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Wellness Wednesday for July 19, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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If you don’t enjoy engineering, I’d argue try doing something else. I think migrating to another country is a fine goal, but if engineering is just a means to an end, you may be setting yourself up for an unenjoyable four years of college and, even worse, an unenjoyable career. I chose engineering because I had a flair for math and thought computer programming was cool, but I found I both hated and wasn’t good at programming or circuits. I still work as an electrical engineer, but I’ve never much enjoyed the work, and always had a what if… feeling in the back of my head. I could do it over again, I would go back and stick with Political Science (or history) and have gone to law school.

To answer your question more directly, engineering is fucking hard. Even at the undergraduate level. Some people are more talented than others, but trust me, very few people find it easy. Regardless, it’s worth thinking long and hard on what you’re interested in (and good at) and weighing your future job prospects.