Stuck in tutorial hell?
“I don’t know what I’m doing” , “I don’t have the right skills” “I’m not sure if this will ever workout for me”. You’ve probably heard this a thousand times while you’re pursuing engineering. Sometimes it’s just a “phase” or sometimes people completely shift career paths to get away from it.
In my case, what I experienced for almost 2 years was constantly running behind new things to learn them. Be it python, MATLAB, Arduino or anything else. It’s something I call “Learn em new, Learn em fast”. But when you get to the actual practice part of it or a real life problem, you feel stuck, then after a few attempts, you either give up or you turn to AI (let’s be honest it’s way faster and easier if someone else does it for you and that too for free, maybe that’s why we give in way too quickly).
Let’s talk about the learning part first. It feels absolutely cool to learn new things and there’s a specific reason behind it. Our brain is wired in such a way that even watching someone do a task that we have planned ahead feels good to us in the same way doing it does. Basically, the brain loves releasing dopamine so much that even watching a tutorial of “100 days of XYZ course” feels good instead of actually working it ourselves. Honestly, it’s great that you get out of your comfort zone and try to learn new things but it comes at the cost of practicing it.
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This phase is often described as “Tutorial Hell” and “Imposter Syndrome”. In simple words, it means that you’re forever stuck in a loop of learning things and never thoroughly knowing what it actually does, leaving you feeling like “imposters”.
There might be multiple reasons people go through this loop. It could be the early 20’s crisis to “figure” everything out or it could be the forced engineering by the cost of their hobbies. It could be the engineering market being way too saturated for freshers so even if they try to learn a 1000 things, they’re just stuck learning and not practicing.
Another reason could be not finding the “correct” guidance. If you go online and search about engineering concepts, you’ll see a “most asked in placement interviews” panel which indirectly makes the student placement driven and not conceptual or practice driven. For me, I feel it was all of this and being suddenly overwhelmed by the pressure of it. Imagine you’re 4 semesters into engineering and you still feel that you’ve improved in no areas of life.
I found myself stuck in the same loop for many semesters but that’s when I decided to pursue my interests and writing is one of them. I decided to practice a lot instead of learning something again and again. I write multiple drafts before I publish anything, I read for references and to improve my writing, I write multiple genres so that I’ll stay hooked, I do whatever it takes to keep myself engaged in practicing. It has helped me think more and enjoy it thoroughly.
So here’s to you not getting stuck in the loop and finally doing some work!
