Comment by aiwejrlaiwj

A really top-tier robotics engineer is going to be a generalist across mechanical, electrical, and several software domains, and then also a specialist, deep expert in one or two of those. So I'd recommend doing a bit of everything then picking a specialty to learn in depth. Build a really simple kit robot and then program it to do simple stuff using ROS. Write a few ROS nodes from scratch to do something simple, things that existing ROS nodes already do. Then learn why the STL ROS options are (most likely) better than yours.

I strongly recommend taking the generalist approach. It makes you a much better engineer in the long run. I had a friend call me up enraged one day. He got woken up at 1am and ordered to drive across the state to get a site back up and running because his hardware was broken and the very expensive software team was sitting around wasting their time. So he got to the site at three or four AM and found that the room full of software engineers, three PhDs among them, didn't understand that BOTH of the battery terminals needed to be connected. Yes, batteries in fact have a positive and a negative. And these people were each getting paid twice as much as him. He left that company and became hardware leadership at a much better company, thank goodness. My point is, super-specializing in the most profitable hyper-niche right off the bat is going to make you a very mediocre robotics engineer who might be successful in the short term, but might find yourself unemployed in a few years when we find a better modality to replace your hyper-niche. Specialists win the sprints, generalists win the marathons.