Chemical engineering teaches you to think in flows. Mass balances, energy balances, residence times — the language is built around things that move through systems and the conditions under which those systems break. It turned out to be unreasonably good preparation for data engineering, where the same questions get asked of bytes instead of molecules.
Four years at NIT Jalandhar, in equal parts heat-transfer textbooks and late-night code, gave me the first instinct that has shaped every job since: when a pipeline misbehaves, look at the bottleneck before you look at the code.