It’s what being an adult is like. You don’t study for the fanfare, you study for a goal or for yourself.
That and if you have a significant other, you might also score a celebratory shagging.
Edit: Never mind, just realized this is an anon on 4chan posting about engineering school.
You’re still right, but OP’s SO is their dominant hand.
I think it’s practical. I haven’t known many engineer types to make a huge deal of graduation per se. It’s just the next step in a bigger procedure.
Talk for yourself. My university friends had a fantastic party.
Yeah, that’s totally me. I honestly don’t see any value in the certificate, but employers do, so whatever.
I went to school for one reason: to get a job. I enjoyed my field of study, but I hated the college process because it took all the fun out of what I enjoyed about my area of study. In fact, I was better at learning relevant things (i.e. things I actually use now) on my own vs in school. But hey, got the job, so task accomplished.
I was a lot more excited about finishing my first project at work than finishing school. Go figure.
I’m kind of surprised; most colleges and universities I’ve seen still have a ceremony for people graduating at the end of the fall semester. It’s not nearly as elaborate as the one ending the spring semester, but it’s still something.
Still, most of life is going to be like that. Usually no real ceremonies for the last day on the job. Move out of your old house/apartment is a lot of work at the end and then you lock the door for the last time.
Congratulations, you’re an adult now.
Slight difference; being an ex on has the opposite effect on your ability to get a job.
Agreed, Exxon is a horrible company but I hear the pay is good. It would be tough for an ex-con to get a job as well.
Oof, touché.
Leaving it as is.
I’ve never attended a singe scholarly celebration since my middle schools where I went and realized that it was completely pointless
plus the whole preparation and fanfare is draining for me, id like to actually celebrate by relaxing not stressing over an event
I feel that. Too many people, and most are just sitting there, looking at other people and clapping.
Validation need not come from anywhere outside yourself. Set your own goals. Do your best. Pat yourself on the back. People who ‘recognize’ you only do so superficially anyway. No one can truly know what you’ve done or where you’ve been.
I mean, sure, but it is still nice to have some external validation now and again you know?
In monetary form even.
…said the mouse in the maze.
How about climbing over those walls, up the leg of the biggest scientist, enter through the eye socket, and hollow out that skull. That’s all the validation anyone needs. Yum!
Now you made me want to read Enders Game again. Cheers!
Two things. 1. If you hated it maybe it was the wrong choice, 2. You can walk in the spring commencement if you want to, that’s what I did for grad school.
I love engineering, I hated University. The framework of school is not for everyone and reading 300 pages of complex stuff every week for 4 years is boring to death and it isn’t for me, and for a lot of people.
School of all levels caters to one type of learning, and not everyone is good with that style.
I experienced a wide array of learning types. Some profs rely on student-led learning from book readings and assignments, some relied on in-person lectures, some worked through examples in class and had similar examples on homework along with challenge problems that extend the examples in new ways, one had us use mathcad to build a model of increasing complexity with each lecture.
Saying university caters to one type is an absurd reduction. Unless that one type is “learning”.
Engineering is a skilled trade with a long list of topics that have to be covered. You don’t have to be an engineer, you could do a two year tech school or just DIY and roll your own, prove yourself through your work to get into engineering-like jobs.
Good for you. My experience is that the program was geared towards people that would continue to masters and PhDs.
I had an exam every two weeks, hundreds of pages every week to read and the professors weren’t really available for us, and teaching assistant didn’t really give a shit.
The labs were mostly just math labs, with really specific applications.
My only real project was the end of program project that lasted a bit short of 2 years. And the professors that were supposed to help us and support us told us that the project would fail for a good part of a year and a half. And when the project was a success and gave exposure to the school, the same professors that gave us shit for almost the entirety of the project took the credit for a successful project.
If you wanted to do hands on engineering, you had to join extra curricular teams.
My opinion on the matter is certainly tainted by my awful experience, but I did a program to become a technician in my field before going to engineering school and it was much more appropriate for my learning style.
- if you hated engineering in uni, will you love the work afterwards?
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Yup. If you enjoy the work but hate the school environment, you’ll probably like being an engineer.
I’m a software engineer, so it’s quite a bit different than other types of engineering, and I hated formal education but I absolutely love my job, even after many years.
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Just use git.
Depends if who you work for. If you work for bad management prepare for some goon to tell you what you should be doing, be wrong about what they tell you, not know what they want, and to demand it sooner than you tell them it will take. They will then change their mind and still expect it to take less time. They will be constantly frustrated with you and you will hate it.
Good management will find work with clear value to customers and you will feel valued and be given *mostly adequate time to do your work. You will put in your hours and be paid. You’ll still be jerked around by typical corporate politics, but it’s everywhere so buckle up. Better than ditch digging unless that’s what you want.
Good management should insulate engineers from most of the corporate politics. My manager, for example, knows we get surprises, so they add in extra time to whatever estimate we give, and he tells stakeholders that this is a firm estimate, which they’ll inevitably push back on and they’ll concede down to something a little higher than our initial estimate (i.e. handle the corporate politics).
Depends on the person, depends on the University.
From what I’ve seen (very old anecdote here, take with salt) some engineering colleges will do everything within the ethics/honor code to obstruct your path to 2nd year. Then they do it again for 3rd. The result are brutally hard classes that are designed to weed students out more than teaching the subject at hand. Even on its best day, school doesn’t mirror the real world, but neither does semester after semester of arbitrary hurdles for a degree. The workplace simply has entirely different, but far more palatable, bullshit on offer. IMO, it’s completely valid to hate school but love your job afterwards.
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Does it matter if you hate the work if it’s the only thing you can find that pays more than subsistence wages?
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Do any of our lives matter in this hell?
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… and then i walked out of the Outprocessing building and took off my beret while still in uniform and walked to my car.
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I just didn’t go to my graduation ceremony, despite there being free dinner. Was (and had been for ages) struggling with pretty bad depression and didn’t feel I deserved any of it.
I graduated in the winter in 2023, didn’t attend the ceremony or anything. I have really bad social anxiety so the ceremony seemed like more stress than a celebration for me, I just ordered food and relaxed. But I do remember, after walking out of my last final, thinking “damn do that’s it huh”, I know it’s just a bachelors degree but I didn’t believe in myself enough to even think I’d ever actually graduate. Things turned out okay though, even had a job lined up before graduation which was lucky given the current job market for software engineering. Believe in yourself, your hard work got you that degree, proud of you man!
Thanks. I’ve done pretty well for myself, I’d like to say. I landed a nice job around six months later and have been able to show my talent pretty well. Due to fighting with depression I entered the workforce around ten years after most of my peers. As an engineer, I’ve caught up the median pay for my peers with 15 years more experience. Can’t complain.
Didn’t go to any of mine outside of high school because I was a kid and my parents could force me on that one. By the time I finished grad school I really felt like I was just another person in an increasingly growing rat race. It’s not even that I haven’t accomplished anything so much as I haven’t accomplished anything particularly unique that sets me apart and grants me intellectual value.
I also skipped my graduation. But just because I don’t like that kind of stuff.
Why do you feel like you didn’t deserve to graduate? I’m sure you did deserve it.
Felt I didn’t deserve to celebrate. Depression messes up with your brain big time.
I get you. It’s hard to think otherwise when all the world is a grey mist.
I skipped as much as my parents would let me get away with, because in my mind, walking for graduation is give the graduate’s family and friends a chance to formally congratulate them. I hated every minute of it, but I can deal with that for one day to make my family happy.
When I finished school, I was already working full-time in my career (internship turned into a FT opportunity), so walking didn’t feel valuable at all.
I finished university at the end of 2019. My graduation ceremony was supposed to have happened in 2020 but uh, other things happened. It took me until the latter half of 2022 to even get my hands on my diploma.
If one is not inclined to social gatherings but still feel a need for something to signal this passage (or any other), a good option is to perform a personal ritual of choice.
Human brains seem to be inclined to appreciate symbolism.
While I agree with the sentiment, I don’t think that the lack of ritual is the underlying problem here.
The school to hospice informal incarceration pipeline is omnipresent for the working class, and college/trades level is right there in the middle. Right after kid jail and before wage slavery.
I dunno, I prefer this to having to take care of cows and growing my own crops.
Life and the endless crushing need for resources is the prison.
False dichotomy. This has nothing to do with cows and crops on some imaginary “farm”. In reality there’s no actual need for people to slave away their whole lives serving capital just so we can destroy the planet.
So let’s say that system collapsed tonight. Tomorrow, 8000000000 people need to eat. If my argument is a false dichotomy tell me how they eat.
Yeah I just had em mail me the thing
idk
frfr
We are, we are, we are, we are
We are the engineers!
We can, we can, we can, we can
Demolish forty beers
Drink rum, drink rum, drink rum, drink rum
And come along with us!
'Cos we don’t give a fuck about anyone else
Who don’t give a fuck about us.
That’s what the first engineer I ever met said, but to be fair he was a combat engineer. Those guys are scary. Stick to electronics and bridges…
I have an MSc and have spent the day cleaning gutters, I have no idea what to do and am unsure whether I’d be better off dead.
Nah man don’t die. You got the freedom to go into a different industry if you want to
I don’t really know how to do that, but yes, I definitely should.
