Why I Left Engineering to Teach

On a typical day, I get to the office around 6:40 am. The lights are off and the office is quiet. The president is usually there. He’s on a call with someone in the Chicago office. I settle in, open my task manager, and get started with the day’s work.

Around 8 am, the principal in the office next to mine arrives. He hops on a Zoom call and closes the door. The president’s door is also closed because he is also in a meeting. They don’t emerge from their offices until lunch. Each grab a bite to eat and head back for more meetings.

A day filled with meetings terrifies me. I sit through an hour of construction updates waiting for my turn to speak. My contribution is two minutes of structural updates. The meetings kept me from my favorite parts of the job, problem solving and collaborating with others.

So I decided to stay on the technical side to focus on analysis and design. I crafted the job to fit what I wanted to do. This should have made me happy. For a while it did. I was paid well and did things I enjoyed for the most part. But the feeling faded as the years went by.

I felt my job was to help developers and contractors meet deadlines and pad their bottom lines. I didn’t see the downstream effects on the people actually using the buildings. If we got attention, it wasn’t because of our brilliant calculations. We got pulled into lawsuits when the concrete cracked or the floor wasn’t perfectly leveled.

I didn’t just sit with these feelings. The plan was to make enough money with a side hustle to fund a year-long sabbatical. I would use the time to discover what I wanted to do instead of engineering.

I started this blog in 2015 as a way to emulate my favorite writers. The blog gained a bit of traction with a piece I wrote about the SE exam. I made a bit of money in affiliate sales. I loved writing (and still do) but I never found a way to make real money from it.

During the pandemic, I started a YouTube channel about trading cards. I pivoted to making videos about Axie Infinity, a web3 game, after one of my videos on how to beat a certain level went viral. I got over 1500 subscribers and turned on ad revenue. That was a great feeling. But I couldn’t keep up with the grind of filming, editing, and posting videos every week. I also didn’t want to make another video on cartoon characters.

My most recent venture was trading cryptocurrency and stocks. I spent countless hours learning about order blocks, call spreads, and perpetual futures. But I still found it difficult to spot trades and execute setups on my own. I had to rely on tips from a subscription service to make money.

While these side hustles made money, it wasn’t enough to replace the income from my salary. I earned and saved enough to get halfway there depending on the price of Bitcoin and QQQ. At this rate, I would never get to take my sabbatical. So I decided it was time to seek advice from a life coach.

In our first conversation together, my life coach suggested we look at different possible careers. He recognized the side hustles were haphazard, like driving without a map. It would be better to first understand my values, strengths, and interests and use that as a guiding light.

From these sessions, I discovered I loved sharing what I learned with others. From my engineering job, I enjoyed figuring out the design and sharing the results with the clients. I enjoyed writing because I saw it as a way to share my knowledge with the world. I enjoyed my time in Teach for America because I got to share math with middle schoolers. I was also giving back to the public education system that I went through.

I got approached by a recruiter for an engineering teaching position at a private school during this time. It sounded like an amazing opportunity. I would have access to a workshop with 3D printers and laser cutters. I get to leverage my experience as an engineer and lead students through the design thinking process.

I stayed up late looking into the history of the school and running the numbers with the proposed salary.

I brought up the new opportunity with my coach at the next session. We had been working towards a career transition and one landed in front of me. I wanted a career with more purpose but not if it meant not being able to support my family. My coach provided an insight; support isn’t always financial, it could be the emotional support your family needs from being fulfilled.

After tucking in the kids, my wife and I sat in our bedroom and discussed the job offer in detail. I was hesitant to take the offer because of the pay cut. She asked, what if I took the money I already saved to make up the difference in pay? I could treat this as an experiment just like all my previous ventures.

I emailed the recruiter in the morning to accept the offer.

It’s been nine months since that decision but one moment stands out. During independent work time, a freshman asked if I played fantasy football. I confirmed. He showed me his roster and said he played in an 8-person league with his friends and former teacher. I made a passing comment that an 8-person league is easy since there are so many good players available. He shrugged off the comment but his face showed disappointment.

I tried to build a connection by offering that I selected Jayden Daniels with my first round pick. A smile flashed across his face as he responded that Daniels was a solid quarterback.

Tags: #career #engineering #teaching