AuDHD
A place for those that got both Autism and ADHD, those confirmed as one and are suspecting they got the other as well, and also everyone who is neither and just genuinely curious.
Since the combo comes with its own set of challenges, this shall be a place to ask for advice, vent, infodump about special interests and/or just vibe and meme.
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Lol, don't let school indoctrinate you into thinking that design work is the only thing for an engineer to do. There is so much more. Field engineering is great and rarely requires design. Inspections are also an awesome way to use that degree sans design. Look into regulation or travel opportunities. High tech and applications also dabble in design without requiring it. Controls and instrumentation can also provide build, maintenance, or modification opportunities that more closely align with what you would call trade work. That said, if the cost is a problem (and I fucking get it), you can always take a hiatus and join the trades as a trial. Electricians have a pretty cool job. You can do residential and mostly cookie cutter work that never ends, or do commercial and specialize, get into service, or even govt inspection. Just throwing some ideas out. Good luck and grats! EE is the shit!!
Thank you for the advice, but I want to do a desk job where I design stuff. I don't like going outside and working with my hands or on my feet. I can build prototypes and solder, but I'm not great at it. I'm interested in coming up with a cool thing and then having someone who's actually talented at crafting to build it on my behalf. I have mad respect for trade workers, but that kind of work is simply a bad fit for me.
Actually, a design job is really a compromise in the direction of more "practical" with respect to what I'm really interested in doing: original research. For example, I'm really interested in the control of nonlinear dynamical systems, specifically stabilization (read: I want to prevent systems from exploding themselves). While there's no generic framework to control nonlinear systems, and it's pretty unlikely there will be, there are lots of subclasses of nonlinear systems that need to be controlled, like robotic limbs, medical exoskeletons, commercial jets, machine learning, etc. It just involves a bit of creativity and a shit-ton of math (even compared to linear control theory). And I'd like to be one of the people doing the math and testing it out on important systems.
But unfortunately, industry isn't typically interested in paying people to do research. And I need to eat. Those few companies who are interested in new ideas are already closely connected to academia. So it makes sense to me to continue my education.
To be honest, I'm kind of the opposite personality of the typical engineer. I.e. I'm super interested in "theoretical" details and how math, physics, and computer science actually works, and I'm not too interested in implementation details (any more than what is necessary to complete projects) because that kind of information is usually not portable to other projects. For that reason, I'm super pedantic, and engineering people usually don't like pedants.
Additionally, I've already applied to a bunch of field engineering jobs out of desperation and during each interview they basically figured out in real time that I'm not interested in field work like at all, so they ghosted me. Plus, a lot of those job require me to climb up a ladder, which isn't happening for at least a year because I weigh like a truck (too much for standard ladders; I checked). Plus, what I gathered from those interviews is that those jobs don't lead to design jobs, just more field work. I'm just not a good fit.
Also the reason I stayed at my pizza delivery job so long was because I got to spend most of my time in the car with the AC on in a quiet place. I left that job because the company laid off almost all the drivers and outsourced the work to Doordash, and while I was given a job inside, I was absolutely losing my shit not being able to be in a climate controlled, quiet environment like my car. So uncomfortable jobs like trade jobs and field engineering jobs will not work for me. I need to be comfortable.
That's the nightmare scenario for me, lol.
Hah! Great to hear then. My apologies for assuming. I didn't understand the nuances or opportunities of engineering when I went through, but you sound much more prepared for the job than I likely was. Good luck to you then! And stick with it. It's tough but worth it.