Some Regrets

I regret coming here this summer. If I knew in January (or even May) what I know now, I would not have come. I have yet to do any engineering work since I’ve been here. I’m in my second week of my second job and the closest I’ve had to any engineering is editing a research paper about LabVIEW and looking at some of the Airbus airplane schematics. I have not had any of the usable experiences that I would have had if I took the internship I was offered in North Carolina. The cultural differences don’t bother me that much. It’s the fact that I’m not doing anything close to what I expected to be doing that bothers me. I have tried to ask for more things to do, but all they have given me is photos to Photoshop and a paper to edit. I do not dislike these things (I actually enjoyed learning Photoshop), but I dislike that everything I have done at both of my jobs would be better done by a good secretary. I want to be doing engineering. I do not think it is because I am a woman because the other guy in my lab has the same tasks I do. I just think that these people want cheap labor from people who can understand technical things. 

I also got my MCAT scores back. I did three points worse than I had done on any of my practice tests, and one point too low to be guaranteed to UCF’s medical school. So now I have to decide if I am going to study for the whole month of July and come back to the US early to take another MCAT on August 18 or whether to forfeit my guaranteed seat in an American MD school that has good residency matches. I should clarify that MCAT scores are not like SAT scores: you should only take it once, but if you do take it again, medical schools want to see serious improvement. If I had not come here, I would have taken the exam two weeks later, giving me more time to study, and I probably would have gotten the score I needed. 

I think the Airbus job would have been good for an industrial engineer, and I think that this study abroad would have been good for me last summer, but I think that this was the wrong time and I was the wrong person for this. Right now, I just want it to be a year from now when I’ve graduated, and I know what I am going to be doing with the next four years of my life.