Career Indecision

[Rockford]

If you're into engineering I say do it. Good money and you can have a band room in your house, invite your music friends over and play your tail off evenings and weekends. You can also laugh when the club owners offer you next to nothing for a nights work. A good job allows you to play on your own terms. Good luck!

[Stilettoprefer]

I am in kind of the same boat. I just got hired full time as a machinist at the shop work at and am progressing in that field very quickly. I love music and will always do stuff like building and repairing guitars/basses, but machining is a good source of income if you get really good at it and are okay with living cheap for a few years. My dad is an inspector at the same shop and makes enough to support a 4 member family in a big house and a few large animals for a year while my mom was unable to work.

Go to community college and take some random classes to see what you like. I'm taking recording classes and am loving it,but am starting to see how difficult it would be to make a steady income. Word is starting to get around that I know how to wire guitars, so I'm starting to get friends of friends taking their guitars to me for wiring work and am making some money that way.

My advice, get some education and start learning about everything that you think might possibly interest you. And always be a good employee. I went from mopping floors at the shop to running 3 machines at the same time, in under a year. That takes most people 2-3 years minimum.

Btw, I absolutely hate math classes, but doing math in the real world really isn't that bad. I have to take a ton of measurements and junk and it really isn't as hard as school made it out to be, especially with modern measuring tools and creative problem solving. And I never made it past algebra 2 in school (lowest level math at most colleges,minimal for graduation in high school)

[graver555]

First thank you for all of your responses.
I think this is what I needed to get back on track instead of from my parents all the time. Im pretty sure Im going to go into chem or material engineering.

Anyone from either of those fields have an idea on the math? I can do basic math easy breasy but some of this higher level stuff is too much theory and not enough "realness?" for me to grasp well.

[UncleFluffy]

Originally Posted by graver555

Anyone from either of those fields have an idea on the math? I can do basic math easy breasy but some of this higher level stuff is too much theory and not enough "realness?" for me to grasp well.

Learning math is really just about beating your head against a brick wall until it falls down. Do the exercises, do some more, eventually the concept clicks. Repeat. You don't need to be a genius, you just need to be stubborn.

[fdeck]

Originally Posted by UncleFluffy

Learning math is really just about beating your head against a brick wall until it falls down. Do the exercises, do some more, eventually the concept clicks. Repeat. You don't need to be a genius, you just need to be stubborn.

The same can be said of learning any subject that you hate.

[UncleFluffy]

Originally Posted by fdeck

The same can be said of learning any subject that you hate.

Yes and no. Math - or at least using it - is mainly pattern matching. My experience was that progress was far less smooth than for other subjects ... nothing for a while, then a big discontinuity when a new pattern clicks inside your head. The stubbornness is necessary for any subject, but the "beating your head against a wall that eventually falls down" part is pretty math-specific and if you don't expect it can be very dispiriting. (For me at least. YMMV. Standard disclaimers apply.)

[fdeck]

Originally Posted by UncleFluffy

Yes and no. Math - or at least using it - is mainly pattern matching. My experience was that progress was far less smooth than for other subjects ... nothing for a while, then a big discontinuity when a new pattern clicks inside your head. The stubbornness is necessary for any subject, but the "beating your head against a wall that eventually falls down" part is pretty math-specific and if you don't expect it can be very dispiriting. (For me at least. YMMV. Standard disclaimers apply.)

There's also a negative side to it.

Actually, pattern matching does a pretty good job of describing school math, but not how math is used in real life. That's a shortcoming of how math is taught, in my view. I use math regularly in my day job, for instance to develop algorithms.

At the same time, a lot of creative fields have a pattern matching aspect. How about music? Consider the time we spend internalizing scales, chords, etc., so we can recognize them while we are playing.

Algebraic manipulation pervades almost all of math, even when we let computers do it nowadays. It's something that has to become instinctive, like knowing your way around the fretboard. Otherwise it will be a perpetual struggle. And nobody really knows how to teach algebraic manipulation except by letting you practice it a lot.