Was Engineering never for me or did I lose my motivation. What now?

College Majors Engineering Majors
1

Hi this is my first post on this site and I regret to post in 2016 even though I’ve read random posts since 2013,glimpsed once a year since 2009.

Alright so please hear me out as I’m lost and scattered in graduating with whatever degree and picking a career.

I have always wanted to be an Engineer since I was young mainly because its a creative field and my dad and his older brother who is a Mechcanical Engineer encouraged me.

I graduated high school one year early with 21 credit hours(7 courses) by the time I started my official first semester at the University of Houston in Fall of 2010. I was 17 and a few months and feeling shellshocked as an undeclared major planning to pursue Petroleum Engineering. In my first semester I dropped(W) Calculus 1 and Chemistry for Engineers because I was hanging out with friends most days instead of hitting the books like I did in high school and community college courses.

After 1 semester I was panicking with a 2.1 GPA from 2 courses and switched to pre-business planning to dual major in Accounting and Finance or Accounting and another major. I didn’t really want to . I was envying business major always looking like they had it easy and fun always socializing and still having a good GPA. I didn’t even enjoy my business pre-req classes but they were easy non theless. At this time I was planning to be a C.P.A and get as high a ranking I can get in oil and gas after seeing successful cousins and others make 6 figures only a few years out of college with those majors.

A few years later I don’t enjoy business courses at all and when I pass them its because of how easy it is to blow something off like that without actually having interest.

I would so love to be a Petroleum Engineer, I mean I live in Houston,Tx. I could make a lot of money too and I love the oil and gas business.

Most of my credits are towards a business degree matter of fact I have 13 classes at the most to complete a BBA(3 classes shy of senior)

This past semester I changed my career path back to Engineering by taking Calculus 1 and Intro to Engineering at community college. I was planning to transfer to UT-Tyler Houston Engineering Center.

I dropped Calculus 1 for the 3rd time in my life. I am taking intro to engineering but completely lost and most likely going to get an F because I couldn’t drop it in time before deadline though It won’t hurt my already 2.54 lackluster GPA.

Should I just give up Engineering forever? Finish a business degree first than do an engineering degree after? I would really love to have a job in oil and gas that would pay 6 figures within the first 5-10 years of employment.

I am 23 with no degree and proper job. Thank goodness I live with my parents because I feel like a loser which is a shame since I was 17 and a sophomore with high dreams. I accepted I am one of those that made good grades early on than mest up in college.

Any thoughts or things I should know or start doing? Thanks I really appreciate your read.

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Ultimately, no one but you knows yourself well enough to understand where you should go. And I have to be honest and say that the “I ruined my GPA and don’t know where to go from here” story is both common and tough to deal with. While it doesn’t close as many doors as you will be worried that it does at a rather troubled moment. But you absolutely will need to sit down and reevaluate your career path. Six years with less progress than you would like is absolutely recoverable, but you have to sit down and seriously consider how this situation happened and what you can do about it.

First of all, let me give the “calm down” talk. Yes, you do lose a few years for being at the “still haven’t finished calculus” stage in your education. Yes, you do have a low GPA that will certainly not be of help in the job search. But neither is rare nor unrecoverable. If you do good work from here on out then you can easily get to wherever you wanted to go to earlier. If you have the potential, then that matters more in the long run than your GPA number or your age at graduation.

Second of all, you have to sit down and truly understand why it is that you did not do well so far. And that’s something you have to do yourself; I only have a few paragraphs of text by which to judge you, while hopefully you understand yourself well. Sometimes it’s a matter of mental state; if you have crippling depression/anxiety then that would really hamper your progress and you should seek medical help. Sometimes it’s a matter of motivation; engineering is a difficult program, and you have to be able to force yourself to do all the work that needs to be done even if it eats into your “other” time, or else you simply will not pass. Sometimes it’s aptitude; there are plenty of people who just can’t do calculus and the like no matter how hard they try (or, more accurately, they don’t do it well enough to get through the program), despite a good work ethic and a stable mental state, and they just can’t finish the academic track. Sometimes it’s something else.

My guess for you is the motivation direction; to put it very bluntly, you sound quite wishy-washy and noncommittal about the direction you wish to take your education and career. The good news is that everything can be fixed; the bad news is that it certainly isn’t very easy to simply change how you approach everything, and buckle down and become a good student. But if you can commit to doing what has to be done then this problem can certainly be resolved.