Not everyone is a team player type or likes to report daily to an intermediate supervisor and I can relate to that to some extent. If you want to be a future business owner, open source might be a good testing ground. No need to be a certified engineer to get started. All you need is a good idea or a solution to your own problem (others must have similar problem too unless you live on Mars). This will also hardly scale up to a full time job. You can do as much or as little while learning stuff and getting your degree. I think both sparkfun and adafruit were started by engineering students/grads with sparkfun's founder specifically trying to solve his own problem. Now sparkfun hires engineers for their own designs (you should see some of their old designs. I could do better).