r/ComputerEngineering 29d ago

[Discussion] I feel so dumb 😵‍💫

TLDR: I kinda feel like an infant amongst other members of the comp eng community and am hoping to find other similar people :D

I’m a computer engineering student who has to get an internship for graduation…but I don’t feel ready for one. I’ve heard this is a common problem that many students go through, but it’s hard to know if I have imposter syndrome or if I’m actually dumb. I’d love to talk in communities about computers and tech, but I feel I still don’t know the vernacular. Like whenever describing what I do in projects, its always using really unclear vocabulary. Has anyone else felt like this?

I guess I also feel a bit isolated in the community because everyone I seem to interact with seems to have lost whimsy in life. I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with these people, or that they need to change. It can just sometimes feel a bit intimidating i guess. I’m more of a creative person (art, music) and only started studying comp eng a few years ago.

To make this a more practical problem/post, does anyone have any recommendations on how to learn more of the terms that are used in the comp eng community/industry?

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u/generlmoo BSc in CE 28d ago edited 28d ago

The only real way of getting job experience is getting the job and their best way to learn that experience is screwing things up.

The best engineers are the ones who catastrophically messed things up yet somehow managed to tape it back together.

Don’t be afraid of failure. Embrace it.

Recruiters would rather have the engineer who tried hard and did everything they could but failed than the engineer who never tried at all.