Straight to the point: am I hopelessly retarded for getting disappointed with STEM when I realised it's not as deep as I thought it would be?
Context: be me, studying Engineering Science at Oxford, bored as shit because all subjects boil down to memorising formulas with occasional interesting facts and insights into how things work. For some stupid reason, little to no insight to how the creative design process is conducted, but hey at least we learnt management and risk factors. Do so-so as a result of not giving a shit. I went into Engineering to be Tony Stark 2.0 and make awesome shit, not solve 6 years worth of past papers every year and drink myself blind, dammit.
>4th year hits, I think "OK, here comes the cool shit" >My final project is literally converting a program from MATLAB to C++ >Iwastoldtherewouldberobots.png
Other modules turn into exam prep on steroids halfway through. I don't understand why I'm doing this shit anymore, try to set up a job in parallel feeling underqualified.
In the end I got stressed out and started eating modafinil like candy, despite that (or more likely because of) equations stop making any sense to me because I lost the plot and don't even know where they are derived from.
Fail final year, only one to leave with a BA while everyone else gets an MEng. Got the job though, now spend days coding in VB.NET. Couple of months ago finally stopped being depressed about squandering the best chance I ever had.
Now I wonder: is it common for STEM students to get fucked by their unrealistic dreams like I did, or am I just a very sad sperg?
TL;DR barely an engineer cries about low IQ.
Jackson Cruz
Yeah that's they thought I was a poor student in graduate school. Nothing cool was happening in the department (where cool means there are no devices; I do not want to be a device technician)
t. former device technician
Wyatt Torres
Nope you just fucked up
Joseph King
What did you study?
Kayden Flores
Fair enough. I heard the best thing to do in this situation is to learn from this and try not to mention the retardeness to anybody in the future.
Jordan Bailey
If you have a BA are you not a qualified engineer?
Joshua Perez
>is it common for STEM students to get fucked by their unrealistic dreams like I did, or am I just a very sad sperg?
It's more than common, it's the intended outcome:
The university administration hypes undergrad programs they know nothing about (because they're all a bunch of HR managers and sociology graduates) to highschool students to boost enrollment and trick everyone into forgetting that it's logistically impossible to deliver a hands on creative, innovative, enriching etc. (other buzzwords) experience for everyone (not even going to get started on how fucking expensive that would be), and then they give the profs in the department insufficient resources and time to develop the lab material for their courses so they pool the money and say "lets buy a bunch of machines and shit that will be useful to our research and then trick the administration into paying for it by writing it off under course expenditures", resulting in a bunch of labs centered around using a piece of equipment and essentially taking turns in small groups to manipulate some samples in some way that vaguely relates to the course material, leaving all the students feeling like lab and class are hardly the same thing, and then four years of tuition goes by and you end up with OP.
>4th year hits, I think "OK here comes the cool shit" Nope, it's grad school, and only because you're no longer the customer, you're the employee: welcome to the system, graduate assistant.
Jacob Allen
I am, I just feel bad about it given that I could have easily been an MEng right now and not have to jump through hoops.
It would make me feel a lot better if you were right, my experience is telling me that is not necessarily the case.
Camden Nelson
Is the same case on purer degrees? I mean physics, math, biology.
Jeremiah Diaz
my friend is now doing a chemistry PhD, he had a low competition because he is doing a very niche thing (mass spactrometry analysis of certain biological molecules).
He spends his days taking measurements from the machine and writing up the conclusions, and that's about it, the skill he's acquiring is just experience of working on that kind of machine. Although unlike me, he didn't have unrealistic expectations of uni and is now quite content with his choices.
