I am a 3rd-year B.Sc. student in Industrial and Production Engineering at AUST, Bangladesh. Three years into this programme and one thing has become clear to me: engineering today does not reward specialists who stay in one box. It rewards people who can connect dots across fields.
In my second year, I started learning mechanical design through SolidWorks. It began as coursework, but I got genuinely hooked. I ended up completing several real-world design projects that had nothing to do with grades.
Around the same time, near the end of the second year, I received a 250,000 BDT research grant to investigate biodegradable bio-implant composites. Getting funded that early in a degree is not something that happens often. I am not saying this to impress anyone. I am saying this because that experience completely shifted how I see research and what students at my stage are actually capable of.
This year, I started learning AI and machine learning. The honest reason is that my entire field runs on efficiency and optimisation, and that is exactly what machine learning does best. It felt less like switching directions and more like finding the missing piece.