Go High or Go Home
I went into engineering because of math, but I could not foresee the incredible goal I arrived at midway through my degree.
I went into Electrical Engineering (EE) because the math was more complex. I excelled in college more than I thought I would, and as a result, I made a decision that led to an interesting chain reaction.
I switched into EE midway through my sophomore year. At my school, that meant I had to wait until the next year to take sophomore EE classes. For the spring semester, I found I could take one class in EE because the only prerequisite was a second level differential equations class I had take.
The class was Communication Theory, and I was in over my head. Somehow, I got an A. That summer, I was mapping out what classes I could take, and Communication Theory was the prerequisite to a bunch of senior and grad classes. I was already planning to do a five year bachelors/masters at University of Detroit Mercy.
My plan was simple, finish in four years to challenge myself especially because I wasn’t putting in as much effort as others. That meant the next six semesters over two years had 102 credits. I was crazy enough that I wanted to double major in math as well. I planned it out during two days at my internship, and two years later, I walked out of UDM with a bachelors with two majors and a masters in EE. If you look at semesters, I crammed 8 semesters of core EE course work into 7 over 2.5 years instead of 4 (sophomore to 1 extra year for masters; freshman year doesn’t have core EE courses). My GPA only suffered slightly through going to class and doing the work.
When playing Euchre in the cafe at UDM, the most common phrase was “Go High or Go Home”, meaning play the high card to win or don’t play. This was especially important because two players would regularly load the deck, so if you weren’t going all out, you were losing anyways.
