Whether you’re going for mechanical, electrical, civic or any other discipline, engineering is a pretty tough industry to break into. But before you even start making your mark in the engineering world, you have to walk away with that all-important college degree—meaning you have to battle tough professors, tougher exams, and what’s probably pretty severe sleep deprivation. How are you supposed to survive four years of that? Well, after talking with our country’s recent engineering grads, we’ve come up with the four best ways:
1. Stop procrastinating:
We’ve all heard that advice a time or twelve in our lives, but it’s time we actually listened to it.
“Try to knockout your homework during your free periods,” advises 2013 grad Derek Schwartz, who graduated from West Point with a degree in civic engineering. “Time management is huge to your success as an engineer.”
Getting an early start on your work is great practice for the days when you have to meet deadlines and no amount of groveling will get them pushed back. Nobody’s saying completing your work in a timely and reasonable fashion is easy, but at least it doesn’t end with you in the lab or library like this—
—fighting for primary sources and caffeine fixes alongside the rest of your class.
2. Take Breaks:
Sometimes, the best thing that you can do for your work is stepping away from it, no matter how close your deadline is.
This should not be you all the time.
“Never, ever, ever, ever do homework on Fridays, no matter how much you have,” says West Point civic engineering grad Peter Noto. “You have a lot of sleepless nights as an engineering student, but Fridays are for fun.”
Despite the guilt that you might feel blowing off your assignments to actually have fun for a while, recent studies are pretty adamant that taking breaks can actually make you more on-task than if you work through the night. SO the next time you want to go out on Friday even though you have a big project, go do it! Science says you'll be more focused afterwards, and we never want to argue with science.
3. Set Goals with tangible benefits:
Getting your work done in a reasonable amount of time is excellent advice, but what’s your motivation? Because let’s be real, “you have to do your homework to get your degree” is really not enough to get you to actually do the homework.
According to Tri Tech Communications engineer Mark Gernavage, the best way to motivate yourself to pick up a textbook again is to set short-term goals with tangible, beautiful rewards.
“I made a promise to myself that when I graduated, I would buy myself a Dodge Ram as a reward,” says Gernavage of his years studying mechanical engineering at New York Institute of Technology. “Whenever school got touch, I’d go for a test drive in a new one and be recharged.”
Need to do well on an exam? Go through your wish lists and pick something out. Positive reinforcement can work wonders. Motivating yourself with material goods may not help with our nation’s rampant consumerism, but it will almost certainly get you to your graduation ceremony.
4. Never lose sight of what you can achieve:
Chuck Norris believes in you. Don't disappoint Chuck Norris.
Engineers have hard jobs–you guys are basically responsible for over half of our world's modern inventions and tech, which requires an insane and frankly admirable amount of brilliance. According to current electrical engineering student Kevin Kruse at the Rochester Institue of Technology, this is something engineering students should bear in mind.
“Engineering is mostly math, but it's not as easy as being given an equation and asked to solve it,” says Kruse. “Engineers have to look for potential applications of mathematics, and we have to use known solutins to come up with fast and accurate data. A small mistake may mean the difference between making a spaceship and making an uncontrollable intersellar missile, so the best way to survive as an engineer is never to lose sight of the implications of your work.”
Keeping your mind on what you hope to achieve is definitely a great motivational technique. Sometimes, when you're in the midst of homework and finals and student loan panic and more finals, it's easy to forget that you're toughing this out for a reason.
“If you forget what you're representing, all that hard work is useless,” says Kruse of his studies. “Also, coffee. Coffee helps with the surviving thing.”
I could not agree more. Although jjust to be safe, maybe you shoulddownload this coffee app to make sure your heart doesn't explode.
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