Breaking up with engineering

I’ve only seen my roommate up before 8 a.m. twice in my life. Both times were the mornings that students had to select courses for the following term. This semester marks the first time I’ll be joining in the frantic scurry to successfully register for the classes that I — like so many other freshmen — have spent hours tailoring to create a perfect schedule. For the past two terms, I’ve followed a regimented engineering curriculum, filled with too many prerequisites to have any real choices available and lectures with caps just large enough to kill all of my excitement on the morning of registration. Now, anxiously watching juniors and sophomores push enrollment numbers toward their limits has made me yearn for my days of safety in the school of engineering.

I originally applied as an A.B. candidate in art history but eventually got so bored of answering "What's your major?" that I started joking I was studying engineering. After months of saying the word, engineering just sounded too good to pass up — so practical, so laudable (according to anybody who has read the articles discussing the dearth of American engineers compared to our counterparts in India and China). So, over the summer I filled out a short form that asked about my preparation in physics and officially made the switch into the B.S.E program.

Soon, multivariable calculus forced me to question that decision. I went to every class but only retained minimal information. Once, my professor told our section the denominator was a demon number. I wondered whether he meant denominators in general or the particular one we were working with, but I decided against verbalizing the question. I wasn’t sure his answer would be helpful. Instead, I cried out in silent terror as I continued to stare at my notes in a fruitless attempt to understand the scribbles on the chalkboard.

I thought about P/D/F-ing the class, but a combination of luck and memorization carried me through the midterm. I should have felt ecstatic, but I couldn’t ignore the suspicion that I wasn’t keeping up with the other engineers. I had so much information about where I fell in terms of other people. I knew the median, the mean and the standard deviation for every test and quiz, but despite my resounding statistical averageness, everyone else seemed to understand more than I did. I wondered if my classmates felt the same way. A few of them loved to talk about math or science, a lot of them loved to hate the class and talked about the quizzes and tests nonstop for days before and after they happened. I didn’t want to do either. I solved the problem sets, felt relieved when they were done and quickly put them aside.

This disinterest wasn’t the first sign that I probably shouldn’t have enrolled in the school of engineering. As I selected courses for my first term here, my adviser suggested I use credit from the advanced placement courses I had taken to explore the various departments within the engineering program. He suggested I enroll in an introductory chemical and biological engineering class. But when the timing of the course conflicted with a writing seminar I knew I would love, I enrolled in the writing sem over the science class and never regretted the decision for a minute.

Prioritizing my humanities classes over my departmentals was yet another sign that I didn’t belong with the engineers. Casually flipping through Cosmopolitan in the library during midterms week rather than actually studying the material was the next clue.

My adviser encouraged me to stick with the program during the next round of course registration. He had attended Princeton as an undergraduate and reassured me that everyone hated the lower-level math classes here. The upperclassman engineer sitting in on my advising meeting explained that she had hated all of the engineering requirements she took her freshman year and didn’t really enjoy most of the introductory departmentals she took as a sophomore. She stuck it out and was happy she had. I wondered aloud if she had lucked into finding a department she loved. She assured me she hadn’t. She knew she wanted to be a mechanical engineer. I wondered silently if perhaps she had convinced herself to love her department after it became too late to switch.

Regardless of my hesitations, I enrolled in engineering classes for the spring term. Juggling five mostly quantitative classes proved a bit too much for me, however, and my masquerade as an engineer ended promptly with the first quiz in linear algebra. I scheduled an appointment with the dean. As I sat down in his office, he asked me why I wanted to transfer out of the engineering program when I had already placed out of the prerequisite courses that usually discourage freshmen from pursuing the curriculum further.

I sat in silence. I couldn’t form one cohesive answer. I wanted to say engineering was too hard, the subjects were too quantitative to hold my interest and I was too lazy to force myself to study them. I wanted to tell him that I didn’t want to work my hardest, instead striving to be average. I wanted to know different things. I wanted to know all sorts of things that I hadn’t asked about because I felt uncomfortable.

Instead, I asked him what he studied in college. I knew before I asked the question — archaeology. I responded that the choice had worked out well for him. He warned me to think carefully before I signed the form to transfer. But I didn’t want to think. I had already spent too much time thinking about the possible consequences of dropping engineering. I signed the form and left.

I'm still unprepared to face course selection tomorrow. I don’t know what I want to major in and I haven’t heard of most of the non-technical certificate programs. I also need to fill my schedule with five classes. But I know that I’ll wake up excited at 7:30 a.m. like so many of my classmates, ready to duke it out for my spot.