I struggle with this issue. I have a MSEE and PhD (EE) (from Stanford to boot !) and I'm not sure if I learned anything value creating in my school years. At l

I struggle with this issue. I have a MSEE and PhD (EE) (from Stanford to boot !) and I'm not sure if I learned anything value creating in my school years. At least at the graduate level, I think a lot depends on your choices of courses. I biased toward Electromagnetism, and learned solution of PDEs. It taught me computational PDEs and building intuition for physical modeling of real world. It is certainly helping me in my "corporate" job. Yet I don't have a good answer when my dad asks 'what value are you creating'. My dad is also an EE and he has salt-of-the-earth understanding of systems, motors, 3-phase home wiring etc etc. He can fix those things in a crunch. I cant. Did Stanford teach me anything useful? I honestly don't know.