Many of you may know that I have not been the happiest since moving to Singapore. Although I love my friends and all of the amazing traveling that I get to do here, I’ve found that maybe engineering just isn’t for me. It’s not that I don’t think that I’m good at my job, it’s that when I finally took the time to think about why I wanted to be an engineer in the first place, I realized that I wanted to get my PhD in engineering so that I could be a professor. I wanted the highest educational qualification as an engineer so that I could teach. Thinking back, I never had the idea that I wanted to be an engineer as a profession. I wanted to be an engineering professor. I wanted to educate others.
Even though I wanted to teach, I had always written off teaching middle and high school because I thought it would be awful. Teenagers are known for being the worst in a lot of ways. This summer, however, I got the change to teach middle school. That’s the age of terror. Girls taller than guys, hormones going completely nuts, half in puberty, half still little kids, … but turns out that I loved teaching middle school. Really. These kids were amazing. They were brilliant and caring and, yes, completely insane sometimes but I absolutely loved working with them. When I got to Singapore and began working as an engineer the comparison between the teaching and engineering was a big contributor to my unhappiness with my job. I wanted to teach. I like engineering as a hobby. I love making things. But I think what I want to do with my life is to teach.
I was distraught when I realized that I didn’t like my job. This was my dream job! Advanced upper limb neural prosthetics? I had literally dreamed of working in this field since I was in middle school. I hadn’t, however, ever thought of what I would actually do in this field. Just something. Something amazing. I had never considered what it would be like to work on a project like this day to day. It turns out, I really don’t like the day to day work of an engineer. At all. I feel like I definitely went through an identity crisis when I realized that I didn’t want to be an engineer, that my dream job was making me miserable, but I think I’ve started to find myself again. One thing that was missing though, was a new dream. Something to push me forward, something to strive for. So here it is.
I want to teach engineer, physics, science, and/or math to middle and high school students. I want to be a positive (female) role model for a generation of budding scientists. I want to work at schools around the world. I want to live a few years in a bunch of different countries and truly experience this amazing planet we have. Although I could do this alone, I think I would really love to have a partner who can come with me and make the journey a bit less lonely. So this is my dream. I’m writing it down here so that I am accountable to my friends and family and so that I can look back on this myself and remember where I want to go when I lose my way. Happy Sunday Everyone!