I’m currently trying to decide which type of engineering I should major in and if you went to or are in the CoE I’d like to know what type of engineering you majored in, what you liked about it, and what College you went to because that would help me out a lot. Thanks.
-I’m doing electrical engineering.
-I kind of have to narrow down what I like about electrical because it’s such a big field. From day 1, I was an analog guy. In high school, I built ham radios, I built audio amplifiers, I messed around with vacuum tubes, all that stuff. I didn’t care about the more mathematical (eg signal processing) or digital sides of the major. And to this day, I still really don’t. I’ve never been a math guy at all.
So my initial interest was analog, but what made me stick with it was finding out just how non-math intensive it really is. I mean, I’ve done graduate classes in it where you just eyeball all the circuits on an exam. “Derive this transfer function by inspection” sounds scary, but once you know basic amplifier models, you can literally solve it in your head. I LOVE how concrete it all is. You can design an amplifier on simulation software, and after a bit of experience, you develop feel for how to tweak it to get more gain or cut distortion by changing certain components. There’s no “use calculus to orthoganalize this vector” or any of that. You do a lot of it by intuition.
The downside of analog is the projects, both in school and in industry. Analog labs in classes (at least at my school) get very long and demanding, far more so than other EE topics. And in designing analog circuits in research or industry, much of it is driven by tape-out (i.e., fully designing a circuit, and having a physical layout ready to be manufactured) schedules with VERY hard deadlines.
-I’m going to Texas A&M, which is a giant state school, and it’s all right. You definitely get the “face in the crowd” feeling in lectures, where even upper level classes have 50+ students, but going to professors’ office hours helps shrink it quite a bit. And if you go to grad school, there’s quite a few advantages to going to a big research university.
I’m majoring in electrical engineering.
I choose EE because in high school AP physics I liked the circuits and E&M components way more than classical mechanics. I didn’t have any engineering experience in high school clubs just did well in school and focused on other activities I found more fun.
EE is definitely a tough major because a lot of it we can’t see in the real world so the intuition doesn’t come as naturally. Unlike @KF7LCE analog circuits, VLSI and any kind of embedded system is not by concentration. I don’t like circuits but I’m good at physics so I chose the Communications side of EE. That involves a lot of dealing with E&M waves and maxwell equations. Plus I’ve taken a lot of signal processing courses to go along with that and that is very math intensive.
This specialty can get hard and boring because it ends up being a lot of math but at least it’s somewhat systematic. The homework sets are very long and any kind of signal processing has a lot of matlab which is pretty tedious.
I go to UCLA where the engineering focuses a lot on the theory and we have a chance to do hands on work in lab classes. But everyone hates doing labs.