If you google ‘Bachelor of Engineering’, you’ll be guided to a plethora of definitions,but the most simplest of it says that,”it is an undergraduate academic degree awarded to a student after 3 to 5 years of studying engineering at a university or college.”.But in India it means a little more than the provided definiton.Here an engineering degree is the pass to the proverbial land of ‘Settlement’. To get a good job & to settle , is the Great Indian Dream.And somehow they end up thinking engineering will help them reach there .
The term ‘engineering’ has been moulded in to different casts at different points of our life, during the school life, it was the only way to go if , you loved maths(who the hell did?) Or you were bad in differentiating Cerebrum from Cerebellum.If you do end up in the former category,you were then hoarded into various coachings ,study groups & tuitions who guaranteed you success if you hand them the money.And when the time came, when you actually registered for a btech degree ,you entered the college with hopes & dreams for the best time of your life .But Right there at the gate of your class room ,every idea which Bollywood/Hollywood fed you since childhood about how a college should be, died! Yep! It isn’t ‘Beta House’ my boy & yes you wouldn’t be the ‘Stiff-mister’.
I believe every engineering college should hang a board on its entrance with “Welcome to the real world Freshers,here air resistance is not taken as zero!” written on it. The reason I’m giving stress on the college is because , this here is the game changer, this defines whether you are an IITian,NITian or from some private institution.If you are from one of the former two institutions ,then life is a little bit more easy for you, but if you are one from the latter,hmmm! Do you know your prayers?
Time also plays an important factor in engineering, in here we deal in ‘semesters’ or ‘sems’ as we like to call it! Every sem is a HOPE, a hope that it’ll be better than the previous one, even the freshers comes with the belief that they will invent something revolutionary during their time in college.But every sem turns out to be a merry go round of unfinished assignments,hundreds of labs ,peer pressure to bunk , professor’s pressure to not to bunk, at this point of time even waking up early in the morning is an achievement to you & after all this if you actually think of doing something related to engineering ,you get attacked by the mid sem or end sem exams! Eventually this cycle some how kills the soul of the student, who entered the college with a dream to achieve something ,maybe to be something ! He/she then goes through a metamorphosis which further adds the idea that Money & only money is the key to a well settled life . And Eventually this makes them go astray,now their only aim is to get a job no Matter what, they do end up having a job & slowly realise that their work isn’t what they dreamed of, it’s hectic,their lives have become monotonous ,dreams materialistic & they feel it is too late now to do anything.
Some of you might say ” atleast it pays your bills!” I agree & i won’t bullshit that “Money isn’t everything“, actually it is. But the only thing i want you to realise is, that just imagine will you be ever happy with being monotonous & materialistic? Because i know for a fact that happiness is everything! No Matter what you do, how you do, where you do, at the end of the day you have a right to feel contended, feel happy of what you do!All in all feel settled!
So lastly i wanna say is that an engineering gives you more than just a degree, it gives you memories of your everythings first, the first day, the first ragging,the first love, the first backlog , it’ll teach you how to survive on mess’s food, it’ll teach you about the importance of all nighters during exams, about brotherhood & solidarity in standing up for friends during fights & you’ll know more about cost cutting while eating maggi during the end of the months! In the end Somehow all the science and math in this world will end up making a child not an engineer but an adult.So it’s upto you if you wanna join engineering or not but where ever you go whatever you do. All you got to do is wear your dreams like a crown & fight to be the king!
Curious Cloud 