).

And my biggest takeaway is that being good at something does not imply you are very interested in it, and vice versa. Decorrelating performance from curiosity/learning did wonders for me.

On a less serious note, spending too much time doing physics/math (I’m in an engineering program known for shoving physics/math as its students in the first 2 years as a former engineering physics program) also has its downsides.

I’ve noticed my creative writing ability has gone down the drain, I sometimes can’t find the words for things, writing long-form is now painful (whereas I could just bang out essays before), and so on. Quite literally, every piece of long-form writing has just been a lab or design report. My writing lacks the character I feel like it used to have. Maybe they should really force engineering students to take (creative) writing courses, instead of ethics courses that are delivered with not quite the right tone.