Looking back, I still cannot believe that a simple game dictated my career. Starting from high school I played Simpleplanes blindly but with wonder and curiosity in the world of practically infinite and boundless possibilities not constrained by money but by imagination. Actual Hobbies like woodworking or metalworking remained largely expensive to start and even more so continuing so something like roughly 5 dollars worth of an app and I can play around with roughly 80% of aerospace companies research and development can do with 70 years of experience, is something that sparked engineering in my soul.
Two days ago, I graduated college with a Bachelor of Science in Aeronautical Engineering, with both Simpleplanes and Simplerockets 2/Juno New Origins serving as my foundation. At surface level, these games are just games, but it taught me one crucial thing: Instinct. Who knew that about 8 years of obsessing various details of aircrafts for a fictional R and D company actually helped in a course that is about aircraft design, construction, evaluation. This gut feeling helped me a lot during my exams especially with computations. I knew something is off in my computation during exams because I did that scenario some time ago when testing maneuverability just to get it right to upload here in the site. The shear amount of relaunches or restarts and goofing around helped in my exams lmao.
Idk, its still absurd to think that a game helped me through college and just wanna share. This is not a goodbye post btw.
Good luck to me in my board exams to be a licensed engineer.