Three things retail taught me about studying engineering
A year at a till and in a kitchen turned out to be better preparation than I expected.
Before I wrote a single lab report, I spent about a year working in shops and kitchens in Ploiești. At the time it had nothing to do with engineering. Looking back, three habits from that work made my first year of university much easier.
1. A queue is a system
When six people are waiting and one of them has a problem with their receipt, you cannot stop and panic. You work out what the bottleneck is, fix that, and move on. My first programming assignment felt the same: the program was not broken, it was just slow in one specific place, and I had to find that place before I could fix anything.
2. Details are the whole job
At the till, a one-digit mistake is not a small mistake — at the end of the day the money either matches or it does not, and it is your name on the report. Engineering problems have the same shape. A missing minus sign is not approximately right.
3. You have to explain, not just know
A customer does not care that something is technically correct. They care whether they understand what to do next. I still get this wrong in my own writing: I explain the method and forget to explain why anyone would want it. Explaining is a separate skill from knowing, and it only improves if you practise it on people who have no reason to be patient with you.
None of this is on a syllabus. All of it shows up in a lab group.