Another repost in the same vein as the previous one. This post came from April of 2013, just as I was about to finish my undergraduate degree. Foolish me would not begin to understand the frustrations that awaited me in the coming years as I prepared to start my Ph.D.

I would still hold to my advice at the time though. I did not fully know the full value of the social interactions I was recommending at the time, and in retrospect I would argue they are more critical than the standalone ambition the title implies, but the message is no less valuable than it was 8 years ago.

In May of this year, I will graduate with my undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering. After four years I feel that I’m far wiser than I was four years ago, but I’m painfully aware of how much more I need to learn about the world. That being said, I now realize how many opportunities were available to me that I simply did not know existed.

As such, the simplest way I can put everything, is this: freshman, be ambitious.

Do not underestimate the value of getting involved with a group that does things you cannot yet comprehend your freshman year. My freshman year I tried to get involved with the universities local Linux Users Group and IEEE out of the gate. Currently, I am participating with neither group, but I wouldn’t discount the interactions I gained from starting to look into these to organizations for a minute.

It was due to my interactions with the LUG that I met the advisers and officers of our local Amateur Radio Club. As it turns out W7YH is one of the oldest ARC’s in the nation with a history spanning just over 100 years! At the time amateur radio just seemed like a passing interest, but it is because of my activity in that club that many of the opportunities I have available to me now became available. My interest in communications got me started with microcontrollers and actually building circuits by hand a year earlier than the first of my classmates. This in turn would land me my first engineering job/internship with Digilent Inc.

Two years after I first was introduced into the WSU ARC, I found myself forced into an officer position to keep the club alive. Two years later I am proud to say that I presided over W7YH for it’s 100th and 101st years. My involvement with the club introduced me to enumerable ideas and concepts related electrical engineering: from circuit design, filter design, signals analysis, antenna analysis, RF safety–the list goes on. While personally I always felt that the introduction.

From here the actual value of your experience with a club should emerge. While I personally felt that my knowledge of these subjects was inadequate for the type of work I wanted to do, what I quickly found was that my knowledge would far surpass what a typical undergraduate would ever learn. On three occasions I’ve found myself teaching organized classes on the material I learned, and I ended up personally mentoring dozens of students in courses related to the material.

don’t want this to sound like a bland exposition of my college experience, but the point I’d like to stress is that everything that I’ve found myself doing today, was as a congruence of a single meeting with two individuals three and a half years ago. Had I not met K7LL and KE7URN, I could not imagine where I would be today. The thing to remember, is that what you gain will be dictated by who you meet, and how you interact with them. Little of what I learned came directly from these two individuals, but was through my correspondence and interaction with them that I found myself pursuing the things that would drive me to where I am today.

My advice for Freshman a few months away from their first year at college is this:

Find a club, group, or organization related to your interests and stay involved. This usually doesn’t mean actually doing anything, but take advantage of any social interaction you can with this group. The true value you gain from a group is rarely from working directly in a project they have organized, but rather it is being comfortable enough interacting with them to use them as a resource to pursue what you want to do. Even if they cannot provide much help for you, if you interact with a larger group in this way, you may be an aid to someone else.

The second thing that you’ll find from this, is it opens opportunities to garner help from students outside of your club. The senior members of your club are typically familiar with the leaders or senior member of other clubs. The WSU ARC, LUG, and Aerospace clubs have this familiarity to a certain extent. Often our work will draw us outside of our comfort zone, so but our personal relations with the members of other clubs makes it easier to bring other students into contact with resources that they will need to pursue their own goals.

Do not underestimate the value of the relations you form, for it is through them that your future will truly be shaped.