It's hard to go to engineering school and it's also hard to be poor.

It's hard to go to engineering school and it's also hard to be poor. It's officially one year post-grad since I've graduated. I graduated with a bachelors in environmental engineering and here are my thoughts about it. A year later, I still think that my degree was worth it. I wouldn't have traded my experience for anything else. I applied to attend grad school, I applied for a civil engineering master's degree with a focus on water resources. I love being an academic weapon. I genuinely love being in school. So, was it hard? Do I actually use all of the math? Sometimes I do, especially stuff that I learned in fluids and hydraulics. I use that in my day-to-day because that's literally what my job pertains to. Calculus, physics. I don't really use that stuff. Math. Physics. The only reason I passed physics 2 is because my final was to do a Rupe Goldberg project and I could figure that out. A lot of people ask me if you have to be good at it. You just have to learn your professors and learn how they test and learn how to study. If you don't want to study, then engineering is not for you. You have to memorize things, you have to memorize how to problem solve. That is literally what the degree is. If you're willing to work hard, I say 100% go for it. It's something I did the other day, growing up with not as much money, school was hard. I didn't want to have to worry about things. What I wanted and having to have someone else reasons us why I went for engineering and then I ended up falling in love with it. I enjoy doing hard things. It was never an issue for me to be an engineer. I was crying and upset and it was super super hard but I knew that the payoff was going to be worth more than the four years that I put into it. My industry, not working in consulting, people ask, what environmental engineers do? The majority of engineers sit at a computer all day and help solve problems and that way. And there are a lot of engineers who have to go out into the field, but even engineers, they work in the office, they work on the computer. So, please don't come for me. There are so many different jobs. You could be like me working for a software that's utilized by civil and environmental engineers. You could be a water/wastewater engineer, environmental compliance engineer, site remediation engineer, pollution engineer. Some of my friends are engineers that are working in the civil sector, so they do like geotechnical designing stuff that more pertains to wastewater or transportation or drainage. You can kind of twist and turn the degree to do what you personally want to do. Majority of engineer jobs have that flexibility to where you can work from home if you need to work from home. Depends on the company that you're working for. A lot of people are really nervous about what's to come post-grad. I promise you it is going to be so much better than what you're doing in school because you don't have to do homework every day. If there's any advice I can give to new engineers who are super nervous as an intern, and even as interns, we know and understand that you guys are coming in with base knowledge. You know the engineering principles, you know how to problem solve. What you do at each job is gonna be different. Expecting absolutely so be asking questions, you're working on every project, you're saying yes to a lot of things. Learning as much as you can. You want to be a sponge when it comes to your first year in engineering. That's all I can say because that's all I've gotten to. Be involved. Talk to the people, talk to the coworkers, wonder what everybody's doing. Especially a woman, a black woman in stem is gonna be difficult and you have to work two times as hard to prove yourself. That's just how life is. Okay? I can do it. I know that every single person that's watching this video can do it. Don't get discouraged. Keep going. I'm a year post-grad and I tell you right now, keep going. Do that degree. I failed two classes. I didn't pass two classes in my college career. It is normal to fail. You just have to get yourself back up and know I'm gonna make great money and I'm gonna have way better life work balance after this. It's okay to fail.