5 things they don’t tell you in an Engineering College.

1. You’re from electrical? Yeah, you might just end up coding for living!
This happens more than you realize. You’re probably too busy riding the high horse of good scores and picking out core branches to study for the next four years of your Engineering, because someone told you how ‘Electrical and Communications is so in’ or ‘Mechanical is an evergreen branch’.

When the companies start coming in for placement, you’d gladly take a job as the ‘Associate Software Engineer’ at TCS, Infosys and Wipro, because they have the MNC tag attached to them and they offer the most number of jobs to about-to-graduate students every year.

Only when you start working, you’d notice how all of rigorous 4 year studying about circuits or machines or tensile strength has gone down the drain, when you are learning Java from scratch.

But, that’s okay as long as you get paid generously at the end of the month, right? Or is it?

2. You’d hate your job:
If you belong to the category in reason #1, you know why this will eventually happen, but strikingly people who actually coded for 4 years and did the same as a part of their job will also be the ones joining the ‘I hate my job clan’. Monotony is a dangerous thing, especially when you are spending days after days sitting in one of the thousand cubicles in the company, where there are probably 6 people in the company who know about you, and you know that you are easily replaceable. Not a nice realization, right?

Don’t worry, the good part it you’d still turn up at your job every Monday, regardless. For the money, for the job-security and for the experience, which brings us to our next point.

3. Once a Software Engineer, always a Software Engineer:
It is a walk in the Jurassic Park to get out of the an entry level software job you hated, and find a one that you’d actually moderately like doing. Most of us stick through the software job because, ‘I’m getting experience for 2 years and will be out in no time after that’, what they don’t understand is that the experience that you’re so happily gathering to put on your resume is actually in the software industry, so if you plan to switch to business, you are basically a beginner again, just like you were 2 years ago.

4. There are things beyond MBA, M.Tech and ‘getting placed':
I know of a friend who did her Engineering in Bioinformatics, got placed in Accenture, went to a Journalism post-grad school instead, and now works at Hindustan Times. I graduated as an Engineer in Information Technology and I write for the blog you are reading right now. There are people who start preparing for CAT or GATE, when they are in their second year, because that’s what they've been told is the right thing to do. Yes, you might end up earning more than I do, or that friend of mine does,  but you’d still hate your job, that as mentioned earlier – no one tells you in an engineering college.

5. The ‘Best Friend’ from college, will not the ‘Best Friend’ after:
Everyone is trying to win the rat race of having a better job, a better salary, a better relationship, a better life and everything else better than the next person and the next person will also include you. You will meet new people, move to different cities, slog away at your job where ‘you’re trying to get experience from’, not stay in touch as much as you promised, and before you know it, five years have passed.

Of course, some people still manage to make it through all this, but prepared for the better truth where they most likely won’t.