Engineering Class

Normally I don't like dreams that involve Uni. I had a few dreams in the past though I don't think I have any of them written on this website because this was way before I started blogging but my dreams about Uni usually involved me trying to study for exams or being completely empty headed during a test and having all kinds of anxieties that whenever I wake up from these dreams, usually it would take me like a few minutes to try to figure out if something was due today, only to realize that I am not in Uni anymore. Nothing more stressful than falling behind in Uni which was why I was so unhappy when I was enrolled before I flunked out. But this dream made me feel something completely different. Something...inspiring.

In this dream I had last night, I was in a classroom with a bunch of other students. These students weren't exchange students from Saudi Arabia, Algeria, El Salvador, or Vietnam. These were students just like me, grew up in the United States, spoke the same language without any weird accents, similar upbringing where we can reference culture from our past, same understanding of each other, and passion for why we wanted to become engineers in the first place. Maybe not necessarily the same race but we were all Americans and we wanted to work for our country. This sort of feeling I haven't had in years, it was refreshing. Still no women in this class either as was the case in my university experience. Girls tended to focus on biology and chemistry sciences more than eletrical, computer, or mechanical subjects. And then there was our professor, a younger professor who probably didn't have decades of experience in the field but understood it well enough and had just as much as a passion for it to teach it the next generation of students who want to delve into the field of engineering. Again, not a foreigner professor from North Africa or Iran with a heavy accent and an old school way of teaching. Someone who grew up and understands us on a basic level.

And no offense to any of the exchange students I had class with my University days either. They were good classmates but they always hung out with their own. They never studied or worked alongside us Americans. In a way, they were heavy competition as was everyone else in my class, even if we didn't admit it, that was just the reality of it. That competition didn't really matter or help us in the end because the last class I took before I flunked out officially, everyone in my classroom failed the final exam including me. Our grades were so horrible, our professor (who wasn't even a professor at our uni) had to start the same class in the summer for everyone to retake but at that point, I was broke and already lost my scholarship at that point just by struggling to keep my GPA above 3.0 average. The real average was somewhere aroudn 2.5-2.8 but you didn't qualify for the scholarship if it wasn't above 3.0. That GPA is pretty easy to maintain if you were taking all of those useless piss easy core courses but when you are taking 18+ hours of courses with like 8-10 hours of coursework that actually matters to your field, you get stressed so easily. Nobody in my class in my time in Uni was having a good time. Meanwhile everyone else taking easier degrees got to experience a real college life, talking to girls, doing all sorts of fun college shit that you see in the movies. Technically, college shouldn't be about that but that's besides the point. We had it really tough and a lot of us if not all of us didn't make it.

So in this classroom, we were doing an exam of some sort. An engineering math problem to be specific. But unlike in my reality where each of us had to figure out the solution to these mathematical problems on our own without any help of a calculator, we were all huddled around a single table with the problem placed on the center of the table and we were all discussing how to solve this problem among ourselves while our professor watched over us and gave us some insight and advice. The whole experience of working like this, it felt encouraging, where even someone as shy and timid as myself can contribute and even if one of us was wrong about the solution, we were able to learn and adapt by hearing the proposals of other classmates. In a sense, we were working like engineers. We were working together and not competing against each other. Our professor wasn't putting any standards up that we had to met but rather he was encouraging us to think outside the box and work together as a team. He wasn't just sitting and expecting us to figure out on our own and just telling us to read the text book when we had a question. He encouraged us to use TEAMWORK. Something modern education is allergic to these days. By the end of the exam, the entire group was in good spirits and my classmates all went to some little hangout spot by this engineering building to relax around a patio and have some snacks. Nobody was left out and we were all in good spirits with each other. Not to mention, this particular university wasn't crowded or noisy either. It was professional but still laid back enough where it didn't feel like I was in prison. Why couldn't my university experience been like this?

My dream ended around the point where my classmates and I were relaxing in some patio student lounge in the engineering building but I woke up feeling a bit inspired to perhaps suggest maybe school shouldn't just be about exams, cramming, and studying late at night until you start losing hair. Rather, maybe we should have education be straightforward, more hands on, and practical to where teamwork and personal input should be encouraged and not suppressed. After all, in the real world, isn't an engineer's job to solve problems using the tools he has available. They aren't exactly trying to solve math problems by themselves on pieces of paper without a calculator. Whatever happened to the idea of working smarter, not harder. But alas, our world is ran by morons who think life should be a JRPG where you have to grind and hustle to be successful.

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