Which Career Field Should You Choose?

Well this is quite a common question amongst various students trying to navigate their way though schools, colleges and universities. How does one know if a particular career path or field of work is right for them?

At the end of the day, it's a question that no one can answer for you other than yourself. However, I can share my experience and journey in choosing my career path which may help others approach this question from a perspective of understanding ourselves better.

I first started pondering this question as a teenager in high school. My first motivation was to choose a career path that would earn me the highest income which I figured, via some internet searches, would be either a heart or brain surgeon in those times. My logic was "If I'm going to put my efforts into something, it better be something that earns me a lot of money". And with that I was all set to start my journey towards becoming a doctor in the medical field!

I took several advanced placement (AP) courses in high school with AP Biology being one of them. This was my first step serving as an introduction to the field of medicine. Although I performed extremely well in that course, I realized I didn't have the passion for this field to carry me through over a decade of schooling in pursuing a career in this field. It involved a lot of memorization of terms and information which, although fascinating at times, could not ignite my curiosity beyond a certain point. Perhaps it was my dislike for all the memorization I performed for the course material. Now I found myself at a crossroad where I had to choose to focus on another field instead. It was this time which required me to look deeper and ask higher quality questions of myself for what I wanted to pursue in life. This is when I started asking myself, what am I scared of? What am I thrilled by? What makes me feel accomplished and rewarded? What do I emotionally respond to?

Luckily I was performing extremely well in all my other AP courses in high school as well including math/Calculus, Physics, Chemistry, History, Geography etc. Yes, I was quite a student, but this really helped open up a lot of options for me to look into for a future career path. I realized that I was particularly good at math and science and those fields have a lot of potential for growth. I started paying closer attention to those subjects and one of them in particular caught my attention: AP Physics C. This was the one subject that I was actually scared of. I was scared of the exams for this course as it offered some very challenging subjects including electricity and magnetism. However, I also took note of the fact that I felt very accomplished and rewarded when I did well in the exams for this course and was able to grasp those challenging subjects. Recognizing which challenges gave me a sense of achievement and were more rewarding than others to overcome was an important part of shaping my focus towards the engineering field.

In addition to understanding what drives my curiosity, excitement and gives me a sense of awe, I wanted to approach the question from a practical aspect as well. I started looking for people who had already walked the path in the field of engineering. In particular, I was interested in spacecraft for their unique design and utility which seemed just out of this world. Therefore, I had made up my mind that I would pursue Aerospace Engineering in university so I could build spacecraft. Also, my sister was already pursuing this field which further gave me a path to follow and look up to for guidance in this field. However, the more I looked into subjects taught in the Aerospace Engineering curriculum, I found myself not very excited to pursue them as they seemed a bit more theoretical and not as practical and hands-on as I was expecting. Again, I found myself at a crossroad not knowing which major to pick in engineering.

While I was still trying to figure out which major to pick in engineering, I came to know one of my friend's grandfather had worked his entire life in the aerospace industry and I got an opportunity to speak with him. In my 20 minute conversation with him, he mentioned something which hit the nail on my head. He said "There are more Electrical and Mechanical engineers working in the Aerospace industry that build spacecraft than Aerospace engineers!". This made me realize that not only could I pursue working on spacecraft with Electrical engineering, but a variety of different industries due to the vast applications of this field. Electrical engineering allowed me to study subjects which frequently involve building things we can interact with while offering the challenge of understanding difficult concepts such as electricity and magnetism.

With this in mind, I chose to study Electrical engineering and after 4.5 years, I graduated with both Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Electrical engineering from the University of Colorado, Boulder with summa cum laude distinction.

Which activities did I prioritize throughout college? How did I perform well in my courses while working throughout college? How did I manage to get multiple job offers upon graduation? What helped me pick my first job after graduation? I'll answer some of these questions in my future posts, stay tuned!