Comment by 7thaccount

It depends on what exactly you do as the industry is so vast.

It is true (I'd wager this is true in most engineering fields) that very few actually use a lot of what you learned in school as it has all been put into fancy software packages. For example, my wife uses some kind of drafting software to design things like roads that she learned all the math to understand in college. It is the same in my industry where yeah, you use a lot of spreadsheets and Python scripts and SQL to help automate software and analyze the results. In a lot of cases you don't really need an engineering degree, but it helps a lot in understanding what is going on when the results don't make sense. Getting the engineering degree is also just really good training for the kind of rigorous thought processes needed for solving open problems.

There are also plenty of jobs in power that are closer to what you would consider engineering. For example, you might have to go to the substation switch yard, help supervise a crew installing new transformers, help design a microgrid...etc.

I'll add that it is pretty common for engineers to have some kind of existential crisis once you graduate and you realize what you thought you'd be doing once you graduated (in my case crawling around Jefferies tubes and fixing the warp reactor) is totally different in the real world. It's kind of similar in computer science where most graduates are basically just gluing library code together instead of writing their own software from scratch in C. I recall reading somewhere that the famous SICP course moved from Scheme to Python precisely because of the change in how people coded now.