Hi i'm 17 and live in NSW Australia.
I'm not so confident in my maths skills and shit at it, so i have chosen to do an advanced diploma electronics at TAFE (Mount Druitt). I all ways wanted to design electronics for power electronics or digital electronics systems for PCB for GPU's. Do you think TAFE is an good starting point for this ? I know i won't be an engineer but more of an technician with that advanced diploma qualification. The head teacher of electrical/electronics at the Mount Druitt TAFE has an YouTube channel/website. With his videos/website what he uses to teaches in the courses at TAFE. I have been looking at this for an while now. Can you look at the links below and then and judge them to see if they are technical for what i wanna do and give me some guidance if i'm making the right choice ?
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChwUMjD6ed5KhQbO1gLm9fQ/videos
http://www.learn.org.au/
This is my first post on this forum and I feel I must reply to this as its far too important. You are our future right now and its imperative you understand a few things, you might not just yet but hopefully you will.
I'm not so confident in my maths skills and shit at it,
Ok, this is the comment that made me comment. When graduated from HS, I was not great at maths.....and I'm still not.....but it didn't hold me back and actually benefited me in the long run. I'll tell you my story.
The fall after I graduated HS I went on to community (Junior) college and took College Algebra. Everything was ok until we got to matricies and I fell on my face. I mean, I didn't just NOT get them. I didn't get them so hard that I told myself that there was no way I could be an engineer and get through the calculus "Trifecta" if I couldn't even get past this. So.....I dropped out of college. My first semester.....done. I then went to work in a hardware store because I was good with mechanics and machining, plumbing, electrics, etc. Then went to work as a machinist for $7/hr in a dirty place called Scot Industries (some might know that name actually!). After that I was hired at another company for $9.25/hr doing assembly of utility distribution systems for kitchens and large facilities. I had drafting experience from HS and that coupled with my talent for mechanical things allowed me to move from the shop and into the office into Sales Engineering....then into Production Engineering and then into R&D. I flourished there.
The company was consolidated and I lost my job after 7 years and was unemployed but at the time there was an incentive program for displaced workers. You could go to school while on unemployment for retraining for what I thought was 2 years. During that time I took 4 classes a semester in Industrial Electricity, PLC programming, etc. I loved it. Unfortunately I didn't understand something with the program and my benefits ran out after a year.....full stop. So I had to jump back into the workforce and drop school which broke my heart. I went back to a shit job working in a place that makes bumpers for trains but 4 weeks later Mitutoyo Corporation (yes, the company that makes calipers and micrometers) reached out to me and offered me a job as a CNC screw machine operator for $15/hr compared to the $9 I was making. I jumped at it in a heartbeat. After 2 weeks there I was promoted from L1 to L3 machinist and the managers learned I had an engineering background. They asked me why I was working in a machine shop and I told them that I had to pay the bills to live and I had no degree. They had no room to move me into the office at the time but they were very intrigued and moved me off the production line and into the machine shop machining special projects and specialized short run measuring items for customers as well as doing the precision grinding and shaping of the screw machine tooling from blanks. After 4mo there, I was approached by my current company and they made an offer for $43k/yr as a design engineer. I gave my notice at Mitutoyo and on my last day, a cake was brought out for me with a card signed by everyone in the shop.....and signed in Japanese by the managers in the office. One of the managers from Japan told me that he knew right away that if Mitutoyo didn't get me into the office, someone else would and he lamented that they didn't have the opportunity yet to take advantage of it. I obviously made an impression and it made me feel amazing for once.
At my current company, I have been there since 2004 and have done everything from Design, to R&D to new product to test to....you get the idea. I have a patent for which I am the sole inventor (very rare in a company these days) and I have a good future there. In 2010 I became single again after 4 years and after some soul searching, I decided to try maths again. The spring of 2011 I registered at College of Dupage and tested into College Algebra and while I did receive an A in the class, it was so taxing on me that I told myself I cannot do it and gave up again. This was the 3rd time I have given up on school.
Fast forward to 2015. I had a knee surgery in Feb of that year and was off work on disability for 3mo because of not being able to drive and sitting at home that long makes you think about things. I asked myself "Brian, what is your endgame? Do you truly love what you are doing right now? What are you going to do if you lose your job again? Are you marketable? Are you going to get lucky again?"
That June I went back to work and dove back into the mess. That summer, the questions I had asked myself while recovering in the spring haunted me. It all came to a head that August when I had a blowup with some mates and I told myself "Quit screwing around, this is not you. You need to graduate from college with your engineering degree and then you can soar." So, that fall I took an Algebra refresher course and in the Spring of 2016 I started Pre Calculus 1; I struggled but passed with a B+. Oh and BTW, I friggin OWNED matrices!!! My professor spent some time with me until I had that "Ah HA!" moment and after that, I just got them. Feeling confident, I enrolled in Pre Calculus 2 over the summer and it became apparent that was a mistake and ended up withdrawing a month later. That fall I retook PC2 and got an A.
In the spring of 2017 it was time for the big league...Calculus. It was only 1 month into Calc1 that I knew I was WAYYY over my head. I ended up withdrawing at the last withdraw date and felt like a failure. I spent that summer lamenting about it and wondering if this was right. Maybe I wasn't meant for engineering. Maybe I wasn't a "maths person." I was determined though and I enrolled in Calc1 again in the fall of 2017, this time a much more difficult professor. He was really not very nice but I was not going to let that deter me and I kept at it. I spent a lot of time talking to my prof after class so he know my situation and could give me some guidance. I ended up withdrawing from that class as well but he let me still sit in on lecture so I still went to class every week as if I was in class but I sat in the hall during tests. This really showed him my dedication and I will tell you this....professors talk to each other. More on that later.
So this was 2 withdraw from Calc1.....it was personal now. I was determined to not give up no matter how many times I took the damn class. I make enough money now where the cost of class is a fraction of one of my paychecks....its not about the money at this point. I am going to learn and get good at calculus and thats the end of it.
I enrolled in Calc1 for the 3rd time in the Spring of 2018 and got the same professor again. Long story short.....I ended up getting a B- in that class. See, at COd there is a bit of an unwritten understanding with the professors in upper level maths. If you don't withdraw and you are not going to pass, they will withdraw YOU from the class as they will not allow a student who pours their heart into a class, to get an F on their transcripts. After class was over with, my professor told me that he felt confident in not letting me withdraw this time and not withdrawing me because he saw a defined transition in my examinations that told him I was understanding now and wasn't just doing things from memory. He knew I got it at that point and knew I was ready as I could be for Calc2.
Over the summer, I spent every day in the Learning Commons Maths center basically working my way though the Calc2 part of the book to give myself a leg up for the fall. Calc2 is notoriously difficult so I wanted to have the best chance at passing it the first time around. As class went by this past fall, I slowly and slowly got behind. I just can't uptake the information fast enough....its how my brain works. I ended up withdrawing from Calc2 on Nov. 14th this past fall. I felt terrible again....I felt a failure like never before. Its weighed heavily on me to be honest. My first night at class for my 2nd try at Calc2 is tomorrow night at 7pm and I am apprehensive but I am going to give it what I have.
There is a lot missing from this story....the amount of work I put in and its something that is nearly impossible to explain. For my 2nd and 3rd round at Calc1 and 1st round at Calc2, I spent easily double to amount of time studying that other students would. I would go to the math center after work until 8pm every day I didn't have class. I had 2 tutors and went twice a week (1hr each). I spent sat and sunday in the math center for 3hrs each day. Thats on top of spending every lunch hour on a white board and both 15min breaks as well doing maths. I became notorious at COD and still am. I became a fixture in the math center and I had no shame in that I kept failing.....but it became very known to all the professors that I was in it for the long haul. Once you cross that threshold....they take notice and you begin getting respected in a very different way and you begin getting help others might not get. My tutors now tutor me outside of school and they do it for free because they enjoy tutoring me. What I leaned through all this is that I learn differently that others.....I must understand something and not just know it. I must understand its inner workings, why it works, how it works, etc. Not just memorize it for an exam and then done. It was apparent to my professors and tutors that a passion for maths was growing inside of me and they began nurturing it.
I still suck at maths.....but I refuse to give up and now....I am minoring in maths.
My point to all of this is do not sell yourself short, do not tell yourself you cannot do something because once you do, you begin to REALLY believe it. Everyone says "Don't live in the past, everything happens for a reason."
I regret few things but one thing I do regret.....dropping out of school 3 times. Learning higher level maths when you are 41 is horribly difficult. My brain is far less flexible than your 17yo brain and I would sell my soul to the devil to go back to 2003 and find a way to stay in school or to 2011 and tell myself I can do it and to just stick it out. It breaks my heart because I know I would have my degree now and be in a better place doing better things.
Enroll in the hardest classes you can. The worst thing that happens is that you have to take them again. Ignore the money.....you can always make more of that. You can't make more time.
The only good thing I have to show for my regret is I am a sole inventor on a patent for a very technical device and a patent is one of the holy grails for any engineer. Thing is, I would trade that patent for a degree anyday.
I know i won't be an engineer but more of an technician with that advanced diploma qualification.
Enroll in engineering classes, do it. You will not regret it in 10 years time. I promise you.
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