Debrief On A Failure
Now I have decided to drop out from my part-time engineering degree course. It had been one and a half years of struggle. It is painful to make this decision since I had invested large amount of money and time for the course. If I were to continue, I still have to go next 3.5 years to finish it. It was a slow and painful realization that I am wasting my time and money. My day job is a programmer and I am passionate about it. But spending most of the evenings studying circuits and amps won’t help me achieve what I want to be, an awesome coder.So you might ask, “Why the hack you started anyway and why wait until now?”. Well, I thought it was important to have a degree from a recognised University. I had a degree from my home country which is not recognised in Singapore. So I was being a sheep and follow the crowd neglecting my passions. To make things worst, they only offers electronics and mechanical degrees as part time courses. I thought, I could study electronics at night while coding at day time. I thought I could become a hybrid electronics engineer and programmer. I was wrong. Although I enjoy learning, I didn’t enjoy learning electronics. There are all the other things I want to learn, do and experiment. After a year, I had this enormous list filled with books to read, languages to learn, challenges to take, side projects to hack on and a wife to take care of! The most annoying thing is whenever I wanted to take on a thing like poking around new programming language, I was stopped by the thought, “Hey aren’t you supposed to study?” I was getting done less and less in both worlds. Alright, screw it. I don’t need any internationally recognised degrees or certificates to live my life the way I want! I am going to spend my time on all the crazy things I wanted to do. For all money and time I have wasted, I have learned important lessons. Things I am not passionate about are not worth pursuing. Do less and do the things that matters. From now on, I will keep asking “Does it really matter and does it worth my life?” And you should ask yourself too.