From my perspective.......After getting my deg's I went to work for Boeing as a mech eng. Absolutely hated it. Setting in an office with a hundred other engineers working on isolated small parts........Boring.......Then went to work for Puget Sound Bridge and Drydock. Another boring job......Finally got fed up with the whole thing and went to work in a machine and fab shop and found my true calling. For the last 30 years I've had a multitude of different jobs. From working in machine shops to fab shops to automotive repair shops. For the last 20 years I've owned several of my own businesses and never been happier. What I like best is redesigning and fabricating equipment for the Ag and mining industry. I really like taking equipment that others have designed, and improving their design, or taking different pieces of equipment from different fields and using them in a whole new process. One of the patents I hold was a combination of a piece of Ag equipment, a piece of mining equipment, and designing a new piece of equipment for a completely different field.....

The key IMO, is to find something you LOVE to do, then working to be the best you can be in that field.

I was very lucky to be raised by a family that worked in the farming and equipment repair fields, and had a wrench in my hand from the age of 8 years old.

Probably not much help, but if I had the chance to do it all over again, I would have stayed in the mechanical trades and not even messed with a degree.........