Hey guys, Iām super excited to be your engsci blogger for 2024! Hope this blog helps give you a little intro into what engsci could be like and figure out if itās your thing or not!
Honestly, I loved reading these blogs as a first year and it helped me so much to gauge what all the specs were actually like to be in, outside of just their formal descriptions, so hopefully I can help do that for everyone reading :))
Iām gonna try to make this blog super aesthetic, so I hope you enjoy my attempt at romanticising my engineering degree because I kinda need that for motivation right now šš I love Pinterest, so I hope this blog kinda looks like a Pinterest board(ish?? from the outside at least? idk??), but if thatās not your vibe stick around anyway, I promise this blog is gonna be super informative outside of that!!
starting out as an engineer…
Coming into engineering I remember feeling so out of my depth, the imposter syndrome was crazy. Some people came into this degree with fully laid out plans year by year, extensively researched and fully decided, and here I was barely able to list off the names of the different specs?
Iām not necessarily in the wrong for not having done my full research before becoming an āengineering studentā, but an important takeaway from this is that itās okay to still not know what youāre doing. I mean hopefully what you want to be doing is an engineering degree at the very least, but something like deciding on a spec is not the ābe all and end allā decision that it seems like. Specs are something that you can make a call on, change your mind about, and then change your mind again…
I mean, I literally changed to engsci hours before the preferred spec form was due!
so what made me change my mind then?
Originally I was headed in the direction of the civil or electrical engineering route. A lot of my decision making came down to: āWhat donāt I want to do?ā which while it sounds super lame, helped me rule out a bunch of options.
Since hearing more about the different specs in Kevinsā engsci111 lectures, a certain spec really called out to me: engsci. I really enjoyed more math heavy subjects like engsci111, especially compared to more āphysicsā based papers like enggen121. As much as I enjoyed mechanical vibe engineering papers, I didnāt really see myself enjoying that as my whole future degree. As the year went on I learnt that coding was an essential part of the engsci degree, but after my less-than-great experience with my first year coding paper, this was enough to scare me away completely.
But then I had a sort of āwhat ifā moment.
What if I’m missing out on what I should be doing (as in āengineering destinyā I guess)?
What if I’m holding myself back without at least giving it a try? – Honestly at this point I was going off of vibes, you could call it an instinct I guess(?), but engsci to me, on reflection, felt like it had the best vibes, or maybe it was just a gut feeling?
Anyway, after living with the effects of that last minute call for a few months now, I can tell you with 100% confidence that it was the right call. While it includes coding, engsci isnāt just ācodingā and so even if you donāt have a strong coding background, like me, you shouldnāt let that dissuade you from choosing it. Over the year my coding abilities have grown massively, and while itās still not my number one fav thing, Iām so glad I didn’t let first year coding put me off of engsci (I was literally the biggest hater of coding in the MATLAB phase of 131š«„). Aside from the coding there is plenty else to learn with papers on biological mechanics sorta stuff and even the stats department (LOVE LOVE LOVE ENGSCI255, I’ll explain the individual papers more later thoughš«¶).
I feel like I have already learnt so much from my first few months, not just in terms of academics, but also within my life as well. Engsci is a big step up from part one with seemingly endless assignments, but as I see it, thereās nothing that isnāt ādoableā if you’re willing to put the time in.Ā
^^Also spoiler alert guys, engsci’s get to go on a three day trip to TaupÅ(!). I’m not sure how much I’m allowed to even say, but if thats a selling point you should know that it’s super fun, and honestly I made so many great friends and memories (and I learnt a little too don’t worry).
Side Note Life advice: I will offer some super specific advice for part two though, TRY TO GET ENOUGH SLEEP! I literally used to always fall asleep in my lectures, TRUST ME when I say that getting 6-8 hours of sleep is going to benefit you wayyy more than an extra hour of sleep deprived studying! I feel like this small detail alone has transformed my studying habits this year, and helped me keep up with the intensity of the engsci workload!
I’ll be going into much more depth about what engineering science and its courses actually entail in my next post, but anyway, thatās just a brief snapshot into my engsci journey so far!
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