As a kid I always enjoyed playing with computers and electronics. I ended up becoming the IT guy for all my childhood friends, helping them fix their broken computers and phones. I also loved music, and played in my High School band. I was fascinated by the patterns in music theory and how pitch was defined. From music, I realized the many different scales and chords related heavily with mathematics, which in itself was mind blowing to me.

When I had to choose a degree to study in college, I realized I really wanted to understand my child hood interests at a much deeper level.

Having opened up dozens of computers and phones, I always looked at the circuit boards in them with curiosity and mystery. I realized everywhere I went I would see electronics, but as to why or how they worked I had no idea. Having seen programming languages pop up in my life through mainstream culture and playing around with software and operating systems I used, I saw them only as strange words with no meaning, only understanding that they were instructions for the computer to follow. Seeing how the OS controlled aspects of multi tasking was simply just multi tasking to me, and I had no idea what it was truly doing at a software level.

I also have a love for music theory and acoustical electronics. I wanted to also understand the physics of music at a deeper level. The terminology of using things such as Hz to tune my instrument was fascinating, but what Hz meant to me beyond a number was absent. Seeing how music was recorded at a professional level was amazing, but what terminology such as sampling rate meant to me beyond the subjective quality of the recording was absent.

In essence, I realized there was a part of the world that I could not see and thus a lacked ability to see certain “colors” of this reality. I did not want to live in a world where my own vision was blind to something that is so common around my own environment. I did not want to see the world with a limited set of colors.

Thus, I ended up choosing ECE at the flagship university in Texas, and I love it so far. My focus is in software engineering and signal processing, lending to my understanding of computer electronics as well as the physics of waves. I truly now can say I see more colors of the world and enjoy very much explaining certain things I see to those around me and myself. Opening up a phone, I instantly can see all of the colors inside of it, rather than seeing the phone as just mysterious wires and boards. Switching the sampling rate of my microphone, I instantly see the colors of such action beyond just changing a number.

But of course every degree out there leads to seeing more of the world. No degree is “better” than another. For that reason, I am always learning new things without constrain to some specific subject. I simply love the pursuit of broadening my own horizons and my own colors of the world.

That is to say, the love of knowledge itself allowed me to go after any subject and excel in it. And, it is with my love of knowledge and seeing how electrical engineering has shaped our world that ultimately led me to study ECE as an undergrad. However, that is not to say I chose ECE because I simply like ECE concepts. Rather, it was seeing how I noticed a huge part of the world was missing from my reality and thus becoming interested in finding this lost world being the root reason for choosing ECE. Yet, the important thing to understand is one’s reality which has missing parts to it is not dependent on some universal constant, rather it is based upon one’s own thought, life history and emotions.

In a parallel universe, a different me might have seen linguistics as the biggest thing missing from my reality and perhaps ECE not as much. In essence, my environment and my own history of life formed my unique reality. By diving deep into my life history and the environment I lived in, I was able to see my reality in its most clearest form. I then was able to produce interests beyond just a superficial reasoning, such as money, or thinking programming is interesting because someone wrote some cool app like Zuck. But rather, I was able to find interests rooted deeply in the foundation of my own unique existence.

To put in another way, the interests I picked did not come from the positive surface emotions that I evoked from them like for example liking programming due to the emotions I felt from seeing people write unique and innovative apps; but rather, it came from the mechanism in how such positive emotions are evoked; for example, asking myself why such emotions would be felt from seeing a cool app made by someone like Zuck and whether or not these emotions resulted from a mechanism that creates an actual interest rooted deeply in my own life history. Therefore, it allowed me to see if such emotion was the mechanisms of an external factor, such as seeing how successful others became from writing a break through app desiring their success. Or, if the mechanism resulted from my internal self, rooted in a deeply personal desire independent from the external factors.

To help illustrate with another example, take for example basketball: if I wanted to become a basketball player, I would of made sure the emotions felt from basketball were rooted from my own life history, rather than from seeing how successful and popular professional athletes are as the mechanisms behind the positive emotions evoked from basketball. In essence, I did not define my interests by emotions, but rather how and why such emotions exist and made sure such mechanisms that created such emotions were not superficial constructs.

As a remark, that’s not to say my major interests as a child was just music or fixing computers. I had numerous other interests. Yet, I understood that going to college I could not study something catering to everything I loved. Taking advantage of the varied interests I had, I was thus able to see a wide range of degrees I could had studied. Being such that computers had been an interest of mine far longer than anything else and yet how ECE also covered other interests I had, I found choosing ECE as a degree most fitting.

Many of the answers below say that engineering degree is good because it pays a lot. Please do not listen to such ideas. If you chase after something for the money, you will lose your internal self to the control of outside materialism. Don’t lose your dignity for a bunch of cloth paper.