Yearly Note 2009: Maxwell Escape
That year I started to suspect that being good at something and understanding it are not the same thing.
Going from first to second year of engineering, the work piled up and the exams kept finding my limits. The clearest memory is the final electrical practical. I had skipped most of the practical classes and walked in genuinely scared. Then I drew an experiment I happened to be good at, finished it, and the relief was enormous. It was also luck, and I knew it.
The good parts were real too: late nights with friends over maths and physics, my first freelancing work, and a competition where, on a whim, I sent in two separate entries and took both first and second place. I owed a lot of that year to the friends around me.
But I kept hitting the same two walls. I wanted a mentor and didn't have one, and the people around me, however well meaning, couldn't quite see what I was reaching for. So I taught myself and went my own way. And in the work itself, my eagerness kept tripping me up. I'd leap at a solution before I'd understood the problem, and patience turned out to be as much the skill as anything technical.
By the end of the year I didn't need more goals. I needed to know where I was actually heading.