I have an MSc and have spent the day cleaning gutters, I have no idea what to do and am unsure whether I’d be better off dead.
Nah man don’t die. You got the freedom to go into a different industry if you want to
I think it’s practical. I haven’t known many engineer types to make a huge deal of graduation per se. It’s just the next step in a bigger procedure.
Yeah, that’s totally me. I honestly don’t see any value in the certificate, but employers do, so whatever.
I went to school for one reason: to get a job. I enjoyed my field of study, but I hated the college process because it took all the fun out of what I enjoyed about my area of study. In fact, I was better at learning relevant things (i.e. things I actually use now) on my own vs in school. But hey, got the job, so task accomplished.
I was a lot more excited about finishing my first project at work than finishing school. Go figure.
Talk for yourself. My university friends had a fantastic party.
What school end their year in December? Also there is always a ceremony if it was a real school.
If you finish all the credits you need in the Fall semester (which ends in December) then yeah, you graduate in the winter. Many schools don’t have a separate winter commencement, so winter grads wait until the end of the following Spring semester to participate in the graduation ceremony.
The school to hospice informal incarceration pipeline is omnipresent for the working class, and college/trades level is right there in the middle. Right after kid jail and before wage slavery.
I dunno, I prefer this to having to take care of cows and growing my own crops.
Life and the endless crushing need for resources is the prison.
False dichotomy. This has nothing to do with cows and crops on some imaginary “farm”. In reality there’s no actual need for people to slave away their whole lives serving capital just so we can destroy the planet.
I just didn’t go to my graduation ceremony, despite there being free dinner. Was (and had been for ages) struggling with pretty bad depression and didn’t feel I deserved any of it.
I also skipped my graduation. But just because I don’t like that kind of stuff.
Why do you feel like you didn’t deserve to graduate? I’m sure you did deserve it.
Felt I didn’t deserve to celebrate. Depression messes up with your brain big time.
I get you. It’s hard to think otherwise when all the world is a grey mist.
Didn’t go to any of mine outside of high school because I was a kid and my parents could force me on that one. By the time I finished grad school I really felt like I was just another person in an increasingly growing rat race. It’s not even that I haven’t accomplished anything so much as I haven’t accomplished anything particularly unique that sets me apart and grants me intellectual value.
I skipped as much as my parents would let me get away with, because in my mind, walking for graduation is give the graduate’s family and friends a chance to formally congratulate them. I hated every minute of it, but I can deal with that for one day to make my family happy.
When I finished school, I was already working full-time in my career (internship turned into a FT opportunity), so walking didn’t feel valuable at all.
I graduated in the winter in 2023, didn’t attend the ceremony or anything. I have really bad social anxiety so the ceremony seemed like more stress than a celebration for me, I just ordered food and relaxed. But I do remember, after walking out of my last final, thinking “damn do that’s it huh”, I know it’s just a bachelors degree but I didn’t believe in myself enough to even think I’d ever actually graduate. Things turned out okay though, even had a job lined up before graduation which was lucky given the current job market for software engineering. Believe in yourself, your hard work got you that degree, proud of you man!
Thanks. I’ve done pretty well for myself, I’d like to say. I landed a nice job around six months later and have been able to show my talent pretty well. Due to fighting with depression I entered the workforce around ten years after most of my peers. As an engineer, I’ve caught up the median pay for my peers with 15 years more experience. Can’t complain.
I’ve got 3 degrees and have a Gold Duke of Edinburgh award (if you do bronze, silver, and gold, you get to shake hands with a failed king)
- Never went to any graduation ceremony
- Never went to Buckingham Palace to shake hands with Prince Philip.
I am right now, sitting at home in my jammies eating burritos. I regret nothing.
How do I become smart? All I do are online courses for tech and such. I have an established career. Good money, house family and shit…but I want the prestige of at least having a degree. But I’m functionally retarded with math.
How do I become smart? All I do are online courses for tech and such. I have an established career. Good money, house family and shit
Congrats, you are smart.
The challenge you have now is to acknowledge and feel it.
but I want the prestige of at least having a degree
So here’s the problem. you want the prestige, not the intelligence. You can get a degree in various ways if you want, and have the time. You can attend a university course part time, or through their online facilities. Choose a topic you’ve done a lot of online courses for and try for a degree.
But I’m functionally retarded with math.
There’s resources online to help with this, maybe the new methods will help you understand math concepts better. Common core, khan academy, and the sponsor of this lemmy post, skillshare
For some tracks there are even speedrun/lower-cost guides for online degrees through places like WGU. They except transfers from online courses as well. You can do it cheap, especially if you get tuition reimbursement.
I just found out my state (Massachusetts) offers associates programs at any state CC for anyone who doesn’t already have a degree. For adults over 25 the program is called MassReconnect. I’d have to look into transfers, but I imagine those could be transferred to WGU towards a 4yr or post-grad degree. Some of the CC programs can also be done all (or mostly) online.
Michigan does this as well.
I do want to earn the degree. Not fast track my way through or anything. Im 33. I skipped higher education for CS, MS, Networking certs. The general ed courses are my only stopping block. And widdling that down more it really is math.
I won’t commit until I put my money where my mouth is most of the time. I’ve learned that from burning myself out with certs.
Something, something judging a fish by it’s ability to climb a tree
I think you’re a smart person that’s terrible at math. It’s ok to be bad at math, I am too and I have a degree in computer science with a union job. Now that I’ve thrown away a bunch of money, I’ve learned that CS is awesome and I love it but I don’t feel like I can qualify myself as being smart with it. With age I learned that I’m really smart with labor militancy and history, and if I could go back I’d get a degree in labor studies. I think you just need to find your topic.
I also think I can be a smart person that is terrible at math. I have so many niches of hobbies that I’ve gotten into, and my boss has already reiterated that a degree isn’t going to help my tech ical skills at this point. But it’s something I’d like to earn for myself. So the sky (and my wallet) are the limit on the degree I’d get.
You don’t need to be smart. Back in my uni, there were student initiatives to record the questions and answers of previous exams. The Math department itself gave out previous years exams to study from.
The key to remember: exams aren’t written my professors, they’re written by the postdocs who have better things to do, and so they just rehash the same stuff from the year before.
If you want to get a useless piece of paper that tells you that you are an expert in topic X, then don’t learn X, learn to pass the papers for the X exam, and learn X later in your free time if you’re still interested in it.
Hmm…sounds like something I need to look into. I do want the useless piece of paper. But I want to earn it. For myself lol
Good job anon. Now take a long break and get back to it when you have your long term goals sorted.
Til 22-year-olds have long term goals
That’s what the long break is for.
Imagine being privileged enough to take a long break and have long term goals.
We are, we are, we are, we are
We are the engineers!
We can, we can, we can, we can
Demolish forty beers
Drink rum, drink rum, drink rum, drink rum
And come along with us!
'Cos we don’t give a fuck about anyone else
Who don’t give a fuck about us.
That’s what the first engineer I ever met said, but to be fair he was a combat engineer. Those guys are scary. Stick to electronics and bridges…
Why you do graduation ceremony btw? We don’t do that here.
It’s a pretty big accomplishment so the schools like to throw a little party. It also allows students to invite family to see the campus and get an idea of how fast they can chug a beer.
First you listen to a bunch of speeches. Then they call everyone’s name individually, and you walk across a stage, shake hands with some people, get handed a degree. Then maybe everyone throws their hat in the air.
The worst part for me was that during my high school graduation, I was expected to shake the governor’s hand. I had been quite involved in politics that election, but not old enough to vote, and I really disliked out governor (they were in the majority party and barely won w/ <200 votes after multiple recounts, when most major party governors won by >10%). The governor apparently attended my high school, hence the invitation.
Add to that the complete worthlessness of my high school diploma, because I was able to get a 2-year degree before getting my diploma due to concurrent enrollment at a local community college. So not only was it a worthless degree at a school I barely attended the last two years, I had to shake the hand of a politician I hated.
Screw graduation ceremonies, they’re complete wastes of time.
Yeah I just had em mail me the thing
Slight difference; being an ex on has the opposite effect on your ability to get a job.
Agreed, Exxon is a horrible company but I hear the pay is good. It would be tough for an ex-con to get a job as well.
Oof, touché.
Leaving it as is.
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… and then i walked out of the Outprocessing building and took off my beret while still in uniform and walked to my car.
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I’ve never attended a singe scholarly celebration since my middle schools where I went and realized that it was completely pointless
plus the whole preparation and fanfare is draining for me, id like to actually celebrate by relaxing not stressing over an event
I feel that. Too many people, and most are just sitting there, looking at other people and clapping.
I’m kind of surprised; most colleges and universities I’ve seen still have a ceremony for people graduating at the end of the fall semester. It’s not nearly as elaborate as the one ending the spring semester, but it’s still something.
Still, most of life is going to be like that. Usually no real ceremonies for the last day on the job. Move out of your old house/apartment is a lot of work at the end and then you lock the door for the last time.
Congratulations, you’re an adult now.
It’s what being an adult is like. You don’t study for the fanfare, you study for a goal or for yourself.
That and if you have a significant other, you might also score a celebratory shagging.
Edit: Never mind, just realized this is an anon on 4chan posting about engineering school.
You’re still right, but OP’s SO is their dominant hand.
I wonder why they hated school. Maybe the problem was the school and not the topic? Otherwise I feel sad for them disliking the topic they chose as a career path :(
I feel like there’s so much interesting stuff out there, there must be something useful that they find at least interesting.
Engineering school is pretty brutal. I love the career and in many ways I loved the schooling, but it was long nights of hard work on difficult stuff, a lot of which you need to understand for the profession but won’t have to do personally outside school. As a whole engineering school has a reputation because of that disparity as well as because some people go through it because it’s a well paying career and not because it’s where they feel they will be happiest, and engineering isn’t a good choice for folks like that.
Fully agree. I’ve seen a lot of people going into engineering for prestige or “by default” because they weren’t bad at math. It always made me a little sad because I found a lot of the courses truly fascinating and eye-opening and I wanted to nerd out with my teammates!
Man, I know it. I love talking about work. I love the stuff i design. But I’m pretty much the only one in my office like that, and it’s kind of a bummer.
Educational institutions are mostly there either to make money or as a public necessity that the rich underfund to have a malleable electorate. The institutions are therefor often understaffed, incompletely equipped, or spending money on things of no benefit to education. The majority of lecturers are thus often quite underpaid, overworked, and unmotivated, which leads to many students being unimpressed.
There are very few institutions and staff that really can show up to work with a smile and be satisfied with their employment.
It’s at times baffling and yet understandable why people do not vote for people or parties that want to treat education as a priority. They are a product of the influence of the rich and powerful on our institutions. That this dude is unsatisfied is no surprise to me.
Thankfully there is often a pretty big difference between studying and working.
I found there to be a level of stress in my studies that I never had a problem with later. An idea that any moment not spent pouring over books was contributing, at least in my mind, to inevitable failure; doubly so with exams looming ahead.
For me finishing my engineering degree was such a massive relief and work is so much better. I’m in anon’s boat.
Life can definitely feel easier after you find a job with a steady workflow. It’s the slow creep of responsibilities that will eventually overtake the stress of having been a student.
Oh the people who managed a few critical but rarely used pieces of equipment left? Looks like you’ll have to figure out how to run it yourself now with limited notes. Your project is floundering because other departments aren’t being upfront about their workload? Now you’ll have to babysit their work and send constant emails asking them to do their job so you won’t fall behind schedule. Are you a doc approver? Better take your laptop with you during vacation to be available for signing off on it.
Yeah I can understand that sitting on a desk all day, reading and taking exams is a pretty harrowing experience for most.
It looks like it’s my personal tastes that allowed me to enjoy school. And I really did enjoy it! Hopefully other people find something to do that they love.
