Getting over a massive failure

Hi Veeky Forums,

>inb4 fuck off to /r9k/

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.

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

Nope you just fucked up

What did you study?

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.

If you have a BA are you not a qualified engineer?

>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.

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.

Is the same case on purer degrees? I mean physics, math, biology.

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.

>be me
>go back to school for chem when I'm 24
>rip through 2 semesters of calculus over summer and next semester take diff eq and cal3 at same time, all As
>surprise myself how good I am at this shit and feel on the up and up in life
>get a gf
>shes 21 and hot but a community college local who wants to party all the time and has no responsibilities
>spend all my time with her and fail analytical chem
>drop out and become a drug dealer
>years later living in poverty while teaching myself to program in a dark lonely basement apartment
>finally out of hole and looking back on it realize that being good looking enough to get a gf nearly ruined my life

you virgins are lucky in a way

I almost fucked myself up last semester because of women. At the end of the semester I realised the time wasted and got back to work and unfucked myself a bit.
No joke, women if, and only if, they are as focused on studying/working as you are. Actually, that should apply to anything, including groups of friends.

>tfw my colelge succeeds in all these while being cheap

Mathfag here and yes. I thought I'd be developing ultra cool mathematical models and shit and now I'm just a sad loser that know mathematics.

Seconded, had a fuckbuddy/gf over the last two years, was excited as hell at first because we were banging every other day and had fun, then it set in that I actually need time to catch up now. Luckily she was also a student so we understood each other.

>I went into Engineering to be Tony Stark 2.0 and make awesome shit
Lulling my fucking ass off mate. That's fucking funny.
Biofag here, in some ways my naive idealized view of biology got destroyed, but as a whole it turned out to be even more badass than I thought.

How much of a "beta" are you? A woman is an accessory to your greatness, not a goal. This is irrelevant of how good looking you are.
Your problem is your own personality, you're the irresponsible one.

>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?

You are just a sad sperg. You made the mistake of looking for inspiration in your classes. For two reasons:

1) A class is simply a guide. They steer you towards the right direction when it comes to achieving your goal as a professional. But most college professors will only be interested in making sure you can handle the problems and can read the literature. That is what they will teach you: solve problems and read literature. After that, you are on your own. You are supposed to look for your own inspiration.

2) You chose engineering you absolute mongoloid. Why did you expect your professors to teach you how anything works? Odds are they don't know themselves. But they know the pretty equations and that is what they will teach you.

>wanting to know how things work so you choose engineering
that's where you were wrong m8

Damn dude, that's a tragic story. How old are you now and what do you do?

>is it common for STEM students to get fucked by their unrealistic dreams like I did
I'd think so, yeah. People who go into STEM with a 'I FUCKIN LOVE SCIENCE' mentality are bound to get crushed. Science is mind numbingly boring 99% of the time. I wouldn't have chosen something else given the chance, but desu all I want right now is to get my degree, get a regular job in my field, and live a comfy life focusing on my hobbies.

Hey, I thought, if I’m gonna go do this for four years, I’d better have some kind of vision. Unfortunately, that wasn’t as great of an idea as I thought.

I was surprised back then that other engineers weren’t particularly nerdy about the subject (except for the fedora wearing magic player), i now guess they figured out what you said before they started.
1) It was Oxford, dude, i came there wide eyed thinking every professor was going to be a magician transcending the boundaries of ordinary science. I found my inspiration now, got hooked on Shannon’s theory of information and also my mind got blown since I signed up for a number theory module in my masters.
2)I wanted to be a jack of all trades and not spend a year studying an incredibly specific area no one will care about past graduation like pure scientists do.

What would you have suggested instead?

You guys keep confirming my suspicions that the eng degree was not as stellar as it was advertised and that maybe I got played. Not sure if that feeling is justified or not.

>What would you have suggested instead?
Math/Physics/Chemistry/Biology

>I wanted to be a jack of all trades and not spend a year studying an incredibly specific area no one will care about past graduation like pure scientists do.

I'd just like to say that usually makes you a "master of none".

What was your major? I don't know what tracks other majors have but I know in Materials Science and Engineering the last year is dedicated to what type of Materials you want to focus on. This could be Polymers, Ceramics and Plastics, Metallurgy, Biomaterials, Electronic Materials, Computational Materials Science, or whatever it depends what school because they have different programs. It's very difficult to not have a track for your major and be successful* in industry unless you follow up your degree with a Master's and add some more focus or specialization to yourself. I believe those who specialize are also the ones who have all the cool equipment since they are typically the ones to be working on "cutting edge technology" projects. The more broad engineers usually get flushed into an office job and write all day and spend barely any time in lab.

I personally think tracks and specialization are great. You'll just be replaced by someone who studied for that specific field unless you're looking for an office job writing all day if you don't have one in my opinion.

*have optimal lab time to report writing type of job

I believe I can say I love science. I think it's the classes that are boring as fucking hell and that's because they do their best to flunk out brainlets and the like. I don't even know how many textbooks I have but I can't stop. They're so fucking fun to read.

Device technology

Huh, do they do masters degrees differently across the pond?
>>memorizing formulas with occasional interesting facts
Oh boohoo, you'll come to find out later that these are quite useful
>>no insight to how the creative design process is conducted
So let me tell you this, the entire field of engineering design is a fucking scam and needs to be purged. All the techniques that are supposed to make you a better engineer are just snake oil.

My masters degree was fucking cool shit. PhD was fucking awesome shit. Loved all of it, love my job right now, but I still fucking hate myself. Really though MEng is supposed to just get you into the field, meaning you will repeat stuff. PhD is where you're actually supposed to do something new.

My only advice is to fuck as much as you can while you are still young.

Yeah I didn't mean to imply that people can't actually love science. The impression I got from your OP (the tony stark bit) was that you went in with a popsci mentality and were taken aback once you realized how much (boring) work STEM consists of.
It's a good thing that your passion for your field is still alive though. I'd guess that as an oxford graduate regardless of your performance you're still a pretty attractive candidate for any job you're qualified for so maybe it's just a matter of time before you find something you enjoy doing.

I know, that’s how the proverb goes, but it’s been my conviction since finishing high school that a broad array of skills has the strength in supplementing areas from one another and can let one see solutions where more specialised people would overlook them. It worked both for and against me so far.

On the second point, I had a modular Engineering Science degree and didn’t specialise until last year where I picked biomedical engineering stuff(wanted to go into prosthetics or at least MRI imaging). I also did Electrical and Comms, and a good amount of signal processing.

And I agree, specialisation gets one a long way, my plan was to apply to Siemens or the NHS, but because I needed a work visa for those and they didnt sponsor, I ended up going to a transport modeling firm. On one hand it’s as you say, it’s an office job, on the other I don’t write reports much, I just code and occasionally do data analytics.

My plan is to get a solid masters and a citizenship and then apply to something biomed again. Alternatively, there’s always higher salary programming/electronics jobs.

Thank you for the valid points, wish I thought about them before.

>My only advice is to fuck as much as you can while you are still young.

Why? Distractions like that can seriously fuck you up. It’s great if it works for you, but your survivorship bias can bring other people in trouble.

Op here, that guy wasn’t me, but I second what he said.

>popsci mentality
Spot on there. As for the boring or voluminous work, I was prepared for that, it wasn’t the problem. What cracked me was how little uniformity there seems to be to all this knowledge pumped into us, I often heard stuff like “don’t worry about where this equation comes from too much, it just how things work best based on previous three generations”. I expected there to be an explanation of how to recognise the novel and ingenious solutions and then use all this knowledge to make something genuinely new.

Like, in school there was a clear narrative of what we learn and why, uni suddenly became a collection of individual tools with not much explanation of how to pick the right one.

I hate to admit it, but despite my work ethic the uni’s name did help me out a lot in getting my current job. Maybe that’s all that matters.

Dude I love learning stuff and got nothing against the formulas, I hated that they were all presented as a matter of fact not as a part of a larger narrative.

>engineering design is ducking scam
I am inclined to agree from what I have read. Was that your degree?

I found that book by Billy Koen recently which was the first to actually give a good guideline to engineering design. In my paraphrase, engineering is about solving a problem of an ignorant society by finding an optimum solution as if it was a perfectly informed society. The rest of the book is cookoo, but that one worked for me since then.

Literally my a-levels

a-levels?
sorry I'm not familiar with to many terms from outside my country

A-levels are final year exams in UK high school. Also it’s slang for “anal sex”

ah ok
can you take all of these in high school? Here (Israel) you're limited to two subjects at most in addition to the regular subjects (like Math, literature, English, Hebrew, History etc.), so you could only have stem a-levels in Math + 2 subjects of your choice

this deserves a screencap.

You can take four full or three full and a half year module. Unis require three grades to apply