Why I Chose Engineering
University wasn't simply the next step after school. It was the first deliberate decision I made about the kind of problems I wanted to spend my life solving.
Overview
People often choose a university because they're good at a subject or because it promises a stable career. I chose engineering for a different reason. I wanted to learn how complex systems work, because I believed understanding systems would eventually matter more than memorizing facts. Looking back, that decision quietly shaped every product I've tried to build since.
Category:
Education
Published:
Publisher:
Philip Heyes
Reading
3 min
Series
Learning
Updated:
Intoduction
People often ask whether university was worth it. I think that's the wrong question.
The better question is why you choose a university in the first place.
For me, engineering was never just a degree or a career path. It represented a way of understanding the world. I was drawn to difficult problems, not because I enjoyed making life harder for myself, but because I believed that learning to solve complicated problems would make every future challenge feel a little smaller.
Looking back, I don't think university gave me answers. It taught me how to approach questions that don't have obvious ones.
Choosing Problems Instead of Careers
When the time came to decide what to study, most conversations revolved around professions.
"What job does this degree lead to?"
"How secure is the career?"
"What salary can you expect?"
Those questions never felt particularly motivating to me.
Instead, I found myself asking something different.
"What kind of thinking do I want to develop?"
Engineering appealed to me because it demanded more than memorization. It required understanding relationships, identifying patterns, and breaking seemingly impossible problems into smaller pieces that could actually be solved. That way of thinking felt timeless. Technologies would change. Industries would evolve. But the ability to approach complexity with structure seemed like something worth investing years into.
Looking back, I think I chose engineering not because I wanted to become an engineer. I chose it because I wanted to become better at thinking.
Engineering Taught Me to Think in Systems
One of the biggest surprises of university wasn't discovering new formulas.
It was realizing that almost every difficult problem becomes manageable once you understand its structure. Whether studying mathematics, mechanics, or programming, the process rarely started by searching for an answer. It started by understanding the system.
What are the inputs?
What are the constraints?
Which assumptions are valid?
Can the problem be simplified?
That habit stayed with me long after individual lectures faded from memory. Today, whenever I face a complicated decision, my instinct isn't to react immediately. It's to step back, identify the system, and understand how each part influences the others before deciding what to change. I've found that this approach applies just as naturally to products, teams, and businesses as it does to engineering problems.
The Most Valuable Lessons Were Invisible
When people think about university, they often think about lectures, exams, and grades. Those things mattered. But they aren't what stayed with me. The most valuable lessons were the ones that never appeared on a transcript.
Learning to sit with uncertainty.
Accepting that the first solution is rarely the best one.
Recognizing that complicated problems are usually collections of smaller, understandable ones.
Understanding that progress often comes from improving a system rather than working harder within it.
Those lessons quietly changed how I approached every challenge that followed. Over time, I realized that university hadn't simply expanded what I knew. It had changed how I learned.
Every Decision Builds on the Previous One
Looking back, I see my education less as a series of isolated milestones and more as a connected chain of decisions.
Learning German taught me that meaningful progress comes from consistency.
Engineering taught me that complexity becomes manageable once you understand the underlying system.
Years later, those lessons influenced the way I approached building products, organizing teams, documenting ideas, and making long-term decisions.
None of those outcomes were planned when I first enrolled. That's what makes education so interesting. Its value rarely comes from predicting the future correctly. It comes from developing ways of thinking that remain useful regardless of what the future looks like. The degree will eventually became part of my résumé.
The mindset became part of who I am.
Conclusion
If someone asked me today whether engineering was the right choice, I wouldn't answer by talking about the university.
I'd answer by talking about perspective.
Engineering taught me to approach difficult problems with curiosity instead of hesitation. It taught me that understanding almost always comes before optimization, and that the best solutions usually emerge from asking better questions rather than searching for faster answers. I don't remember every equation I solved. I don't think that's the point.
What stayed with me was something much more valuable. A habit of looking for structure before searching for solutions. It's a habit that continues to shape how I learn, how I make decisions, and how I approach every new challenge.
