Ok, so here's the deal. I have had much internal conflict regarding the subject of engineering. In class, I often find myself saying, "what's the point of knowing this minute equation?" or "I wonder if I can take 30 minutes to go throw a frisbee in the quad during my class break?" However, my greatest distraction from engineering school is travel. No matter how far I go, how long I am gone, what disgusting things I have to eat, I will never get tired of traveling and experiencing new cultures and places. How will I ever settle down?
I have not traveled a lot, mostly just for tourism in Canada and Mexico, as cheaply as possible of course. But more recently, I have been aiming my travel experiences through engineering. I have traveled to Tijuana to help build low-income houses, Bolivia to reconstruct decrepit roads, and now I am off to Austria to be an Au Pair for three kids and work for the Father's geotechnical engineering firm as an intern. After that, next stop is home for a quarter of engineering classes at UW, then SCOTLAND, at the University of Aberdeen, to study sustainable engineering practices. I decided a blog might be necessary to start logging my adventures and see how my perspective on engineering changes throughout the course of a year, which you get to follow too!!!
Here are my thoughts on engineering right now, sitting on my bed, right after attending my senior Civil Engineering class' graduation, 15 day left in America, just received my current GPA from last finals, sippin' tea, and should be working on an Engineers Without Borders report:
Poo-tee-weet?!
As my friend, Kurt Vonnegut, would put it.
Yes-I have a very existential view on engineering, if you haven't noticed. I am a completely passionate and nerdy engineer through and through, but there is something amiss in my understanding of the role as an engineer in this world. Why do I have these doubts? Let's put some real hands-on experiences to answer these questions before I give up my engineering aspirations first, shall we?
I encourage discussion on my travel experiences and my engineering perspective, so if you care to, please comment and follow me throughout this process!
Hello Annie. I just read your first two posts on your blog, because the tendency to procrastinate didn't just magically disappear after I graduated from UW and currently distracting myself from doing actual work. In anycase, good luck on your engineering-based travels and one tip I have for you is to watch a few movies that I've found very accurately reflect what happens to Americans traveling abroad. If you haven't already seen them, they are: Hostel, Human Centipede, Turistas, The Cave, Alien vs Predator, Jurassic Park.
ReplyDeleteIf you put reminders up on facebook periodically, I'll come back and read your new posts.
-Arthur Yang