19
Mar
24
The Small-Town Engineering Dream That Isn’t Always a Dream
Where I come from, becoming an engineer isn’t a choice — it’s a tradition. The town I grew up in is just an hour away from the City of Nizams, surrounded by a dozen small engineering colleges. After high school, the expected next step was automatic: enroll in one of them. Passion had little to do with it. Engineering was seen as a rite of passage, a badge of respectability, and a ticket out of uncertainty. For many of us, it was simply the thing you had to do.
But the euphoria fades fast. Once the first semester’s novelty wears off, you realize that not everyone there wants to build bridges or write code. Some are just waiting for time to pass, while others — a rare few — start using those years to shape who they want to become. I wasn’t sure which one I was yet. I had chosen computer science not out of passion, but inertia. It was what everyone else was doing, so I did too.
College Life: Between Freedom and Confusion
The first year was pure freedom. After years of strict schooling, suddenly there were no uniforms, no attendance drills, and no one watching over you. For a while, that alone felt like success. But slowly, I realized that college wasn’t meant just to prepare me for a job — it was a space to fail, to wander, to test everything the world told me to take seriously.
I tried joining clubs, organizing events, writing code I didn’t understand, even skipping classes that felt irrelevant. At the time, it felt like chaos. Looking back, it was data collection — a messy but necessary way of discovering what didn’t fit me. Every confusion had a purpose. That’s something you can’t teach in lectures.
Learning by Elimination: Finding What You Don’t Like
They say you can’t dislike something until you’ve tried it. College gave me that privilege. I failed small, often, and quietly. I realized I wasn’t built for endless theory or rote learning, but when it came to code — to logic disguised as art — something clicked. Programming felt like design in disguise: structure meeting chaos, rules bending into creativity. For the first time, I wasn’t just studying to pass exams; I was solving problems that felt alive.
From then on, engineering stopped being a cage and became a toolkit. It wasn’t about degrees anymore. It was about building something that made sense, even if nobody else saw it yet. Ironically, that realization came not from passion but from boredom — the moment when you get tired of waiting for life to happen and start building it instead.
When Passion Replaces Obligation
Somewhere between debugging and deadlines, the switch flipped. What started as routine coursework became a quiet obsession. I began staying up late, writing snippets that broke and fixed in equal measure. It wasn’t pretty, but it was mine. That’s when I understood something crucial: passion isn’t always a lightning bolt. Sometimes, it’s a slow burn that starts from frustration.
And when that happens, the world shifts. Grades stop defining you. Approval stops mattering. You start building things not for marks, but for meaning. That’s the real graduation — the invisible one that happens long before you get your certificate.
Breaking the Corporate Spell
When college ended, most of my classmates aimed for the comfort of large corporations. I didn’t. The idea of climbing the corporate ladder one rung at a time felt more like a treadmill than progress. So I packed my bags and moved 1,900 kilometers to New Delhi to join a startup. It wasn’t glamorous — the pay was modest, the hours long — but it was alive. Every week brought a new problem, a new design, a new chance to fail faster and smarter.
That environment, where “ship fast” mattered more than “look perfect,” taught me more than four years of engineering theory ever could. It was real-world debugging — not of code, but of mindset. There’s something liberating about being allowed to mess up as long as you fix it yourself. It turns fear into fuel.
Connecting the Dots: What Engineering Really Teaches You
Looking back, I often laugh at how reluctant I was to become an engineer. But without those years, I wouldn’t have discovered what truly drives me. The irony is that the herd mentality I once mocked gave me the framework to explore individualism. You follow the crowd long enough, and one day you realize you’re walking in your own direction.
Steve Jobs once said that you can only connect the dots looking backward. I think he was right. The version of me who enrolled in college out of habit could never imagine the one writing this now — a designer who still codes, still questions, and still breaks things just to see how they work. Maybe that’s what engineering really teaches you: not to obey the manual, but to write your own.
What you wanted to be back then doesn’t coherently exist with what you want to do now. So why regret?
A Final Word to the Young Engineers
If you’re sitting in class wondering whether you belong there — you probably don’t. And that’s okay. Use those years to find out what does belong to you. Build something, break something, argue with your professors, skip a few safe choices. Just don’t stop experimenting. One day, you’ll realize that every confusion was actually a clue.
