no i will not "personalize" my "blog"

I am a larval mechanical engineer and am entering my senior of college year soon. On top of the impending senior design hell, I have to decide soon if I want to go to graduate school (probably just for my masters) or not. It feels like a very big decision and everyone I talk to keeps giving me conflicting advice.

You’re an engineer that seems to have ended up in a fairly stable career, do you have any advice for figuring out what I want to do for the next 2-5 years of my life?

Other people have their own opinions on graduate work, so take me with a grain of salt, but I don't really recommend going straight from a bachelors to a masters. Go into industry for a minute, play around, figure out what kind of work you specifically like doing, then use the masters as a way to specialize in that. Worst case, you don't like any of it and you can use the masters as a lateral move to something adjacent. Maybe mechanical jobs don't really tickle your fancy like you'd hoped, but aerospace or robotics seem fun. Bam, masters gives you an in. Also, jobs will often offer to pay your tuition for your masters, but the cost of the tuition is truly miniscule compared to the time, so don't fuss over that too much. If you have to pay yourself, it's not a huge deal.

Engineering as a job is very different from engineering as a study, which is unfortunate, because it can mean that things you enjoyed learning about aren't actually fun to do. Or vice versa. Learning your own tastes is part of the post-college experience, which is a little nerve wracking, but also, pretty fun. It's sort of like dating yourself. You get to start asking questions like who am I, what do I like, where do I want to go, what makes my life fun. It's a little existential, but it's important and frankly very satisfying to figure out. You might be receiving conflicting advice because people are retroactively describing the fastest path to get to the place that made them happy, and not the process they used to find that place. Focus on the process and the destination will solve itself.

You'll hear "asexuality is purely about attraction, not action" a lot in defense of how asexuals who have sex are still asexual — and, to be clear, asexuals who have sex are still asexual, resoundingly so, and including them is important, I highlighted them in the original post for a reason — but "attraction only, not action" is not the correct argument to make for their inclusion! The correct argument is "different asexual people will be asexual for different reasons, where some people consider their attraction/lack thereof the most important factor, regardless of whether they have sex, whereas other people consider their aversion to sex the most important factor, regardless of whether they experience sexual attraction — and they are all equally asexual." The point is that we all get to decide for ourselves what the most important factor in defining our sexual orientation is. Attraction for some, actual sexual interest for others, probably a secret third thing for even more people too.

Vera Farmiga as Norma Bates

Ruth Marten, “#94”