Got my ECE Bachelors after 6 years. If my dumbass can do it so can you.
To those of us that work part/full time during school, have severe burnout issues, or just plain are bad at school (all three in my case)...
YOU CAN DO IT.
For much of my past few semesters I've been riddled with so much doubt about my ability to get through it; feeling like I was going to once again disappoint my peers, friends, family, partner, etc. by having to drop yet another class, having to take another semester, having to miss out on other opportunities.
It didn't feel real until I went to my commencement ceremony this past Friday. Even after my last few finals went okay I was still assuming I made some mistake somewhere and I was gonna have to register for another semester last second.
One class that kicked my ass in 2nd year was Electromagnetic Engineering (Maxwell's, TEM waves, Transmission lines). I dropped that class initially after "failing" the 2nd midterm. I attempted the same class the following semester with a different professor, no dice, had to drop. Same story in Spring of 2024 and Fall of 2025. I never even got to Transmission Lines those four times I took the class (I got the concepts down in other courses, namely Power Systems & related).
They brought the professor whom I took it with in 2022 back to teach the class again this spring semester (apparently the largest registration for the course since the 90's?) and I signed up for it, expecting to fail once more.
Struggled with the same concepts again but with enough experience under my belt I got through the first two mid-terms with slightly above-average scores. When we finally got to waves and Transmission lines, bounce diagrams, impedance transformation, the dreaded Smith Chart, I found myself able to understand and learn and see the connections with the material in my other electronics, solid state devices, power systems courses, and even the astronomy/cosmology electives I took. It felt like cheating almost, like I learned this stuff the hard way through the courses meant for me to take AFTER Emag. Seeing the foundational stuff and how the concepts branch off to every other ECE discipline made everything I'd already studied click into place. The math wasn't abstract anymore. It was describing the things I'd built, measured, and debugged in every other class.
Pulled a solid B in the class while expecting to fail again (and realizing that I likely could've just not dropped it in 2022 and passed with the curve that professor gave. ʘ‿ʘ ).
Sorry for the rant I just wanted to get it off my chest, I don't have a good way to wrap things up other than to say that if you're a few semesters in and convinced you don't belong, or you're deep in it and feel like the finish line keeps moving, or you're staring at a withdrawal form right now wondering if it makes you a failure: keep showing up. The material doesn't care how many tries it takes you to get it. The degree doesn't either.
You can do this, I believe in you!