narratingengineer

[narratingengineer]

How it feels to be an engineer in core department?

Ashamed! Happy! Depressed! Proud! Guilty! Enthusiastic!

Yes, you read that right that's how it feels it’s a mixture of all feelings, I am a Mechanical engineer from southern part of India and I will be sharing my experiences here. This quandary filled journey start from junior college, with two categories of students in science group, one being the student who took it out of his own interest and the other who opted it because of parent’s compulsion, actually it’s more of relatives stupid ideas and suggestion. These relatives suddenly get dynamic after our inter results whom I wasn’t even aware that they exist in my family tree. After a huge struggle in my 11thand 12th with a good satisfactory score we pass out junior college with a dream word being said, ‘once you finish your inter you can enjoy the life’, the most unrealistic lie said to us.

Then getting into an engineering college is a huge struggle because of the stream to be selected, here at this point 75% of the students don’t have an idea why they have selected this stream, 20% of students took this stream because of some silly reasons such as boys alone in mechanical department so mechanical engineering, more girls in computer science department so computers and electronics, students who choose this department because their friends chose it and the rest 5% people will have a clear cut idea why they chose the respective department. All these categories of students will come into one single roof and start their journey.

‘College life expectations verses reality’ is one famous phrase that we all know about and after the first day of college is that is when you realize that the statement (once you finish your inter you can enjoy the life) is a lie. After a lot of struggles in college, cheating in tests, begging the professors, fighting with other department students, facing love failures, crush failures and with much more fully packed engineering life comes to an end after 4 years and just after your final exam of 8thsemester you will get this question from those magician relatives who were vanished for these four years suddenly come into existence and ask us one question, “WHAT’S NEXT, WHERE DID YOU GET PLACED” and that moment is the most irritating moment of life and with a lot of mails and resume printouts we finally find a job. If I had saved my resume printout money I would have got bOAT earphones.

The first job is always a dream to many of the youngsters out there and when that happens we all will be in cloud nine but choosing the first job actually becomes a huge challenge because of the variety of options available, here too we can find two types of students, the first one, no matter from which stream the student is from but finally he/she ends up in IT sector (honorary mention – Sundar Pichai also did the same). The other category is that students who love their department to the core and wish to just work in the core companies and this may sound easy but it’s the more toughest job on planet, studied civil engineering and getting into IT field has nowadays become normal but seeing a student who studied civil and has become a civil engineer is just like seeing a Haley’s comet. I am proud that I am one such Haley’s comet.

The struggles of IT sector workers are huge but let me detail it in another blog. So, now coming to the core job holders, where you are expected to have 3-5 years of experience within the age of 21, must be aware of the latest trends in engineering and also must have been participated in World War I and II and work for 16 hours a day! How is this even possible, but this is how the core field expects. Speaking about trends in engineering, in school teacher starts a new concept and says, “you will learn this in college in detail” and skips the topic and in college professor says, “you have already learnt this concept in school” and skips the topic and finally at work place you go and stand without knowing anything, your senior will ask, SORRY will yell at you saying, “what the hell did you learn in your school and college” that moment you will be in no position to explain your position to the your senior and there are other expectations where your senior expects you to know the working of everything right from a pencil sharpener to activating the RDX, which may be possible in the parallel universe but not here.

To all my Haley’s comet, don’t worry this isn’t your fault because in college lab access was only during limited number of hours and also our exposure to the machines are limited to the experiment list which are updated once in a millennium and not more than that. This is the reason which we lack practical knowledge and aren’t much familiar with the machines or devices. The another important problem here is with the interdisciplinary subjects, being in a one department we were not much allowed to explore other department subjects inside the college and this became a negative aspect for us.

The problems listed above are just 0.001% of the actual problems faced by my fellow Haley’s comet and regular stars (IT sectors). For every problem there is an answer so the same way, this problem also comes with an answer i.e. students must much focus on practical knowledge and also must be aware of what’s happening in engineering around the world, unless we move forward to the professor and have interest in ourselves we will not be able to get any fuel to pump our brains, be open to learning always, if you a mechanical stream guy and they ask you to learn coding to control the machine, learn it no matter what, if you are a electrical engineer and you are asked to learn about mechanical systems learn it, future technologies will involve all the streams and will be integrated into one. I have listed out our problems and also solutions that I figured out, so a huge hi-fi for my entire fellow engineers and wish you all the best for your future.

I wanted to finish with a saying by Indian director Balu Mahendra (I am a huge fan of cinema), “we may win, we may lose, we may earn, we may face difficulties but among all this, it’s a huge blessing that you are still doing your dream job and you are still persistently staying in your field”. So be happy with what you have, kudos to my engineers out there

Narrating ENGINEer

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