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i didn't have the strength to get it all the way off
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Reply 22 of 357 (Originally posted on: 07-10-12 06:53:06 AM)
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As someone who did it all wrong, I can give you plenty of advice.
First and most important: find others to study with. Don't try to do this shit on your own. No one else will be doing it on their own, the teachers don't expect that you're doing it on your own (even if they say so), and you will drown. I did it on my own and I thought I was just dumb for a long time, until I found out everyone else had study groups. It makes all the difference in the world. I didn't grow stronger to a significant degree for it, either, because the biggest problem is working alone is that you'll get stuck on something very small and in the grand scheme of things, insignificant. You'll get stuck there for an hour maybe more, and it's something that you could potentially just ask your friend "hey do you know what this means?" and you'll be on your way in no time. An assignment that would take you 2 hours might take you 6 because you can get snagged on stupid things, and you won't have 4 hours to spare. So things will suffer, assignments will be skipped/half assed if you don't have someone there with you that can say "yeah we covered that last week really quick, it's in chapter 2.5 take a look."
The second most important advice i'd say is don't expect to learn/know/understand everything you're taught. Undergraduate engineering courses do a lot of hand waving to get from step to step in explanations. The reason for that might be because the math/theory that takes you from one step is really extensive and complex and may be very important to your understanding of the problem as well, but the teacher will skip it because learning that could take up weeks and he just wants you to see the end result so that you can use it in other problems. Basically there will be a lot of stuff that gets glossed over and skipped and the teacher might not really make that clear - so at the end of the day you may be able to ace your tests but you still won't have a good grasp of the subject you're learning. That's how the classes work though, and there's really no other way to do it. If when you're all done you want to learn more, you'll get the opportunity to do that, but until then be at peace with the fact that you don't really have all that much depth, because no one else in your class will either.
It's really easy for engineering students to get a feeling of "imposter syndrome," partly for the reason I mentioned above. You're talking about all these complex things and you don't feel like you understand it and you assume that everyone else does and you're just faking it. Also partly because shit's hard and sometimes you'll do bad. Just don't get discouraged. I really believe that anyone is capable of doing all the shit I've done so far, if they want to and if they believe they can. Many people don't want to, obviously, but a lot of other people do want to but get discouraged because they don't think they can. Which to me seems ridiculous - not because it's easy (it's not), but because it doesn't take super intelligence or anything like that. Sorry for the pep talk, you probably don't need it right now but most people do end up needing it at some point so just keep it in mind if that day ever comes. Best of luck with everything!
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