Our class teacher asked who was planning on engineering. Almost every hand went up. Not most — almost every one, in a room of forty-odd people with completely different personalities, hobbies and marks.

That struck me as statistically weird. So over the next two weeks I asked people, one at a time, casually: why engineering? Not to argue. I genuinely wanted to know. Nearly every answer I got fell into one of four groups, and only one of them was actually a reason.

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Answer 1: "Scope hai"

This was the most common by a distance. Engineering has scope. Good scope. Best scope.

So I started asking the obvious follow-up: scope for what, exactly? Which job, doing what, in which industry? Almost nobody could finish that sentence. A few said "IT" and stopped. One person said "abroad" and that was the whole answer.

Forty people, one plan. That's the part worth being curious about.

I'm not saying they're wrong that engineering opens doors — it genuinely does, it's a solid, flexible degree. I'm saying "scope" was doing an enormous amount of work in that sentence while meaning almost nothing. It's a word that ends the conversation instead of starting it. And a plan you can't describe in one specific sentence isn't really a plan yet, whichever field it's in.

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Answer 2: "Papa ne bola"

The second group was honest about it, which I respected. Parents decided, or parents strongly suggested, and that was that.

Here's the thing though — I asked a few of them what their parents actually said, and it usually wasn't "you must be an engineer." It was closer to we want you to be secure. Those are very different instructions, and the second one has more than one correct answer.

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Answer 3: "Sab kar rahe hain"

Everyone else is doing it. All my friends are joining the same coaching. It's what people from our school do.

I want to be careful here, because this reason gets mocked and it shouldn't be. Following your group is a genuinely sensible instinct — usually the crowd knows something. But a crowd of sixteen-year-olds mostly knows what the crowd before them did. That's not information about you. It's an echo.

And there's a cost nobody mentions: if you enter a field with a hundred thousand people who chose it the same passive way, you're competing against all of them at exactly the thing they're all also doing. The people who do well in a crowded field are almost always the ones who chose it on purpose, because they're the ones still interested at 11pm in year three.

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Answer 4: the actual answer

Then there was the small group. Maybe six people out of the whole class.

One of them fixes things — actually fixes them, has taken apart a mixer and a cooler and put both back together. One had built a working line-follower robot and could talk about it for twenty minutes. One just really, visibly likes maths, in a way that isn't about marks.

The six who could finish the sentence. That's the whole difference.

These six gave me answers with a noun in them. Not "scope" — circuits, structures, code, machines. They'd done something, however small, before choosing. They might still change their minds, and that's fine. But they were choosing, not defaulting.

To be extremely clear: this is not an anti-engineering article. Engineering is a strong, versatile, genuinely useful degree, and for those six it's an obviously good fit. The problem was never the field. It's that thirty-four people picked the same thing as the six without doing what the six did.

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The test I now use on myself

After all those conversations I ended up with three questions, and I'd offer them for whatever you're considering — engineering, design, medicine, law, anything:

1. Can you name the actual job? Not the degree, the job. What you'd be doing on a Tuesday. If you can't, you've chosen a word, not a career.
2. Have you tried the smallest version of it? Written code, sketched a design, shadowed someone, built one thing. Two weekends of trying beats two years of assuming.
3. Whose voice is it in? Say the reason out loud. If it comes out in your father's phrasing or your friend's, that's worth noticing before you commit four years.

You don't need to pass all three today. But if you fail all three, you haven't decided anything yet — you've just gone along with something, and going along with something is how people end up in year three of a degree they can't explain choosing.

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And if you get it wrong?

You'll survive, and I want to say that clearly because the pressure around this makes it feel otherwise.

Plenty of people finish an engineering degree and go into design, writing, business, civil services, teaching, or something that didn't exist when they enrolled. The degree isn't a life sentence and the first choice isn't the last one. What actually costs you is spending four years on autopilot — not the field you picked, but not paying attention while you were in it.