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<p>But I don’t see IT as a field that necessarily requires excessive adventure and risk-taking, or at least, not in the way those terms are traditionally defined. If anything, I would argue that engineering actually requires more risk-taking than does IT. After all, many, almost certainly most, incoming engineering students will not actually complete engineering degrees. Many flunk out entirely, while others might not have flunked out per-se but were nevertheless deterred from continuing in the major due to mediocre grades. </p>
<p>Hence, everybody who actually manages to complete an engineering degree survived a frightful risk. If you try to learn some IT skills and are unsuccessful, oh well, you can simply move on to learning something else. But if you try engineering and receive poor grades, those grades will scar your academic record * for life*. I can think of several former engineering students who flunked their courses, and for the rest of their lives, whenever they’re asked whether they’ve ever been placed on academic probation or have been involuntarily suspended/dismissed from any school they’ve ever attended, they have to sadly answer: “Yes”. I therefore believe that whatever risk-taking is necessary to start an IT career is minimal compared to the far larger risk-taking necessary to earn an engineering degree. </p>
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<p>But how hard is that to figure out, really? That’s surely far easier than trying to figuring out the far more difficult material inherent in any engineering program. </p>
<p>For example, to this day, I still haven’t figured out what the real-world meaning is of the thermodynamic Maxwell Relations are, and I’ve conceded that I’ll probably never know. I also recently spoke to somebody who earned a PhD in engineering, and she freely admits that she doesn’t know either, never did, and probably never will. In fact, I have never met a single practicing engineer who does know. Compared to that, learning IT skills is child’s play. Indeed, sometimes literally so - I’ve even known some junior high school students who have picked up respectable IT skills. They can learn those skills yet somebody who wrestled with the baffling coursework inherent to any engineering program can’t learn those same skills? </p>
<p>As far as finding out what IT skills are useful or not, that requires little more than scanning the online job boards such as Monster or Hotjobs for IT jobs and note the particular skillsets that keep popping up. Or visiting some of the discussion boards that serve as the analogues to CC, but have to do with IT jobs and skill development. Or, perhaps even easier, determining which IT certifications seem to be in demand - which can also be discovered by gleaning the job boards - and then learning the skills necessary to earning those certifications. </p>
<p>Where I would agree is that an IT career is risky in the sense that it defies social convention. The standard career path laid forth for high school kids today is to attend the best college that they can, where they may choose an engineering major for which all of the necessary coursework and curricula has been laid out for them in advance. That curricula may be abstrusely incomprehensible and harshly graded such that many students won’t finish the major, but at least it is clear what is necessary to do to finish. A social infrastructure exists which they can follow: they can watch other students struggle to understand the same recondite engineering material that they’re attempting to understand. Every year, they can see other students above them successfully graduate and (hopefully) take engineering jobs. </p>
<p>In stark contrast, no such social validation system exists for the college student who wants to learn IT skills, despite the fact that those skills are far easier to learn than are engineering skills. He doesn’t see other students learning IT skills. He doesn’t have faculty telling him which skills to learn and threatening to punish him with poor grades if he doesn’t learn them. In short, he has to step away from an established social milieu in order to learn IT skills - and in that sense, I agree that what he is doing is risky. </p>
<p>But hey, that’s risk that you have to take if you want to be exceptional. After all, exceptional success, by definition, will never be obtained if you always do what everybody else is doing. You have to be willing to do things that others are not doing.</p>