I have a degree in mechanical engineering with some 500-level shit in acoustics.

I'm taking machining and jewelry design.

Yeah, I took like 10 credits on the crystalline structure of steel. I took statics, I took dynamics, I took fluid mechanics, I took thermodynamics. That does not mean I know that you need to knock a couple notches out of your tools if you're working with brass because it'll pull through too fast otherwise. That's the kind of thing you learn in machining class. Which I learned when the instructor quizzed me on the spot to figure out if he'd be wasting my time. Which is more than I learned in my entire 300-level machining class at UW because the instructor was so checked out that he had me teach the welding section, and where the machine tools were the same as the ones I grew up with which were 80 years old at the time except the shit my dad owned hadn't been rode hard and put away wet by 60 years of undergraduate use. I've handled AK-47s with higher tolerances than those poor destroyed lathes.

I first ran AutoCAD in 1990. Doesn't mean I know how to drive Rhino.

I've sandcast aluminum. Doesn't mean I have a handle on .925 casting grain.

I wouldn't be taking these classes if I wasn't expecting them to be vital to my future. It was the same the first time around, except back then I didn't give a fuck what the classes were for.

I was a fuckin' terror in high school, but I never said a fuckin' word unless I was called on because I was too busy being depressed and mad and hating everyone (and yes, I was thrown out of four classes, permanently, in three and a half years). In college nobody ever called on me. I considered it a win if I made it through a class without anyone learning my name.