Engineering lessons learned: Reflections on my Virginia Tech journey

My parents were ready for me to come here before I was.

I am an international student, and moving to Blacksburg was not just starting college. It was leaving my parents’ house for the first time and figuring out who I was without them in the next room. They believed I could do it before I believed it myself. Four years later, I am glad they were right.

What I did not expect was how quickly another family welcomed me in.

For me, that first clicked at a football game. I had no real understanding of the sport, and I am still not convinced I do, but standing in a stadium with sixty thousand people jumping to the same song is a specific kind of belonging, and any homesickness I had quickly dissipated. Your version of that moment might happen somewhere else entirely, at a club meeting or a lab bench or a dining hall table. The point is to put yourself in the places where it can find you.

Join things, then join more things

Having somewhere to be helps more than almost anything else.

Get into the clubs and design teams connected to your major, but do not stop there. In my case, I joined groups that had nothing to do with engineering, purely because they made the week better. Find whatever your version of that is. The balance between the things that build your resume and the things that simply make you happy is the whole point, and I have never met anyone who regretted the second category.

I co-founded the Semiconductor Club here, the first of its kind on campus, and taught chip architecture and VLSI workshops to people who mostly had no hardware background. That started as something I did for fun. It is now one of the parts of my degree I am proudest of.

Talk to your professors

I did undergraduate research under two professors whose guidance shaped how I think about the work. It went on my resume, which was the reason I started. That is not the reason it mattered.

Professors know an enormous amount, and not only about their subject. The input they gave me on my research changed my work, and the input they gave me on everything else changed how I approached the four years. That access is waiting right there in office hours, and it is a fantastic resource to tap into.

So ask. Go to a professor whose class you like and ask whether they have anything going. It might be a research project, a design team they lead, an internship connection, or a task nobody has picked up yet. What matters is getting practical, industry-level experience while you are still a student, because that is what makes you a better graduate.

And make something of your own out of what you learn, whether that be a project, a tool, or paper.

While classes are largely standardized, the creation you built because you wanted to is what makes your four years yours.

Make friends in every single class

Not only for the social reasons, but moreover for the study groups.

Some days, it will be more difficult to do work than others. But when you have a group that meets, you will show up for the company even if the assignment is not a current priority. Studying together most importantly means pooling understanding, where members can explain ideas to each other instead of people working with their own knowledge. As long as you reciprocate, they will keep you in the loop.

However, by the end of four years, I realized I can do it without them. Motivation is unreliable. Some days it simply does not arrive, and on those days discipline has to be the thing that gets you to your desk. Building that takes the whole four years, so start early.

The engineering-specific one

Do not pile up work until the night before it is due.

I am not saying this as general wisdom. I am saying it because I did it, because the panic that follows takes days to come back from, and because your GPA is something you poured yourself into and one bad week can undo a lot of that.

Start the day the assignment drops. It will not take long that first day, and it does not have to. But opening the file once early changes everything about how the deadline feels.

The same goes for exams. Saving an entire syllabus for the day before does not work. You might get lucky once, but consistency is what counts.

Take the practical parts seriously

The labs, the project-based classes, the design teams. That is where your skills become real instead of theoretical, and it is where you learn to work on an interdisciplinary team. That last part is the one people underestimate. Almost every project you work on after this involves people whose expertise fills the gaps in yours, and yours fills the gaps in theirs. Learning to be that kind of teammate is a skill on its own, which goes beyond textbooks.

Give yourself some grace

Inevitably, nobody can do all of this perfectly. I did not.

There will be semesters where you fall behind, weeks where the discipline is not there, exams you walk out of knowing exactly what went wrong. That is not failure, that is a first attempt at something genuinely hard. Forgive yourself for it and start again the following week.

The goal was never to be perfect at college. It was to keep at it, keep showing up, and get as much out of these four years as you can. Consistency is the whole thing. Everything else is details.

Go Hokies.