Love it.

I have a college degree, so I was expecting a different atmosphere. I'm pleasantly surprised at how different it is.

I went into electrical engineering tech. Most of my day is spent in hands-on instruction, and even the theoretical coursework is based around doing and understanding rather than memorizing and regurgitating. I really like that. We're given exercises and practical work and asked to determine what's up and to explain it by ourselves. Personally, I have a heavy auto-didactic bent and I've received nothing but support in my quest for reliable sources to learn from at my own pace, whereas in a more traditional academic format I often felt that teachers didn't have time for people who wanted to push forward on their own, so I stopped asking.

I discovered a pleasure I didn't know existed : manual work. I never did much of it. I assembled furniture, but that's about it. I'm one of many boys who were told a very fundamental lie : manual work is below you, you shouldn't bother with it, you wouldn't enjoy it. I'm from a poor family, I had no father figure and I was bookish, so I always was pushed towards college as a way to ensure my upwards mobility. As a kid, I was never encouraged to explore the manual side of things, not by my parents and definitely not by the school system, where shop class had long vanished, along with anything fun to do during recess (like playing tag or snowball fights).

I never questioned that my place was in college, and afterwards to some paper pushing job, but I always knew something was missing. I am still relatively new at more hands-on work, but now I know what that is : pride. It's one thing to learn through a book, it's another thing entirely to learn by doing, by experimentation and trial and error. All men like to tinker, and all men get an enormous high when what they're tinkering with ends up working as intended, period, end of story. I wish I had known this before I wasted so much time in college. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy learning theory, reading and researching, but it's not the same thing as doing, not at all. I never got the kind of satisfaction I do from setting up a simple project to make a LED flash on and off when I wrote elaborate papers on arcane points of labour law.

There's another thing I like about this. There are no women. I was expecting the token girl but my cohort is all guys, and there's a definite shift in the atmosphere as compared to college. Teachers make jokes that could easily get them sued. People are less guarded, they cooperate, they ask each other for advice, and they are less judgmental. I am extremely introverted and I have little social skills or graces (I am diagnosed with Asperger syndrome). Often, people would get on my case because of my quirks, even though I tried to hide them. A while ago, I decided that the best shot I had at being happy was to stop trying to be someone I'm not, learn to live with my idiosyncrasies and anyone who didn't like it could go fuck themselves (in other words, going my own way, but socially instead of sexually, if that makes any sense). If anything, I'm more strange and less approachable than before, but no one is trying to boost their social status by driving mine down - I've even had people come talk to me; I try to be friendly, but formal, as I'm only interested in discussing matters related to our mutual activity and not in making friends. I assume that's because there's nobody to impress, no pecking order to be established for access to females. Things just seem much more egalitarian without girls around.