You're an engineering student and you think you're never going to have to do meaningless work that you don't care about?

I don't even care what field your engineering degree is in (I'm betting software or a related field, since your responses here seem to indicate that you're nothing more than a Script Kiddie that got into a decent school), you're going to start out doing shit work that you don't care about. Especially if you're a programmer/coder/software engineer.

(Female, 34, my own career is in IT doing security work. Just so you know. I'm not "outside the industry" or "promoting my husband's career instead of mine" and I'm certainly not being sexist.)

I see this attitude out of so. many. kids your age. You pull off some "hacking" stunt or build some sort of emp/railgun/other "borderline illegal" project device and think "I'm The Shit!"

Then your first ten real jobs are doing boring shit work, like patching software to run ads on billboards, or building kiosks. And you tell your employer to piss off, you can do Real Work.

Which is how, ten years from now, you find yourself making 30K a year doing a job you hate - not unlike your mommy - because you never got it into your head that shit work you don't care about is the dues you have to put in to get to do what you want.

But no. Go ahead. Take your ability to fake extrovertism and your "interpersonal skillls" and turn that into a career in an industry where it's NOT about skills or projects - it's all about networking, who you know, who likes you, what company is impressed with your ability to interview, what you bring to a team when every other single applicant has the exact same education... and projects... that you do. Because trust me, little script kiddo - any little software project you've thought of, several hundred of your peers have thought of first.

You have to bring more to the table than arrogance and hacking. You have to do the shit jobs to meet the people who have the interesting ones. And nobody is going to bank on a newb.