Pivots, Engineers, and Visionaries: Brandon Jennings' Thoughts on My Pomona-Caltech-Georgia Tech Roads Ahead

In the TKS session this weekend, director Brandon Jennings -- UPenn MechE and MIT MS/MBA alum -- said that he had insights to share about college for those who had just received decisions and were making decisions. Having gotten into only one school I re-applied to this year, there weren't any urgent hard decisions on my mind, but like most ambitious interdisciplinary students a fair amount of ambiguity awaited me, so I scheduled a call with Brandon to get his perspectives.

My personal context is that I went from being a STEM kid growing up, to finding a deeper passion for humanities and social sciences in high school, to 180'ing and getting pretty far into a software/entrepreneurship career in my gap year after getting into Georgia Tech, to getting into a humanities-oriented liberal arts college (Pomona) and planning to pivot right back.

To me it seems like there are two paths ahead, humanities and tech. The former is a nice blank slate in front of me: I go to Pomona, I take media studies classes, I pursue relevant journalism, policy, etc. internships, I build out my network, and wait to see what paths open up in front of me. The latter is a weird criss-cross of compromises between my current pursuits and humanities opportunities I'm unwilling to give up. I could keep pursuing my startup, raising money and either taking another gap year or running it while at Pomona. I could take pre-engineering classes and strive to get an engineering degree from Caltech under Pomona's 3+2 program, opening doors in tech later on. My network here is already solid, and opportunities bountiful, but is this reason to pursue tech over a serious humanities career?

I asked Brandon about a vague idea for keeping engineering opportunities open. I was able to break into software and software entrepreneurship without formal education, and those who do get CS degrees credit most of their learning to their projects and work experience anyways. "In engineering industry or entrepreneurship, how much are relevant skills learned in classes vs. on the job?" I asked.

It's not the knowledge that engineering school is useful for, Brandon explained. You can learn that from a textbook. But it would be hard to replicate lab experience: experience using manufacturing machinery, for example, is not only a directly applicable skill, but also informs your CAD designs and other thinking. Thinking about my experience on robotics teams and research into Georgia Tech's competition teams, I knew what Brandon meant: like any other kind of problem-solving work, engineering is not like answering questions on a math test for which there are set curriculums and materials, but is instead a creative process that requires broad and deep experience-derived intuition. This is what an engineering degree, with classes requiring lab work and real experience, gets you.

Brandon offered an interesting perspective on going to a school like Caltech (i.e. through Pomona's 3+2 program) vs. Georgia Tech. The best SpaceX (where Brandon worked) employees are Georgia Tech and other "good" tech school grads, Brandon tells me, because they feel lucky to be there and will be loyal employees, staying for 6-7 years. In contrast, Caltech, MIT, and Stanford grads only stay for 1-2 years, because "they can go anywhere and they know it." Because it's so selective and prestigious, Caltech is a totally different kind of environment with totally different students, Brandon tells me: grads from these schools are the visionaries and leaders rather than the talented technical workers of the world.

Hearing about and seeing my interdisciplinary interests in both humanities and tech -- me seeing them as two fundamentally similar fields rather than diametrically opposing ones -- Brandon tells me that there are many others who aren't completely attached to engineering. At UPenn, only half of his classmates studying engineering took engineering jobs upon graduating; others went into consulting, finance, politics, grad school, etc. Many people go into engineering and STEM because they are useful to study in today's world, not because they want to spend their careers entirely in these fields, Brandon explains. There are plenty of opportunities to pivot to a sector entirely outside of tech: a nuclear engineer might become a management consultant, then a writer for the New York Times.

My key takeaway from this conversation is that careers are long, and not nearly determined by your undergrad major, or even what school you choose to go to. Knowing this, I came to appreciate Pomona even more: it would be easy for me to dive into studies and career opportunities in the humanities, while paths are open to one of the most prestigious of engineering educations. At Pomona, I can explore without exploration being a delay or distraction, finding my way by choosing a path and starting to run instead of ruminating at the junction.

Hard decisions still lie ahead. Should I take another gap year to pursue my startup, or treat it as only a learning project and shut it down before raising money and taking on investors' expectations? At Pomona, I'll only have a semester or two before deciding whether or not to fulfill pre-engineering requirements and pursue two years at Caltech. Still, just as I don't at all regret my pivot into tech this past year, getting those two semesters of experience will be far better than trying to choose, and thus close, doors at this moment.

"There's no wrong move to make right now," Brandon tells me. I'm in a position many at far more prestigious schools would probably envy 😁