An engineer is someone who is trained as a professional. What it means is as soon as s/he steps out of the college s/he is qualified to work as a highly skilled worker in his/her area of expertise, this may be true for the IITs however it doesn’t add up for other colleges.
Let us take up computer engineering for example. The first year you are taught everything you already learnt in High school and which you were so desperate to shun. You will learn chemistry (yuck), physics and English, mechanical drawing, you will be sent to the workshop to learn carpentry, welding, and working with machines. Not that I did not enjoy working in the workshop, I loved it however I seem to not understand the point – here we are enrolled as computer engineering students wasting time learning all useless things and if we failed in any exam we will have to re-appear the next year which means we study physics or chemistry again .
In the second year you get to go to the computer lab…. woooo – only once every week for 1 hr (should this not be introduced in the first year and almost every day?) and you will continue to learn electronics, communication, advanced mathematics, numerical analysis and other rubbish. Come third year and it gets a bit serious, you will learn about microprocessors, computer graphics and computer architecture – really useful stuff but one semester is not enough to master the working of a microprocessor – It took Intel several years of research to build a microprocessor and the college expects you to learn it in one semester along with 5 other subjects, in my college we were also required to a build a compiler which was very interesting. Come final year and again you learn economics, marketing management, personality development and you are required to do some ridiculous science project similar to what you did in High school – like creating software for library or grocery store. I had the fortune of not doing what everyone else did as I convinced my professor to allow me to create a project which integrated electronic volume sensors and computers.
Anyways when I passed out I knew the following programming languages: C a bit, C++ a bit, JAVA little bit, and little tiny bits of utterly useless outdated programming languages, however I also knew little bit of how to operate a milling machine, how to make a box out of sheet metal and how to make a hook by hammering red hot iron rod. This meant I knew a little bit of what an ITI pass out knows and I knew little bit of what a NIIT pass out knows. This was enough to prove that I was big ZERO and the only place that would welcome me would be a call center.
Thanks to my friends and my own curiosity, I at least learnt how to assemble a computer which is what gave me my first job. Now I am an tech consultant and after being in the industry for close to 10 years, I have realized time and again that engineering was the biggest waste of time for me. In my career so far I have never used: chemistry, integral calculus or economics. All that comes in handy is years of experience and basic mathematics.
I could have learned a couple of programming languages myself at home after high school and built a website or some useful software, become an entrepreneur before I turned 23. I could have even assembled and sold computers for a living. Anyways my free and unwelcome advice to the 12th graders is follow your passion in life and don’t do what others do, especially engineering. If you are the best at basket weaving or pottery, then follow it, no one can stop you when you are the best and money will automatically follow you.
