When I tell people I was a Mechanical Engineering major for my first semester, they are inevitably shocked. I'm not sure why--I guess I just don't look like an engineer or something. But I was planning to be an engineer, and applied to college and got accepted into one of the toughest programs in the country. Unfortunately, by the time classes had started, I had already decided months earlier that I no longer wanted to do engineering. I was stuck, though, for the first semester.
Why did I want to be an engineer? I think about that decision and wonder what I was think back in the early 1980s. It really is not all that mysterious, however. Everybody wanted to be an engineer at the time. That dramatic final speech by Anthony Edwards in Revenge of the Nerds, when he extols the virtues of the engineers--the guys who design the planes you're flying in, for example--captures the engineering zeitgeist pretty well.
I was not so much influenced by the movie, though, as I was by the constant pressure. All through school I had been very good at math, so all of my teachers, my guidance counselors, and my family encouraged me to "do something with math." Doing something with math meant engineering school. It didn't matter that the entire time I was getting straight As in math I was also acing my English classes. No one said, "You should do something with English." It just wasn't done.
I would like to think there is a big, important lesson--or, better yet, a Big, Important Lesson--here. Something about finding your own direction in your own time, and I guess you could take that away from my experience. The truth is that your freshman year is a messy time, and it's fine not to know what you want to be when you grow up. You need to figure things out, and soon, but there is still a little time left. Maybe that is the lesson, then: Find yourself! Choose your destiny!
Actually, the lesson is probably just that I don't look like an engineer. So do this: Find out what you look like and choose your major accordingly.
