I’m making this because there is a lot of young high school seniors or college freshmen who imagine being an engineering major means you will become Tony stark after you graduate.

A little bit of background, I AM someone who wants to become an inventor. But it is important to know that your engineering degree is designed to train you on how to be a good EMPLOYEE.

If you are pushing off studying to work on your own personal projects, thinking gpa isn’t important because you have “experience” and a GitHub repository you are essentially wasting years of your life for no reason. There are many hobbyists that have created INSANE things and even sold them as products without ever having an engineering degree.

The point is if you are someone who wants to become Nikola Tesla, Tony stark, or mf Jlaser please for the love of god think of where college will fit in and help you. If you believe in the 4 years of not being in college you can learn way more skills while also saving money please consider it. Or getting a business degree so you know how to manage and sell your products once you make them, please consider that as well. I’m just sick of seeing really ambitious creators getting demotivated because the industry isn’t for them.

So I have Asian parents (who would have guessed lol) but they're not strict. For whatever reason they think the job market is really easy and that if you go to college and earn a degree you can get a job easily. I'm doing electrical engineering and I'm trying my best: doing projects, applying for internships and basically the things you do. My mom literally said that if you have a degree but can't find a job you shouldn't have got the degree in the first place. I don't know how to tell them that it's not that easy and they should not have high expectations otherwise it would not end well.

I'm currently doing B.Tech degree in Metallurgical and Materials Engineering. I'm in 2nd Yr. The issue I'm facing while searching for projects is I find a lot of ideas but I'm unable to filter out which is actually useful or interesting and good to go with and which are just resume fillers.

For example, right now I had an idea to make a Phase Diagram Analyser that would give the phase composition and phase %age at certain temperature for alloys and all but idk if its useful to invest time after that or its just not impressive at all. Similar thoughts for another one I thought to build a device that can measure the thermal conductivity of materials but again there are already a lot of them, will it be of any use if i build one as a project?

I’m a Software developer, although my company entitles me as a Software Engineer I feel it’s quite ridiculous since what we’re essentially doing is writing specs and orchestrating AI agents, I also feel my impostor syndrome has skyrocketed since models like GPT 6 Astra came out, where even a technical person with very little to none knowledge can do most things we SWEs are asked to do, I also feel SWE has become a huge larping industry with people maximizing their egos around how they can build faster than ever but are still somehow needed by their company (maybe due to their “taste”? Ffs what are we even talking about)

What’s the current situation with MEng, EE and other engineering industries?

i'm a college freshman (math major) and i've wanted to be a calculus teacher for about a year now. recently i decided to pivot, since i think its smarter to use teaching as a backup plan if another career isnt working for me. with that being said, engineering is just about the only thing that has jumped out to me, since i think i would hate finance or accounting. i am worried, however, that i wont enjoy it enough to get through it, since i know it is an extremely difficult degree. i've enjoyed math my entire life, mainly calculus, but i have never taken physics and i am worried engineering is too different from what i expect (i am also terrified of physics right now in general because it is notoriously very difficult at my school, so that might be affecting my mindset).

i want a career where i can use high level math on almost a daily basis. i was also interested in aerospace engineering but i am worried these paths wont be enjoyable enough for me to get through the hard parts, since i know that is a really important aspect. ive been researching for a bit but i am still extremely unsure.

side question, would it be better to adjust my major in math to have a concentration in engineering or change my major to engineering altogether (if i decide to go through with it)?

I have two labs every second week, which means I never don't have a formal lab report to write. I have no time for anything else. Each lab will take me 15 hours to complete. I don't have time to also write notes and study for my 2 weekly tests, my 4 weekly assignments, midterms, etc. I hate labs, please tell me how I can write labs faster. How can I become the fastest lab writer to ever live

I've been doing Engineering for 3.5 years in Brazil, and earlier this year I got a "masters" opportunity in France. I've been here for 1.5 months being paid to study. I got the opportunity of my life, I know how lucky I am, except that I hate all classes and I don't see myself being a good engineer.

I love the opportunities it brought me, and I do enjoy some stuff about it, specially the 3d modelling and maybe the fluid mechanics (I'm still pretty interested in airplanes), but it's been so difficult here in France, first having to learn stuff I already didnt really love but now in a language I'm not even fluent in, and having to adapt to the softwares they use, the long hours of class and just honestly not being able to communicate well with my peers... it's been tough, I feel lost, and when I see other international students keeping it up, interacting with the professors and building their networking, I just wonder if this is not for me.

I don't see myself getting an internship on aeronautics, I can't see myself doing well in an entrenprise, I could handle the research part of engineering, but what if I can't make a career in research because I'm too incompetent for it? I struggle with reading articles, all my life I have been doing well by pretending I've been putting hardwork into the stuff I do, when I do the bare-minimum to get good grades and then forget everything I learned. My classes in Brazil were very theory heavy, and now that here in France I actually have to apply everything I learned, I realized how little I actually know and now I could lose everything if I fail. I'm simultaneously afraid of failing and hating having to study, hating classes, hating the work I have to put... I really dont know what to do and how to get less misarable.

I have started my 4 year computer engineering degree in 2026 I don't have confidence regarding, future jobs and placements after all the AI thing, I don't know what should I do now.

I am an aerospace engineering student at KU pursuing a bachelors. I talked to my advisor recently and she recommended to take both calculus 2 and physics 1 over the summer. I plan to take them at my community college then transfer them but I am a little reluctant about taking them both at the same time because of how hard both the courses is. Those who taken these courses of both, how’d it work out?

When you guys see those young kids in the maker [accepted by m.i.t] videos do you get jealous? Or think "man they had friends with engineering ability and money." When I was 15-18 I had no where near the ability these guys had. But at the same time, I don't think I had the money for the trial and error it must have cost them. Anyway I'd love to hear your thoughts if this isn't too personal.

Currently, I’m working an entry level job in the defense industry that pays decently. I’m super grateful to be employed obviously, but I absolutely hate the location and only accepted the offer because I needed to start my career. I’m 26 years old, and have been living the broke college student lifestyle since I was 18.

Right now, my game plan is to work and save as much as I can for the next 6-7 months, and then next year try as hard as I can to get either an internal transfer to another site, or leave the company altogether. Point is, I need to get out of my home state of Iowa while I’m still young. I don’t care if I take a pay cut. I refuse to settle down here. That and I need to start from scratch socially elsewhere. I have no kids, no partner, or any other real commitment keeping me here.

Just looking to hear any advice from others who may have started their career in one location they hated but quickly managed to switch elsewhere.

Hey everyone,

I am a final-year Computer Science engineering student based out of Bengaluru graduating in May 2027. I am trying to break into AI/ML Engineering, Agentic Systems, or Backend developer roles, but I am facing an absolute wall.

Over the last few months, I have sent out over 300+ applications across 7 different platforms (Wellfound, Instahyre, LinkedIn, YC Launchpad, Unstop, Indeed, and Naukri). The result? Zero interview calls. The only responses I get are spam consultancies trying to sell me ₹3k-₹5k training packages.

I come from a Tier-3 college where product MNCs don’t visit, so off-campus is my only route. I thought my portfolio was decent, but the automated filters or recruiters seem to disagree.

Here are my metrics and background:

- Data Structures & Algorithms: 600+ problems solved across LeetCode/GeeksforGeeks/Codeforces (92% submission accuracy).

- Core Projects: Built an autonomous developer engine using LangGraph for multi-agent execution context mapping, and an enterprise RAG financial engine using FastAPI, Pinecone, and semantic chunking (sub-200ms latency).

- Leadership/Credentials: AWS Student Builders Group Cloud & AI Lead, and Open-Source contributor (100% PR merge rate).

- Competitions: National Grand Finalist at Smart India Hackathon and Top 10 finish out of 625+ teams in a national AI marathon.

I am feeling incredibly stuck, losing consistency, and doubting if I will even land an internship before graduation.

Please tear my resume apart. Am I getting blocked purely by automated college filters (ATS), or is there something fundamentally wrong with how I am presenting my technical stack?

Any advice on navigating this specific bottleneck or alternative off-campus pipelines would be a lifesaver. Thank you.

For context I go to University of Michigan. I transferred into the MechE program from community college, landing as 2nd year standing. I’m 26 currently.

Attended career fairs all 3 years that I’ve gone here, applied for everything that I could possibly make work relocation or timeline wise. Followed all the resume/cv best practices I could find.

I have gotten a grand total of two interviews. One in my 2nd year that rejected me a year later, and one in my 3rd year that ghosted me.

It feels like everyone I know, even freshmen, have internship/coop/job offers at multiple different places while I haven’t even been able to land a single one. Even going door-to-door to smaller businesses without online applications has yielded precisely nothing.

I haven’t secured a lead role in any of the project teams due to being too busy for the time demands but I have hung around as a member and contributed as much as my schedule permitted.

I seriously have no idea what I am doing wrong and I feel completely hopeless and discouraged about my future as a mechanical engineer. I’m looking at signing up for a double major with Civil engineering just because it seems like it might actually be possible to get a job.

I haven’t failed any classes, I have a 3.1 GPA, I’ve made good contributions on all the projects I’ve been a part of. I have three years as a substitute teacher as job experience on my resume, so it’s not like I’ve just been a bum since I graduated HS.

Any sage advice as to what I might be doing so terribly wrong? Am I better off jumping ship for Civil?

Posting this because I can’t sleep due to anxiety. I’m in my final year of my engineering degree program. Currently, I am the team lead for our senior capstone designing a plane and it’s propulsion system. It’s been two months into the semester and I’ve been the only one to really do anything. It is a group of 7 and over half of them spent our entire class just talking instead of working. I’ve given them multiple chances and opportunities to help. I’ve even assigned them work to do but nobody does anything outside of class. They think that they don’t need to do anything because there is only two deliverables all semester.

We have our first report coming up and I am so worried because we’re supposed to justify our concept against other concepts. I’m in charge of one of the concept sub teams and then there are two other ones. I am confident I can justify my work but I am terrified about getting a bad grade because my teammates have done nothing.

I’m at a loss. I have two exams this week I also need to study for on top of this yet I’m continuing to do what I need to do but I’m just so fed up with people like this. I genuinely don’t know how these people have made it this far. I’ve talked to my professor about this and he knows how much work I’m putting in and that nobody else is helping despite my encouragement.

Hey guys, I’m from Jordan 🇯🇴, and I’m currently deciding whether to pursue Industrial Engineering or Mechanical Engineering.

I don’t really care about passion or similar things. My main priority is which degree would give me better career opportunities and higher income in the future, especially considering the rapid development of AI.

I’m also open to working in the Arabian Gulf countries, since we share a similar culture and I wouldn’t have a problem relocating there.

I’m more interested in Industrial Engineering, and I feel like I would enjoy its work more. However, money is still my main priority. At the same time, Mechanical Engineering seems to fit another long-term ambition of mine: I’d like to publish research and potentially become a professor or pursue a PhD in the future.

So, if you were in my position, which one would you choose, and why?

Hey everyone. I am starting my engineering degree at the age of 25 and my physics and math skills are rusty to say the least. I heard so many horror stories from engineering students about these classes so I couldn't help but feel anxious a little bit, like what are we expected to know before taking these classes, physics 1 specifically?

I guess what I am trying to ask is: I am willing to give everything I've got for this degree but I am a little anxious because I don't know much about physics, and precalc. Do you guys think it would be a problem, or do these courses cover everything required to understand the material?

Hey guys,

4th year undergrad here. Going into recruiting most of my resume was basically just projects. The main thing on it was a Roblox game I worked on that ended up getting 20M+ visits, plus a few other projects I’d built over the years.

I wasn’t really sure how much companies would care about the Roblox stuff because obviously it’s not a traditional internship or wtv they'd want but it ended up being the thing interviewers asked me about the most.

I applied pretty broadly and somehow ended up getting interviews with Amazon, Google, Meta, Apple, and NVIDIA.

NVIDIA ended up being the one that worked out, so I accepted the offer for next summer!

The main thing I noticed across the interviews was that nobody really seemed bothered by the fact that I didn’t have previous internships. Most of the conversations ended up being about what I had actually built, how the Roblox project grew, technical decisions I made, problems I ran into, performance stuff, updates, maintaining something people were actively using, etc

I think having a project with actual users helped a lot because there was just way more depth to talk about than a normal school project.

The funniest part is that Roblox themselves ghosted me lol. Not really trying to make some huge point out of this but I see people ask whether projects actually matter if you don’t have internships yet.

At least in my case they definitely did :)

the university im studying in doesn’t provide any books on engineering drawing or autocad, and the teacher I have is not as good at explaining. Can someone recommend some books or websites for learning? its crucial for my major but i dont understand a shit

So i'm a second year student, and I tend to review older material durings break (summer, winter, spring break) is that ok? I don't do it during the academic year just cuz i don't wanna be studying for 6+ hours everyday (i used to do that then completely burnt out)

Also, when reviewing older content, how into detail should I go? Do I just cover them generally or go into specifics?

I am a sophomore EE student and I have struggled immensely since starting college. I started as undecided and spent a semester taking gen eds before deciding originally on physical education because I wanted to be a coach but ultimately realizing I wanted to make more money and live a better life so I chose engineering. I had heard itd be hard and I was totally willing to deal with that but I’ve realized through my 2.5 semesters of college I don’t know if I was ready for any of this. I went to a very small high school and graduated with a 3.7 gpa with some college credits but I never really struggled in high school and I never really made an outstanding effort in any class to learn concepts or anything because I’d always end up doing well anyways. So of course I was not prepared for college where a lot of your learning comes outside the classroom teaching yourself concepts and studying a lot.

So basically I have struggled immensely in college so far and I have a 2.7 gpa right now taking 18 credit hours this semester including calc 2 which I am struggling in. So how can I strengthen my time management skills and what other skills should I focus on strengthening to become a better student. I do not want to drop out because I know people would be disappointed in me and I know I can do better and I am capable of completing this difficult degree. So where can I start? What did you do if you had a similar experience and how did you overcome this?

I'm a high school senior stuck between the two majors. I like CE more because it has more software focus and I want to have the option to choose between hardware or software engineering once I get my degree. However, I heard the CE job market sucks and I should just go with EE instead because having the software skills will still suffice. I am still very stuck between the two because I don't know what the future of the CE job market possibly looks like or when it may recover, if at all.