Transcription
Currently, the attrition rate for engineering is 50%. That means that half of all students who begin an engineering degree either drop out or change majors. And the majority of those who don't make it actually drop out freshman year. What does that tell you? To me, it's pretty obvious. It says that their failure happened before they even started. Their failure stemmed from a lack of preparation. It's not because they're lazy, it's not because they're stupid, it's because they started engineering with the wrong expectations, the wrong priorities, and no plan for the workload.
Which is why in this video, I'm going to get into the four essential items that must be in place before anyone begins an engineering degree. Because if these four items are in place, your chances of graduating will skyrocket. But hey, if you're new here, my name's Jake. I'm a mechanical engineer, YouTuber, and author. A few years ago, I wrote this book to help new and struggling students actually make it to graduation. It sold thousands of copies all over the world and is actually required reading at several universities across the US. I also run a program called the Engineering Success Academy, where we turn inexperienced and overwhelmed students into high performers. So, instead of just winging it and hoping things work out, which is what most students do, you'll have a proven step-by-step roadmap that will show you how to prepare, succeed, and thrive in an engineering degree. So, if you want to get through an engineering degree quickly while avoiding all the roadblocks and setbacks that derail everybody else, I highly recommend checking out the academy. So, check the links below if you're interested in any of those things. Back to the video.
Okay, so like I said, there are four items, right? Four puzzle pieces that must be in place before you begin an engineering degree. If these items, if these things are not in place, this whole thing, your whole, you know, college experience, at least the beginning of it, can feel like you're racing the Indy 500 while building the car around you at the same time. It's no wonder why so many freshmen drop out, right? It's better to build your car first before you enter the race, don't you think? That's the difference between That's the the big difference between people who actually take the time to properly prepare before starting an engineering degree and people who don't.
So, with that, let's get into the first item here, the first piece of this puzzle, which is to make space in your schedule. I would say that perhaps the most costly mistake that any new engineering student can make is to try to fit an engineering degree and all the work that comes with it into an already busy schedule. That's probably the fastest road to burnout and low performance. So, before you begin school, you need to make space in your life, right? For all this all this work, all this learning that you're committing to because at its core, an engineering degree is just You can look at it just as a huge pile of work, right? A huge pile of time that you need to dedicate, you know, assignments, uh homework, labs, projects, exams. All of these items that have real finite amounts of time um associated with them, associated with your success. And if you don't have that time available, if you have time that's if if that time is allocated towards something else, that's not a good thing, right? So, you need to have the real finite amount of time freed up so that you can have success in those things before day one. A lot of students enter school with this kind of carefree mindset, right? Like this whimsical kind of perspective, like, "Oh, it'll just work itself out." You know, "Yeah, I have I'm spending my time in all these other things like work and family and friends and girlfriends and trips and, you know, the gym and all these hobbies I have." Yeah, "I'm spending my time in all the other stuff, but I'll be able to fit school in somewhere, right? I'll be able to do all the homework and studying and all the all the other things. I'll be able to fit it in somewhere. No, right? No way. This or that that approach will burn you so hard. You have to have several hours per day or big big chunks of hours throughout the week, right? To be able to do the work that's necessary. And this time has to be available and unallocated before school begins.
So, let's go over some quick ways that you can do just that. Number one, make the word no your default answer to anybody asking you of your time, right? At least in the beginning, at least when you're still trying to figure out how to have success, how to do well, how to build the system, you know, for good performance in school. Everything else that's asking, you know, uh asking your time of you should be uh reserved, should be said no to. All your families and friends and and other obligations should be set aside while you're trying to figure out this new big thing that you want to have success with. Number two is you want to reduce the need for money in your life, okay? That sounds kind of weird, but if you're someone that has to work, right? And you have bills, work, you you know, bills, right? The uh the need for money equals the need to spend time at work cuz you're you're you're need to spend time earning that money. That's time that you could free up potentially to spend on school. So, if you reduce your need for money, then by consequence you reduce your need to spend time at work. So, how can you reduce your need for money, right? Maybe move back home, maybe get a roommate, maybe look at the things you spend your money on, is it all necessary, right? Are all these things necessary? Subscriptions, so many things, right? That you maybe could pull it back a little bit. Maybe spend a little bit less time at work then, maybe go part-time, maybe find a job that isn't so time intensive. All different ways where you can reduce the money that you have to spend so that you can reduce the time that you have to spend working. And then lastly, this is kind of a mindset shift. So, set school, set your performance in school firmly as your number one priority, okay? When you do this, magically somehow, when you actually do this and you actually act on this priority shift, magically time seems to free itself up to get this thing done. Once you start judging your days, the success of your days are judged by you getting your school work done, all of a sudden there's a lot of free time to spend on that thing, which is actually a perfect segue into number two, this item number two, puzzle piece number two, which is set your priorities.
You know, this one can really be summed up with the following quote, which is "There is never enough time to do everything, but there is always enough time to do the most important thing." So, it follows that as long as you establish your school performance as the most important thing to you, then you should always have enough time to dedicate towards it. And to be more specific here, when I say performance, I'm specifically talking about your exam performance. If you're studying an engineering degree, your exam performance must become the most important thing in your life. And the reason why is because in most engineering degrees, your exams will account for 70% of the overall grade in your classes. So, when we talk about priorities, it should be, you know, school, but specifically your exam performance must become the most important thing in your day. Just real quick, if you're beginning an engineering degree or if your exam scores aren't quite where you want them to be, check out my free bulletproof exam prep blueprint. If you follow this blueprint, I guarantee your exam scores will improve. Links in the description.
So, I think this one, talking about priorities, this topic, I think it can best be described using an analogy. We all We all love a good analogy. So, I think your experience in college can really be compared to getting on a cruise ship, if you've ever been on a cruise ship. You get on and there are countless things that are all competing for your attention, right? Parties, you know, games, sporting events, um you know, hanging out with new people, newfound freedom, right? Just like when you get on a cruise ship, it's all sorts of stuff, right? Pools, foods, shows, gambling, parties, dancing, you know, all these things that are all right in your face and they look super fun and you want to spend your time on all of them. And when you get on a cruise, that's all good, right? You're a passenger. You're there to have fun. It's a vacation. But, here's the key difference. When you enter school, when you enter an engineering degree, you are not the passenger, right? You are the captain. And the captain's job is not to be distracted by all the other shiny things that seem fun. They may seem important, right? The captain's job is to make sure the entire ship makes it to the destination. So, that's your job, too, right? You're the captain, okay? Your Your mission, your job isn't just just to experience college and do everything, all the distracting things. Your Your primary mission, your primary objective is to make sure this big adventure, this big experience actually ends with you getting the degree you want, okay? And that begins with firmly establishing, firmly setting your exam performance as your number one priority.
So, let me show you what this can look like, right? Firmly establishing school, your school performance as your number one priority. So, you might have seen this chart before if you've seen some of my other videos, but this graph shows every single class that I took during my, you know, college engineering career and all the grades associated with them, right? The left side of this graph was the first couple years of my um school. And as you can see, the grades are kind of all over the place, right? I had many failed courses. My average GPA was like a 2.3. This represents bad priorities, okay? Now, when you move to the right side of this graph, you see a large improvement, right? I never failed a course again. My GPA went to 3.8. All good. Now, what's interesting is my obligations, the amount of money I needed to earn, the amount of time I needed to spend at work, all my friends, girlfriend, family, all my time obligations didn't change, okay? Between the two sides of this. What changed is my priority. What changed was the most important thing to me, and that was my exam performance. I firmly established my exam performance as the most important thing in my life, right? And then I started acting on it. And you can see the difference that it made. So, if you want to avoid, you know, the first half, this first half of my engineering career, and just skip to the second half, I highly suggest that you do the same.
Let's move on to the third puzzle piece here, which is what's going on in your head. Specifically, your expectations and your mindset. Your mindset has a massive impact on your productivity, right? The right mindset can create energy, create confidence, and breed persistence, while the wrong mindset can drain energy, create anxiety, and make challenges seem way bigger than they actually are. And one of the biggest mistakes that I see a lot of students make as far as mindset goes is they begin school with the wrong expectations, right? This is especially true for smart students. They expect, you know, everything to kind of come easy. They expect to get good grades right away. They expect it to be like high school. And then when they inevitably struggle, they interpret that struggle as if it's a sign that they don't belong, right? As if they're not smart enough. But that's not what struggle means. Engineering is supposed to be difficult, right? It's supposed to actually challenge you. And what that means, a lot you know, a lot of students don't understand what that actually means. It means that you're going to hit some roadblocks. You might actually fail and have a couple low scores here and there. That's what actual challenge means. You know, when I wrote my book, the analogy I made is do you expect you know, what you go golfing, right? Do you expect to hit a hole-in-one on a par three, right? You don't expect that. It's because it's actually challenging, right? So, if you don't hit a hole-in-one on a par three, you don't get very mad because you have the right expectations for the situation. If you went into golf expecting a hole-in-one every time, you're going to be super angry, super frustrated, super let down because you had the wrong expectations. So, that's why I say you want to start, you know, this engineering degree with the right expectations, with with expectations that are at the level of the difficulty, right? I'm not saying that it's as hard as hitting a hole-in-one. I'm just saying that there's a difficulty level that you should expect it to be. So, feeling confused and lost and, you know, kind of overwhelmed and challenged, those are not those should not be interpreted as bad things. Those are good things, right? Those are signs that you're learning and pushing yourself.
And that brings me to the second thing I want to talk about here, which is a growth mindset. So, students with a fixed mindset believe that their performance reflects reflects their inherent ability, right? They believe that their performance is a reflection of who they are at their core. Whereas students with a growth mindset believe that their performance is only a reflection of their current level of skill and effort. That is a huge difference, right? One says, "I got a bad grade because I'm not smart enough." The other says, "I got a bad grade because my approach needs improvement." So, as you can see, a fixed mindset leads to discouragement and stagnation, right? While a growth mindset leads to improvement and action. So, one of the easiest ways or or the best way to start developing a growth mindset for yourself is to take your focus, take you know, what you value off of immediate results, and instead place what you focus on, place what you value onto effort. Because, let me tell you, when effort becomes the thing that you value above all other things, that's when you become really dangerous.
Now, let's move on to the fourth and final piece of this puzzle, this fourth and final item that you have to have in place before you start an engineering degree. And that is to start building your system, right? To start building this system where the inputs are your time, focus, and energy, and the outputs are learning, good grades, and eventually a degree. So, the question is, what is that system made of? Right? What are the components of this machine? And before I get into it, I will say that I actually made a longer video about this topic where I go way more in-depth into this. So, I'm not going to do it all over again. Um if you're interested, go check out that video next. In this one, I'm just going to summarize it.
Okay, so there are four main components to this machine, the system I'm talking about. And the first of which is a robust learning system, one that emphasizes spaced repetition, active reading, active recall, active problem-solving, and a feedback loop. Essentially, you want to put yourself in the exam environment as much as possible. Number two is developing productive habits, right? Habits create consistency so that you don't have to rely on motivation every day. Habits are basically the closest you're going to get to automating the work that you need to do. So, you have to take advantage of them. Number three is productivity. So, the goal is not to spend more more more time studying, the goal is to get more progress out of the time that you spent. This means starting the work when you actually intend to, right? Don't mess around with procrastination. And it also means engaging with the most productive techniques that we went over in step one. Speaking of procrastination, if you struggle with procrastination like the rest of us, I offer a free conquer procrastination mini course. Check the description below for a link to that. And the last piece of this system that you have to build for yourself is sustainability, right? You need to develop a schedule and lifestyle that protects your energy, your physical health, and your mental health so that you can perform consistently for years.
So, those are the four components of this this system, this machine that I'm talking about, right? Where the inputs are your time, focus, and energy, and the outputs are real learning and consistent performance. Now, should you expect to have this system perfectly built on day one? No, not not at all, right? Your performance, your exam performance, will instruct kind of how to make changes to your system. So, you you shouldn't expect to have it perfect on day one. But, you should have the foundations laid.
All right, there you have it. Those are the four items, right? If these four items, right, make space, uh set your priorities, get your mind right, and start building your system, if those four items are in place before you start school, you are shielding yourself from burnout and you're skyrocketing your chances of making it to graduation. Let me know what you guys think in the comments, you know, if you want me to dive deeper into any one of these topics, or if you're someone that's already well into school or graduated, do you agree, you know, with the items I talk about? Did I miss anything? Let me know what you guys think. That's it for now. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.