My Anonymous Engineer

By Elise McGouran

My new friend is studying electrical engineering. He was in the middle of studying, actually, when I walked in on him and awkwardly asked if he would tell me a bit about himself. Everything or anything, I wasn't picky.

"I don't know," he said. "I'm a pretty private person."

Regardless, he took pity on me, and, although he wished to remain anonymous, I now have the chance to tell his story.

"I actually started out as a business student, my freshman year. I wanted to become an entrepreneur. I have all these cool ideas in my head, but, a few weeks into starting college I realized that - if you really want to implement any of your ideas, you have to know how to make them happen. How to build them. How to design them. Being a business person you can always have someone do the work for you by paying them money or fundraising, but I thought it would be really cool to spend my time here learning how to actually build the systems that I'm interested in, so it was a pretty easy switch to engineering. I've liked it ever since."

I wondered how the transition was from a business focus to engineering.

"It's been pretty tough, especially since I didn't come in with a background like a lot of these engineering kids have, like math, physics and chemistry, so it really took a lot to get over that initial learning curve."

Even though he came in behind the rest of his contemporaries he doesn't seem jaded. In fact, he's the opposite. He's thankful.

"I had tons of support throughout the whole way, and if I were to say any message to anyone doing engineering it would be to stick through with it. In the long run it definitely pays off."