Engineering freshman. Looking for some advice about my education/career direction

Hey SF,

I am feeling a little lost, and hoping you can help my first a direction. As a preface to this long-winded post, please forgive any error in grammar or structure. Although I generally consider myself a fairly solid writer, I haven't slept in 24 hours, hurray for calculus midterms!

I am currently enrolled in first year Computer Engineering.

I sort of fell into engineering. I had always been strong in the maths and sciences, and after watching older friends graduate with arts degrees only to find themselves working at Starbucks, it seemed like a solid choice. I don't really love the program, but I don't mind it.

I am now three quarters of the way through my first year, and am starting to question my chosen path.

I will come straight out and say that although I can keep up with my peers and my work-load, I am certainly not the top of my class academically. However, where most of my anti-social engineering peers totally fall apart, I hit my stride.

I think my social skills are substantially stronger then most other students in my classes. I can speak confidently in front of a group, I can sell an idea or product, and people generally seem to like me. In high school, I would take a stop to talk to my friends parents about politics, or the current state of the Eurozone instead of heading straight to the scheduled video game session.

I have already used these skills to line up an internship with an engineering firm this summer, frankly ahead of students much more qualified than me.

I have often though I would fit in well in something like economics or law.



Anyways, here are my options as I see them:

a) I push through the next 3 (or maybe 4) years, and finish my engineering degree. Realistically, my marks will probably be pretty mediocre. Will my personal soft skills make up for my lack of technical ability? Does the qualification and credibility of an engineering ring mean that much in the real world? Will less then perfect marks have a huge impact on my marketability as an employee?



b) I transfer to something like commerce or economics. My marks would probably be more solid, although I suspect still not stellar. This seems like it would line me up with a more likely career, but I worry the softer degree will stand out less.



c) Any other ideas?




I have been thinking about this for a while, but would love to get some advice from the pros, I know there are a number of fairly senior people on SF from all sorts of fields, hopefully they can help shed some light on where I should aim.


Thanks so much guys,
-Ben



EDIT:

After skimming a few other threads in this forum I figured I should add.

- I have a handful of fairly strong connections in the worlds of Canadian finance, law, and engineering through my family.

- I am in the lucky position where I can spend some time figuring out what I want to do, and I don't have to stress about piling up student debt.
Edited by Bentech - 2/19/12 at 7:47pm

Thanks for the reply.

I wanted to clarify that I didn't mean to imply that all engineers lacked social skills, simply that I felt mine were stronger then most of my peers. My main question was mostly about weather those skills would compensate for lower grades, and I think I have found my answering.

Thanks again,

Thanks for the reply.

Just to clarify, if the tone of the first post came off as a little strange, I was in a slight crisis mode at the time of writing it.

In regards to my inability to score top marks. I was diagnosed with ADD ~9 months ago. I have been meeting frequently with a series of doctors in an effort to come up with a working solution to my issues, but have so far been unable to come up with anything solid. My strength seem to come in the form of intuition, or things that I pick up after periods of unsought exposure. I fall apart when it comes to things that require long periods of focused study. I am trying to deal with this situation as aggressively as possible, I wish this had been dealt with yesterday.


But I digress, that is not the point of this thread. The point was more so to ask those in positions of experience how valuable an engineering degree would be for someone who chooses not to peruse a hard engineering career. Likewise, Is a degree in something like poli-sci as useless as everyone seems to joke it is?


Thanks again for the replies,
Edited by Bentech - 2/15/12 at 5:03pm

Thanks for the reply and the recommendation on the certifications, I would have never realized the value of those.

This sounds a lot like my current plan. Stick through engineering in order to pick up the credibility and technical foundation.

When you decided to make the jump to the management side of things, was the transition smooth? Would I feel unqualified compared to colleague with business degrees? I am looking at picking up a management minor, but the idea of adding an even more heavy course load would be hard to sell to myself.




Thanks for the reply,

As per my post above, I am leaning more and more towards powering through engineering and trying to move to the management side of things after a few years of workplace experience.

I am really seeing the value in a deep fundamental knowledge of the concepts, not just enough short-term memorization to get by the exam. I found myself in the unsettling position of struggling to remember some of the basic from Calc I earlier this week. Clearly a more knowledge-based approach is called for in the future!

As per your recommendation of switching to a more broad field of study, I am planning on transferring to electrical next year, I'm not that much of a software guy anyways.