III. EP/Summer Job
EP stands for engineering physics, not physics engineering. Examination of the second form quickly reveals it to be nonsensical, as it implies that a practitioner of this discipline attempts to engineer the science of physics. This improper terminology is even more obvious if the term physics engineer is applied to someone (the correct term is engineering physicist). How did I pick this discipline with the hard-to-remember name? The answer is: foolishly.
- Never let shyness get in the way of conducting a thorough investigation before making an important decision. While this realization is intuitively obvious, I still make this mistake all of the time. When the time came to choose my major I believed the hype that said EP would allow me a future in any specialization I desired. What I didn’t do was speak to EP students and professors or look beyond the course calendar descriptions. Thus I find myself in a subject I’ve learned to loath. The reason for this failure is simple, the fear of seeking out strangers and speaking to them about stuff I don’t know.
- You have to find happiness in your day-to-day life. The description of my last summer job sounds very impressive. I attempted to improve the capabilities of a satellite instrument so that it could do something it was never designed to do, all with the purpose of furthering humanity’s understanding of the atmospheric science of climate change. However, my day-to-day work was incredibly boring – writing and debugging and debugging and debugging and debugging computer code in a language I was completely unfamiliar with. While it sounds romantic to do certain things, often the reality just isn’t something you can live with. Therefore, my plans for the future have been greatly revised from what they once were. Where I once aspired to design space probes that would travel to other planets, now I wish only for a job doing something where I’d enjoy the day-to-day tasks (and with an overall purpose I can live with, of course). Letting go of my dream is very hard.
- Never let shyness get in the way of conducting a thorough investigation before making an important decision. While this realization is intuitively obvious, I still make this mistake all of the time. When the time came to choose my major I believed the hype that said EP would allow me a future in any specialization I desired. What I didn’t do was speak to EP students and professors or look beyond the course calendar descriptions. Thus I find myself in a subject I’ve learned to loath. The reason for this failure is simple, the fear of seeking out strangers and speaking to them about stuff I don’t know.
- You have to find happiness in your day-to-day life. The description of my last summer job sounds very impressive. I attempted to improve the capabilities of a satellite instrument so that it could do something it was never designed to do, all with the purpose of furthering humanity’s understanding of the atmospheric science of climate change. However, my day-to-day work was incredibly boring – writing and debugging and debugging and debugging and debugging computer code in a language I was completely unfamiliar with. While it sounds romantic to do certain things, often the reality just isn’t something you can live with. Therefore, my plans for the future have been greatly revised from what they once were. Where I once aspired to design space probes that would travel to other planets, now I wish only for a job doing something where I’d enjoy the day-to-day tasks (and with an overall purpose I can live with, of course). Letting go of my dream is very hard.
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