What Advice Would You Give To A First Year Engineering Student?

The #1 Thing First Year Engineering Students Should Do To Succeed.

4 min readJul 30, 2021

Start building projects from day one. Here’s why…

What do engineers do? They build things. So what should you do if you want to become a great engineer? Build things everyday. It’s as simple as that…Or is it?

The common problem I hear from engineering students is that they don’t have enough knowledge yet to build something.

Here’s the sad truth…

Autonomous vehicle I built with other students at RVCC community college

You will never have enough knowledge to build something. When working as an engineer you will encounter problems that you have no knowledge of and you’re going to need to ask different people, google search and try different things to solve your problem.

Initially if you do not know how to build something what you want to do is find a project that someone has already built, and copy it. Re-create it.

This is exactly what engineers in industry do. Very rarely does an engineer start from absolute scratch. They adapt pieces from other systems that engineers have already built. They study what people have already engineered before and usually will copy the same exact thing but modify it to work for their system.

Why reinvent the wheel? It’s just a waste of time. And when you work as an engineer, time is money. So in effect you’re just wasting the company’s money if you are trying to recreate something from scratch when another engineer has already solved the problem. Leverage what they have already built.

You don’t need to have taken a circuits class to start building a circuit. Can you point to the law of physics that says you cannot build a circuit until you have completed your circuits class? Exactly — You can’t. It doesn’t exist.

The Important Caveat

3D Printed Hand I built while I was in college.

Here’s a caveat to rebuilding projects…When you copy another engineer’s project or solution, it’s important to understand why the engineer built it that way. Why certain configurations or implementations work. You can’t just build it and not know or understand what you just did. You would still be the same if you didn’t build it at all.

Try to do the math yourself. Understand why it works. If you have access to the person who designed it, call them or shoot them a message asking them to help you understand what they did and why it works.

One way to start understanding why a system works the way it is built is to first copy and build what is working…and then try changing some part of the system.

What happens when you remove a resistor?
What happens if you don’t have this screw in place? Does it still work?

Start experimenting with what already works and you will start learning about the system you are building.

Now I know first year engineering students probably can’t build a project a day. Heck I don’t even build a project a day. Some projects just take longer.

Sometimes you just don’t feel like it. But you want to try and build at least one thing every semester (No matter how big or how small).

College is great, but I’ve found that college focuses more on engineering knowledge retention and how to solve word problems as opposed to focusing on what you will actually do as an engineer, which is design, test and build things.

One More Thing…

My fiancé (right) and I (left) on top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

Another thing I would do is to study a little bit everyday. Don’t wait for the exam to then go and study.

I actually wrote another blog post talking about how I graduated with a 3.93 GPA in engineering.

You can check that article out by clicking here.

Recap

So in a nutshell, you want to build engineering projects as frequently as you can. Copy a project another engineer did. Understand it. Then start removing small parts of the system and modifying small parts of the system to experiment and see what happens.

You will learn a lot just from doing this.

I hope you found this article helpful.

This is the advice I would give to any first year engineering student.

What’s Next?

If you enjoyed this article, check out some of my other articles on Medium.