It’s that time of year again, recruiting season, and it ignites the questions we hate to ask ourselves, what am I going to do for the rest of my life?
So much of college is about doing well in classes and understanding the material that sometimes I forget where that material is supposed to be leading me. I am technically an electrical engineer but so little of what I am studying focuses on circuits that I don’t meet the job description for the typical “double E”. Learning about communication systems and signal processing is awesome and I love it, which is part of the reason I am thinking about getting my PhD, but it is not the typical “want” from employers. So now I am in a niche field that my degree doesn’t express right away.
That is the hard part, my emphasis is important and incredibly useful to the tech world, but it sometimes is seen as EE, sometimes CS, and most of the time it’s in the middle. But that just means I have to put in a little more work up front, find the companies that need one or two DSP engineers and that’s my way in. Now unfortunately I am in the frustrating part, where it’s hard to find those jobs and when you do there is radio silence on the other end, but that is what Viterbi Career Gateway is for, I can find jobs and get advice on what I can do to get employed.
Whenever you have to make choices like this it’s scary. I get obsessed with trying to picture myself working at the company, where I would live and what the offices are like. I often chicken out if I feel like I would end up being a cog in the machine or in a typical cubicle space. The same goes for applying to colleges, it’s like trying to predict the future and win a popularity contest at the same time. While it is not fun now, I am excited to see where it might take me!
