Most engineering schools require students to design and construct some sort of prototype before graduating. At my school, this prototyping requirement is called “Senior Design Project“. Although most students have the ability to create a great project, when the Demo comes they end up selling themselves too short.
What do I want to be when I grow up? For most of us, this is an existential question that will follow us wherever we go. We are dropped in this world by a mysterious stork, which does not leave with us any hints of why are we here, what are we supposed to do, and how are we going to do it. So we begin our quest for the discovery of this existential conundrum.
We first want to be a doctor, then a veterinarian, and maybe later an engineer. But at some point along the way we lose the childish concept of a profession and we suddenly plummet into the so called “real world”. We have seen so much TV, read so much sensationalist media, and heard so many stories posed by a “friend of a friend”, that we are unable to pursue our true passions anymore. Not only have we divorced that idealistic representation of our future self, we have made a conscious effort to convince ourselves otherwise.
The Pareto principle, more commonly known as the 80/20 rule, establishes that 80% of a process’ output comes from 20% of the inputs. If we consider our job or school such a process, this would mean that it would take us 20% of our time to achieve 80% of the results we would achieve if we spent all of our time focused on such endeavor.
