[jerf]

It's impossible to tell from this post whether there is a "real" skill gap. It is very easy to look around you in college and think everything is coming easily to everyone else, because you feel the work you're putting into something, but you don't really know or feel how much work other people are putting in. The higher you get into a good engineering program, the fewer of your peers are getting by just on raw talent and not much work. In fact there's a mass exodus every year from engineering programs as freshman who cruised through high school on natural raw talent and not much work encounter their first instance of needing to work in their life, and they can't handle that. The author certainly passed that bar which a lot of others do not, which puts her in the ~50% of those who start an engineering program at all right off the bat.