As many others have stated in this thread, your career is what you make of it. Especially when you first start out as a young engineer, aggressively seek work that interests you, and stretch your capabilities. You'll often find in industry there are all levels of effort/interest by your teammates. Promoting yourself as motivated and capable of learning.adapting to a constantly evolving work situation will quickly set you apart from the field.
Fortunately FIRST has provided many opportunities for you to practice those skills, in front of your mentors as well as judges and VPs during competitions
Advice aside, my day job is an electrical engineer for a "major defense contractor". What does this mean? On any given day, I could be:
- Writing C/C++ on an IBM AIX platform to do multi-threaded signal processing (parallel FFTs, IQ data manipulation, filtering, Doppler processing, etc).
- Writing C++ and MATLAB analysis and/or test equipment automation scripts. The fewer times you have click a mouse or push a button on an instrument the better!
- Writing VHDL for a variety of FPGA platforms, including one very similar to the FPGA inside the cRIO
- Hardware design, which for me is typically high-speed mixed signal circuit board designs with FPGAs, A/D and D/A converters, and RF signal chains.
- Mentoring junior engineers or supporting other engineers in specific subject matters such as phase noise, fiber optic interfaces, and RF design.
- Sitting in meetings or filling out reams of paperwork - well, you can't have fun every day...
Surprisingly I still use about 75% of the math and physics I learned in high school and college. Trig and trig identities get used pretty frequently in signal processing, linear algebra on an almost daily basis. Differential equations to some extent, and calculus at least in terms of series approximations to forumulae.