Yes it's true. I was planning on being a Nuclear Engineer, as I thought that was cool at the time. But I took a graduate heat equations class, and long story short, it was the first time in my life I not only struggled in math, but hit a hard wall. During the break I showed my brother (BSEE SJSU, MSEE UCD) some of the equations I was struggling with the prior three weeks. He took 5 minutes, and then said, "Oh I see what is going on" drew a graph to demonstrate and solved it in a few seconds. That was the end of my ambitions to be a Nuclear Engineer. So I went back and did the upper division for BSCS deree at SJSU (CS is what all aspiring Engineers bail out to for work) and and have worked in that field as a Software Engineer for 25 years. (There is a fair chance that if any phone calls you make interact with an old land line switch that you are using some of the LCR and trunking code I wrote two decades ago).

Recently I got reacquainted with the course work as I helped my son understand some concepts at his school. He has done some cool work, such as fire evacuation code (obviously the Grenfell Tower did not follow any of the evacuation procedures my son worked on; WPI Prof for that project is one of the top worldwide experts). We like that school for our son because they do real product projects (he also has an app for UMass General) and currently he is doing a co-op in Arizona with a mining company. Techie family.