I’m Navika and I’m currently 20 years old and am in my Freshman year of college in America (currently undecided)
I always thought I wanted to be an engineer, but recently felt that my skills aren’t purely technical. I found an assignment in college is exactly what I want to do:
-Address a global challenge
-Create a profile of the problem—who it impacts, who are the stakeholders, does each group have conflicting needs etc.
-Design a solution—state intent, delineate observations and concepts one is building upon,
-Iterate on the solution, seek feedback, implement a working solution.
I want to do this for a variety of global challenges, and ultimately end up working directly with Elon Musk.
Each of his companies is built around addressing a specific global problem.
Who does this kind of work in real life? People at my college said its mostly entrepreneurs. I see 80,000 hours essentially does a version of this related to careers- I’d love if I could talk to one of the people on the team and see if I could conduct research for 80,000 hours.
What should I study? I am a very interdisciplinary person.
Someone told me that it is engineers, lawyers and doctors that solve the toughest problems, so I was thinking it might be better to study engineering. However I do not want to be in the technical details, executing on someone else’s vision, I’d rather create the vision and then oversee its implementation.
I’ve been in tech for a while. That sounds a lot like management / “product management”, or “intrapreneurs”.
If you want to be in charge of big projects at a tech-oriented venture, having a technical background can be really useful. You might also just want to look at the backgrounds of top managers at Elon Musk companies. Most tech CEOs and managers I know of have majored in either software engineering or some hard science.
Hypothetically there could be some other major more focused on tech management than tech implementation, but in practice I don’t know of one. It’s really hard to teach management and often expected that those skills are ones you’ll pick up later.
I myself studied general engineering in college, but spent a fair amount of time on entrepreneurship and learning a variety of other things. Recently I’ve been more interested in history and philosophy. There’s a lot of need and demand for good interdisciplinary people. But I’m happy I focused on math/science/engineering in college; those things seem much more challenging and useful to learn in a formal setting. I’d also recommend reading a lot of Hacker News / Paul Graham / entrepreneurship literature; that’s often the best stuff on understanding how to make big things happen, but it’s not taught well in school.
Also, I really wouldn’t suggest getting too focused on Elon Musk or any other one person in particular. Often the most exciting things are small new ones by new founders. Also, hopefully in the next 5 to 20 years there will be many other great projects.
Hi All!
I’m Navika and I’m currently 20 years old and am in my Freshman year of college in America (currently undecided)
I always thought I wanted to be an engineer, but recently felt that my skills aren’t purely technical. I found an assignment in college is exactly what I want to do:
-Address a global challenge
-Create a profile of the problem—who it impacts, who are the stakeholders, does each group have conflicting needs etc.
-Design a solution—state intent, delineate observations and concepts one is building upon,
-Iterate on the solution, seek feedback, implement a working solution.
I want to do this for a variety of global challenges, and ultimately end up working directly with Elon Musk.
Each of his companies is built around addressing a specific global problem.
Who does this kind of work in real life? People at my college said its mostly entrepreneurs. I see 80,000 hours essentially does a version of this related to careers- I’d love if I could talk to one of the people on the team and see if I could conduct research for 80,000 hours.
What should I study? I am a very interdisciplinary person.
Someone told me that it is engineers, lawyers and doctors that solve the toughest problems, so I was thinking it might be better to study engineering. However I do not want to be in the technical details, executing on someone else’s vision, I’d rather create the vision and then oversee its implementation.
Thanks in advance for any replies!
I’ve been in tech for a while. That sounds a lot like management / “product management”, or “intrapreneurs”.
If you want to be in charge of big projects at a tech-oriented venture, having a technical background can be really useful. You might also just want to look at the backgrounds of top managers at Elon Musk companies. Most tech CEOs and managers I know of have majored in either software engineering or some hard science.
Hypothetically there could be some other major more focused on tech management than tech implementation, but in practice I don’t know of one. It’s really hard to teach management and often expected that those skills are ones you’ll pick up later.
I myself studied general engineering in college, but spent a fair amount of time on entrepreneurship and learning a variety of other things. Recently I’ve been more interested in history and philosophy. There’s a lot of need and demand for good interdisciplinary people. But I’m happy I focused on math/science/engineering in college; those things seem much more challenging and useful to learn in a formal setting. I’d also recommend reading a lot of Hacker News / Paul Graham / entrepreneurship literature; that’s often the best stuff on understanding how to make big things happen, but it’s not taught well in school.
Also, I really wouldn’t suggest getting too focused on Elon Musk or any other one person in particular. Often the most exciting things are small new ones by new founders. Also, hopefully in the next 5 to 20 years there will be many other great projects.