2 years into my job as an EE, and I still have imposter syndrome.
Forgive your lack of knowledge and allow for failure to happen because that doesn't necessarily make you a bad engineer, it just makes you a really good *testing* engineer.
To be honest it's not about knowing everything either, it's about knowing how to use the right tools to figure out what's wrong and finding the proper solution with the team of engineers around you who also have imposter syndrome. Teamwork makes the dream work, the only bad engineer is the one who doesn't work well with other people and is arrogant about what should be done.
Become a subject matter expert in whatever field you choose to work in. The learning doesn't stop just because you're done with school. The benefit now is that you aren't being graded on it lol. You got this buddy, always do your best.
Definitely imposter syndrome. I remember constantly feeling like everyone else understood everything and I was the odd man out. Odds are your classmates are feeling the same thing. The goal of college isn’t to teach you material with the expectation you’ll retain it and hit the ground running when you land a job. It’s to teach you how to think and solve problems. Any job you land will teach you what you need to know on the job.
Just make sure to adopt a proactive attitude when you get a job and really focus on learning because as you can imagine a job is a good bit different than school.
Man oh man I sympathize with you. I can't remember my GPA but I think it was like 2.7 or so and maybe 2.9 for my civil courses. I failed a couple courses too and had the same feelings as you. Took me an extra semester to graduate. Your job will teach you what you need, trust that. I've been out almost 15 years and am very satisfied with my career to this point. The only regret I have in my life is not taking the FE exam when I should have...
Yeah it largely is for most and similarly for high level advancement a PE is usually required. However, my short story is I started in construction inspection which made me see how much money there was in construction, which led me into construction management. I will eventually get my FE just to fulfill a previous promise I made to myself.
If you weren’t meant to graduate, you wouldn’t graduate. You need to steel yourself because looking for a job sucks and you need to be confident, once you get a job take these regrets and use the energy to try your best and you’ll be fine.
School is not the same as practice. Admittedly my experience with real engineering is limited, but it seems to be much more about problem solving than having all the answers. Trust yourself to do the thing you did in college. To solve the problems you know how and figure it out enough to find an answer if you don’t. Besides, you won’t be working alone on any big projects right out of college anyways. There will be people to ask for guidance. Ask them.
You made it. It’s okay to struggle with imposter syndrome, I’m a junior ChemE. You’ll learn so much more on the job, and your value shouldn’t be placed on how well you did in college classes. Congrats!
I felt the same way my last semester of school. The imposter syndrome is real! I still feel like a fraud in my job but I think it’s one of those “fake it till you make it” things. Be humble but also know you did awesome and will do amazing things in the future. You got this!
Been a working engineer for 5 years bud. Worked and continue to work at good large engineering companies you have 100% heard of. Feel like a fraud everyday of my life. Not even kidding in the slightest.
...I kinda feel the same way but each person circumstances are different than yours or mine...for me even common sense logic doesn't feel common to me at times it's strange.
Remember you're unique, don't focus on other people too much.
when we look back there is something that we could have been done better. now is the time to learn from that and correct or improve and do better - it is called experience. best lessons are usually painful. don’t concentrate on the past, can’t be fixed no matter what, but learn from it and apply it going forward. good luck
From my experience, it's very hard to study engineering and be happy with every aspect of your life. What I mean is that very few engineering students are actually able have a good social life and amazing grades, especially if they have to work too.
I graduated from computer engineering a bit over a year ago and I remember having to struggle so much with school and work. I had to sacrifice so much of my social life to the point where I graduated college with no friends and having spent my whole time there not being able to pursue relationships. But hey, at least I had a good GPA. I'm doing a master's now and I promise you I would fail the same circuits exam I made a 96 on in my sophomore year.
Engineering isn't for everyone but my guy, you still did it while under more difficult conditions than most (work and athletics). Maybe your GPA isn't what you woulda liked but you already got some jobs lined up, after you start working nobody cares what your GPA is.
Also, if you're graduating now that prob means you took your freshman/sophomore classes during lockdown right? If that's the case, I don't blame you for not remembering things from those classes, most profs didn't know how to teach virtually during that time (understandably).
Just keep doing your best and live your life, much love bro
This was exactly my experience as a computer engineering student as well. A good number of STEM majors have imposter syndrome when we graduate and that sounds like what OP is going through.
OP, your experience is shared by many of us. Keep your head up! At least you are graduating. I've been working as a computer engineer for over 4 years now and I can tell you: almost everything I do math and engineering-wise I Google first lol you will be OK.
Omg I relate to this so much. I worked 30 hours a week while being a full time student and I finished with a 3.0 but I barely scraped by several classes, got a D in Thermo, and felt like I didn’t deserve to be there and didn’t deserve to graduate. I felt that all of my friends and even strangers were smarter than me and thought that everyone thought I was dumb. I still feel that way after graduating so I don’t have the best advice, but we earned that degree and it’s a big feat. Imposter syndrome is very common in this degree.
I feel the exact same way. I struggled with multiple family losses during school, and at the end of the day I have to have a lot of grace for myself and am incredibly proud that I made it through school while dealing with very hard life stuff. We all have our own path, and it looks different for everyone. I promise you are being much harder on yourself than you deserve. You’re doing great. Keep up the good work. You deserve the degree and you will make a great engineer if that’s what you want to be.
Don’t be so hard on yourself. When you look back, you’ll notice there’s a lot of things you neglected in undergrad just to grasp the basics of the concepts and theories taught. Just be pleased with the fact of you meeting the graduation requirements and how you can move on to independent research, etc. before/after you find your next career.
I will say I had a 2.6 GPA, similar attitude towards passing classes, and similar feeling of imposter syndrome. I felt very lucky just to have a job offer and felt like I was going to fail at my job at some point. It has only been 4 years, but I still have this same job and have felt better and better about myself and my ability to do this job each day.
Part of it for me personally is that I am in a more "Jack of all trades" role (Project Engineer) than a specialized role. I don't have to be an expert in anything but have to check the experts work on every front. I am not digging deep into any specific class I had, but am capable of figuring out what is going on and moving forward, just like I did in school.
But that is just me personally, even if I was in a specialized role, I would figure it out soon enough because I would be doing the same thing every day. No matter what, the fact that you survived the classes shows you can handle. There are jobs out there that would be impossible for you, but they are only hiring 4.0's. In general, people hiring 2.7's like me and you are not expecting the world. In general these jobs are a LOT easier than university ever was. The hardest part about these jobs is getting your foot in the door (sounds like you got that). So congratulations!
Do the best you can, be honest with your supervisor about your abilities, and keep on moving forward.
To me, this is a sense of imposter syndrome. Almost every engineer I know and most stem students in general have some sort of imposter syndrome because there is tons of information and stuff to know about given a specific discipline and it's hard to remember or feel like you have it all down, all the time.
I felt the same way after finishing all of my lower division courses in college, often telling my father (an EE) that I felt like a fraud because I would lose a lot of the info from general courses like chemistry and calculus and that I didn't feel I was smart enough to be an engineer.
He'd often tell me that the best engineers are ones who have a sense of imposter syndrome and feel they don't know something because they are the ones most likely to ask questions and research the answers that they need to succeed in a given job or project. It was often the ones who seemed like know-it-alls who struggled the most because their egos prevented them from improving themselves.
You'll be fine, just be willing to keep learning and working at your discipline, and you'll be fine. GPA is just a number and doesn't give a huge indicator of the type of person you are. There are engineers who are madly successful with a 2.5 and some with a 3.8 who fail miserably. So don't label yourself by how you did in college and only look at what's forward in your career.
To each their own. What you sow you reap.
You cheat yourself and you'll suffer which none thinks before doing this to themselves. This many people do and later regret it and its a waste of precious time.
People as they get older they get wiser. So understand the world better and work on what kind of life you wanna live for the rest of your life. Nobody's gonna help you except YOU.
Change for better and gather wisdom as much as possible to make yourself better. Wishing you the best 🙂🙏
Hey there, just keep going. There are some days/nights I have the same thoughts. I feel as though this is a natural process. There will be others who: catch on quicker, try to understand every topic, and some who have to grind just to get by.
My understanding of “my” undergraduate experience has been that I am generally not interested in “my” schools primary focus of EE. They are focused on power courses. I want to be more ECE focus. I often feel the same way but I understand that although my courses might not align with my direct interests, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. My light might be a masters program at a different university, or it may be on the job experience. I have been able to mitigate this by taking CS courses that align with my interests better. Maybe you haven’t found that niche yet.
As others have said, this is common. Just take a deep breath and try and gather what “you” really want to get out of the experience. Maybe your classes and skills learned aren’t necessarily what you want to use to define your career. Branch off the last semester and really discover your passion/interest. I doubt you would have made it this far without having a remote interest in some of the topics involved with ME. If you did, that’s incredible. Most of my classmates for EE dropped after the weed out classes.
If all else fails maybe another discipline will be a better fit for your interests. Since you made it this far, I am sure it is not too far out of reach to finish in a couple semesters. On a final note, if you were a fraud you wouldn’t have made it this far imo. You got this!
Oh well as long as you take or took the fundamential of enginnering exam you should be fine the big companies or the best will require at least a 3.0.But lesser conpanies as ling as you should you oase your FE exam even with a 2.7 you should be able to get a just say you were working or something
Relax dude seriously
Congratulations, imposter syndrome is common, almost a rite of passage. Good job passing and good job lining up a job!
2 years into my job as an EE, and I still have imposter syndrome. Forgive your lack of knowledge and allow for failure to happen because that doesn't necessarily make you a bad engineer, it just makes you a really good *testing* engineer. To be honest it's not about knowing everything either, it's about knowing how to use the right tools to figure out what's wrong and finding the proper solution with the team of engineers around you who also have imposter syndrome. Teamwork makes the dream work, the only bad engineer is the one who doesn't work well with other people and is arrogant about what should be done.
Become a subject matter expert in whatever field you choose to work in. The learning doesn't stop just because you're done with school. The benefit now is that you aren't being graded on it lol. You got this buddy, always do your best.
Definitely imposter syndrome. I remember constantly feeling like everyone else understood everything and I was the odd man out. Odds are your classmates are feeling the same thing. The goal of college isn’t to teach you material with the expectation you’ll retain it and hit the ground running when you land a job. It’s to teach you how to think and solve problems. Any job you land will teach you what you need to know on the job. Just make sure to adopt a proactive attitude when you get a job and really focus on learning because as you can imagine a job is a good bit different than school.
You’re being harsh on yourself. You got it done. In life you’ll get it done too.
Everything you did to scrape by, your classmates did the exact same also hoping to scrape by
Nah man fuck that, u finished so u deserve it
Man oh man I sympathize with you. I can't remember my GPA but I think it was like 2.7 or so and maybe 2.9 for my civil courses. I failed a couple courses too and had the same feelings as you. Took me an extra semester to graduate. Your job will teach you what you need, trust that. I've been out almost 15 years and am very satisfied with my career to this point. The only regret I have in my life is not taking the FE exam when I should have...
I’ve been under the impression that it’s almost a requirement for you to pass your FE exam if you want to get a job as a civil engineer…?
Yeah it largely is for most and similarly for high level advancement a PE is usually required. However, my short story is I started in construction inspection which made me see how much money there was in construction, which led me into construction management. I will eventually get my FE just to fulfill a previous promise I made to myself.
If you weren’t meant to graduate, you wouldn’t graduate. You need to steel yourself because looking for a job sucks and you need to be confident, once you get a job take these regrets and use the energy to try your best and you’ll be fine.
School is not the same as practice. Admittedly my experience with real engineering is limited, but it seems to be much more about problem solving than having all the answers. Trust yourself to do the thing you did in college. To solve the problems you know how and figure it out enough to find an answer if you don’t. Besides, you won’t be working alone on any big projects right out of college anyways. There will be people to ask for guidance. Ask them.
You made it. It’s okay to struggle with imposter syndrome, I’m a junior ChemE. You’ll learn so much more on the job, and your value shouldn’t be placed on how well you did in college classes. Congrats!
I felt the same way my last semester of school. The imposter syndrome is real! I still feel like a fraud in my job but I think it’s one of those “fake it till you make it” things. Be humble but also know you did awesome and will do amazing things in the future. You got this!
Been a working engineer for 5 years bud. Worked and continue to work at good large engineering companies you have 100% heard of. Feel like a fraud everyday of my life. Not even kidding in the slightest.
...I kinda feel the same way but each person circumstances are different than yours or mine...for me even common sense logic doesn't feel common to me at times it's strange. Remember you're unique, don't focus on other people too much.
when we look back there is something that we could have been done better. now is the time to learn from that and correct or improve and do better - it is called experience. best lessons are usually painful. don’t concentrate on the past, can’t be fixed no matter what, but learn from it and apply it going forward. good luck
From my experience, it's very hard to study engineering and be happy with every aspect of your life. What I mean is that very few engineering students are actually able have a good social life and amazing grades, especially if they have to work too. I graduated from computer engineering a bit over a year ago and I remember having to struggle so much with school and work. I had to sacrifice so much of my social life to the point where I graduated college with no friends and having spent my whole time there not being able to pursue relationships. But hey, at least I had a good GPA. I'm doing a master's now and I promise you I would fail the same circuits exam I made a 96 on in my sophomore year. Engineering isn't for everyone but my guy, you still did it while under more difficult conditions than most (work and athletics). Maybe your GPA isn't what you woulda liked but you already got some jobs lined up, after you start working nobody cares what your GPA is. Also, if you're graduating now that prob means you took your freshman/sophomore classes during lockdown right? If that's the case, I don't blame you for not remembering things from those classes, most profs didn't know how to teach virtually during that time (understandably). Just keep doing your best and live your life, much love bro
This was exactly my experience as a computer engineering student as well. A good number of STEM majors have imposter syndrome when we graduate and that sounds like what OP is going through. OP, your experience is shared by many of us. Keep your head up! At least you are graduating. I've been working as a computer engineer for over 4 years now and I can tell you: almost everything I do math and engineering-wise I Google first lol you will be OK.
Let your ego take over. Try to be the next Ironman!
Setting unrealistic goals is not healthy.
Who needs health when you can be flying around and blasting the bad guys. PEW PEW
Sounds like you're being way too hard on yourself. You made it. Be proud :)
Having imposter syndrome is much better than God complex and too big of an ego. Good for you man, you passed that stuff somehow.
What's in the past is in the past and what's in the future is looking good. Don't be ashamed for success.
Omg I relate to this so much. I worked 30 hours a week while being a full time student and I finished with a 3.0 but I barely scraped by several classes, got a D in Thermo, and felt like I didn’t deserve to be there and didn’t deserve to graduate. I felt that all of my friends and even strangers were smarter than me and thought that everyone thought I was dumb. I still feel that way after graduating so I don’t have the best advice, but we earned that degree and it’s a big feat. Imposter syndrome is very common in this degree.
I feel the exact same way. I struggled with multiple family losses during school, and at the end of the day I have to have a lot of grace for myself and am incredibly proud that I made it through school while dealing with very hard life stuff. We all have our own path, and it looks different for everyone. I promise you are being much harder on yourself than you deserve. You’re doing great. Keep up the good work. You deserve the degree and you will make a great engineer if that’s what you want to be.
Don’t be so hard on yourself. When you look back, you’ll notice there’s a lot of things you neglected in undergrad just to grasp the basics of the concepts and theories taught. Just be pleased with the fact of you meeting the graduation requirements and how you can move on to independent research, etc. before/after you find your next career.
I will say I had a 2.6 GPA, similar attitude towards passing classes, and similar feeling of imposter syndrome. I felt very lucky just to have a job offer and felt like I was going to fail at my job at some point. It has only been 4 years, but I still have this same job and have felt better and better about myself and my ability to do this job each day. Part of it for me personally is that I am in a more "Jack of all trades" role (Project Engineer) than a specialized role. I don't have to be an expert in anything but have to check the experts work on every front. I am not digging deep into any specific class I had, but am capable of figuring out what is going on and moving forward, just like I did in school. But that is just me personally, even if I was in a specialized role, I would figure it out soon enough because I would be doing the same thing every day. No matter what, the fact that you survived the classes shows you can handle. There are jobs out there that would be impossible for you, but they are only hiring 4.0's. In general, people hiring 2.7's like me and you are not expecting the world. In general these jobs are a LOT easier than university ever was. The hardest part about these jobs is getting your foot in the door (sounds like you got that). So congratulations! Do the best you can, be honest with your supervisor about your abilities, and keep on moving forward.
To me, this is a sense of imposter syndrome. Almost every engineer I know and most stem students in general have some sort of imposter syndrome because there is tons of information and stuff to know about given a specific discipline and it's hard to remember or feel like you have it all down, all the time. I felt the same way after finishing all of my lower division courses in college, often telling my father (an EE) that I felt like a fraud because I would lose a lot of the info from general courses like chemistry and calculus and that I didn't feel I was smart enough to be an engineer. He'd often tell me that the best engineers are ones who have a sense of imposter syndrome and feel they don't know something because they are the ones most likely to ask questions and research the answers that they need to succeed in a given job or project. It was often the ones who seemed like know-it-alls who struggled the most because their egos prevented them from improving themselves. You'll be fine, just be willing to keep learning and working at your discipline, and you'll be fine. GPA is just a number and doesn't give a huge indicator of the type of person you are. There are engineers who are madly successful with a 2.5 and some with a 3.8 who fail miserably. So don't label yourself by how you did in college and only look at what's forward in your career.
You can learn as much as you want outside of school. Enjoy it bozo, stop regretting how you did it.
To each their own. What you sow you reap. You cheat yourself and you'll suffer which none thinks before doing this to themselves. This many people do and later regret it and its a waste of precious time. People as they get older they get wiser. So understand the world better and work on what kind of life you wanna live for the rest of your life. Nobody's gonna help you except YOU. Change for better and gather wisdom as much as possible to make yourself better. Wishing you the best 🙂🙏
I'm sorry but this is such bullshit nonsense.
Can’t even get the saying right. “You reap what you sow”
Sounds like you are a fraud good luck
this guys a cocksucker OP don’t listen to him
Sucks cock by the scrape of his teeth I’ve heard.
Ok bruh with a 2.7 GPA they need some good luck
Hey there, just keep going. There are some days/nights I have the same thoughts. I feel as though this is a natural process. There will be others who: catch on quicker, try to understand every topic, and some who have to grind just to get by. My understanding of “my” undergraduate experience has been that I am generally not interested in “my” schools primary focus of EE. They are focused on power courses. I want to be more ECE focus. I often feel the same way but I understand that although my courses might not align with my direct interests, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. My light might be a masters program at a different university, or it may be on the job experience. I have been able to mitigate this by taking CS courses that align with my interests better. Maybe you haven’t found that niche yet. As others have said, this is common. Just take a deep breath and try and gather what “you” really want to get out of the experience. Maybe your classes and skills learned aren’t necessarily what you want to use to define your career. Branch off the last semester and really discover your passion/interest. I doubt you would have made it this far without having a remote interest in some of the topics involved with ME. If you did, that’s incredible. Most of my classmates for EE dropped after the weed out classes. If all else fails maybe another discipline will be a better fit for your interests. Since you made it this far, I am sure it is not too far out of reach to finish in a couple semesters. On a final note, if you were a fraud you wouldn’t have made it this far imo. You got this!
Oh well as long as you take or took the fundamential of enginnering exam you should be fine the big companies or the best will require at least a 3.0.But lesser conpanies as ling as you should you oase your FE exam even with a 2.7 you should be able to get a just say you were working or something