Thank you for the advice, but I want to do a desk job where I design stuff. I don’t like going outside and working with my hands or on my feet. I can build prototypes and solder, but I’m not great at it. I’m interested in coming up with a cool thing and then having someone who’s actually talented at crafting to build it on my behalf. I have mad respect for trade workers, but that kind of work is simply a bad fit for me.

Actually, a design job is really a compromise in the direction of more “practical” with respect to what I’m really interested in doing: original research. For example, I’m really interested in the control of nonlinear dynamical systems, specifically stabilization (read: I want to prevent systems from exploding themselves). While there’s no generic framework to control nonlinear systems, and it’s pretty unlikely there will be, there are lots of subclasses of nonlinear systems that need to be controlled, like robotic limbs, medical exoskeletons, commercial jets, machine learning, etc. It just involves a bit of creativity and a shit-ton of math (even compared to linear control theory). And I’d like to be one of the people doing the math and testing it out on important systems.

But unfortunately, industry isn’t typically interested in paying people to do research. And I need to eat. Those few companies who are interested in new ideas are already closely connected to academia. So it makes sense to me to continue my education.

To be honest, I’m kind of the opposite personality of the typical engineer. I.e. I’m super interested in “theoretical” details and how math, physics, and computer science actually works, and I’m not too interested in implementation details (any more than what is necessary to complete projects) because that kind of information is usually not portable to other projects. For that reason, I’m super pedantic, and engineering people usually don’t like pedants.

Additionally, I’ve already applied to a bunch of field engineering jobs out of desperation and during each interview they basically figured out in real time that I’m not interested in field work like at all, so they ghosted me. Plus, a lot of those job require me to climb up a ladder, which isn’t happening for at least a year because I weigh like a truck (too much for standard ladders; I checked). Plus, what I gathered from those interviews is that those jobs don’t lead to design jobs, just more field work. I’m just not a good fit.

Also the reason I stayed at my pizza delivery job so long was because I got to spend most of my time in the car with the AC on in a quiet place. I left that job because the company laid off almost all the drivers and outsourced the work to Doordash, and while I was given a job inside, I was absolutely losing my shit not being able to be in a climate controlled, quiet environment like my car. So uncomfortable jobs like trade jobs and field engineering jobs will not work for me. I need to be comfortable.

Cookie-cutter work that never ends

That’s the nightmare scenario for me, lol.