I have noticed a trend with people’s reactions to when I am asked about schooling and reply that I have an engineering degree; “Oh you’re so smart”, “What are you doing talking to me? Shouldn’t you be doing smart things?”, or some other nonsense paired with slight timidity afterwards.
I do think I am pretty intelligent, and have done a good job exemplifying that many times, so maybe those comments are true in some sense. However, my intelligence is in no part thanks to my engineering degree that I hardly showed up to lectures for. Sure, it expanded my knowledge and let me see other aspects of life I wouldn’t have seen otherwise so immediately after high school, but the degree didn’t make me. I would’ve dug down those rabbit holes at some point on my own accord if the subject matter interested me. Just as I did with rocketry, programming, filmmaking, working out, etc.
This is where I have a gripe with labels. I don’t really care what label I am assigned: “programmer”, “engineer” (a label I cannot even legally have here in Canada, actually!), “student”, “developer”, “engineering graduate”, or whatever other bucket I can be tossed into. And the truth is, you shouldn’t care either.
These labels are just dumb ways to summarize some part of some aspect of who you are, it has so little hold on who or what you actually are. I play the piano; the word “engineer” doesn’t seem to hint at that. I also know quite a bit of Adobe After Effects, but nowhere in that list of labels does it scream “novice visual effects artist”.
Labels are dumb, just be who you are. Why do we have to summarize ourselves into a few words? Don’t buy into it.