Engineering is almost every kid's childhood dream.
Building cool things like Iron Man. Hacking systems like Batman. Creating robots, apps, rockets, AI -- that's what many of us imagined engineering would be.
In India, around 75% of engineering students come from poor or middle-class families. Parents take education loans hoping their son or daughter will get a stable job, earn money, and "settle in life." That's the average Gen Z dream sold to us from childhood.
Study hard.
Become engineer.
Get job.
Buy house.
Done.
My love for computer science started when I was in 3rd grade at Holy Angel Primary and Secondary School. It was a tiny school with maybe 50 people total, including teachers and the principal. There was only one computer lab running Windows XP.
Computer class meant one thing: wait for your turn to touch the mouse for two minutes.
Some kids opened Paint and drew houses. Some clicked random buttons. Some played games secretly when the teacher wasn't looking.
That old CRT monitor felt magical to me.
My uncle worked in IT. He always carried his laptop around, typing fast like a hacker in a movie. The keyboard sound itself felt futuristic. He looked cool. He understood technology, and that inspired me.
I wanted to become an engineer who builds things and solves problems.
Of course, Iron Man, Batman, cartoons, and Hollywood hacking scenes added fuel to that dream too.
But after joining engineering college, I realized there are mainly two kinds of people there.
The first category: people who choose engineering because their family told them to.
The second category: people genuinely excited to build things and understand how technology works.
Both groups enter college thinking engineering will change their lives. They imagine innovation, cool projects, deep discussions, smart labs, startups, inventions, maybe even changing the world someday.
Then reality starts.
Old professors walk into class and begin teaching subjects nobody understands. For the first two months, students don't even know what's happening.
Random formulas.
Unknown theories.
PowerPoint slides from 2009.
Professors reading PDFs word by word without explaining what anything actually means.
Half the students are confused. The other half are sleeping.
Nobody asks questions because everyone is scared of looking stupid.
So students go to the library trying to decode what the professor even said in class.
After three months, most people stop trying to truly understand things and switch into survival mode.
"Just study important questions."
"Just pass somehow."
"CGPA matters."
"Don't get arrears."
Curiosity slowly dies.
Even computer labs feel trapped in another century.
I still remember the first time I saw Turbo C++ in college. The UI looked older than me. Blue screen. Tiny fonts. Weird commands.
And somehow this was supposed to prepare us for the future.
In programming lab, students still write code in record notebooks before typing it into the computer.
Imagine learning programming in 2025 by copying code line by line into Turbo C++.
Nobody explains why the code works.
Nobody explains how memory works, how compilers work, what happens inside the CPU, or how operating systems think.
The lab becomes:
Copy the code.
Type the code.
Get the output.
Leave the lab.
That's it.
Some professors don't even teach anymore. They open a PDF on the projector and start reading directly from the book in broken English like an audiobook with low battery.
No energy.
No curiosity.
No real teaching.
Just finish syllabus and leave.
Students memorize everything, vomit it onto the exam paper, pass the semester, and suddenly society calls them engineers.
The syllabus is so outdated I feel like my grandfather studied the same thing. Even when universities say they "updated" the syllabus, they mostly rename subjects and add words like "AI," "Machine Learning," or "Data Science" to sound modern.
Nothing fundamentally changes.
And the saddest thing?
Many students enter engineering with genuine curiosity.
But somewhere between outdated classrooms, attendance pressure, memorized exams, lazy teaching, and placement fear, that curiosity gets beaten out of them.
Placement season is another psychological war.
Suddenly everyone starts panicking.
Friends who never cared about programming suddenly join Java courses, DSA bootcamps, aptitude training, MERN stack classes, AI workshops, anything that promises a job.
Some students cheat in online coding tests. Some memorize interview answers from YouTube. Some fake projects they downloaded from GitHub.
Not because they are evil.
Because they are scared.
Parents spent lakhs on education loans. Families are waiting for results. Relatives keep asking:
"Did you get placed?"
"What package?"
"Which company?"
For many students, engineering is no longer about building things.
It becomes survival.
After graduation, both categories of students face the same question:
"What now?"
Many still don't even know what engineering truly is.
So they join a web development course, learn React or MERN stack, build a basic website, and start applying for jobs.
If you ask many graduates how a computer actually works internally, what lexical analysis is, how compilers work, or what computer architecture means, they often don't know.
And honestly, it's not fully their fault.
The system trained them to pass exams, not to think like engineers.
Today, people from arts, commerce, mechanical engineering, civil engineering -- everyone ends up doing the same programming courses:
Java.
Python.
MERN stack.
Now AI and ML.
Then they all enter IT jobs because software is where the money is.
India doesn't really produce enough passionate engineers.
It produces degree holders chasing stability.
Post a Backend Engineer job on LinkedIn and you'll get thousands of applications from people with completely different educational backgrounds all competing for the same role.
Some are talented.
Some are lost.
Most are just trying to survive.
India has millions of engineering students.
But very few are actually taught how to become engineers.
Most are only taught how to become employees.