Computer Engineering or Computer Science?

Graduate School
1

<p>I graduated from a relatively unknown private college with decent but not great grades in Electrical Engineering. I have some good progression in work experience and have been at my first job out of school for a year now. It's been on my mind the whole time that to really qualify for jobs I wanted I would need grad school, and I would probably need to quit my current job to go full-time.</p>

<p>What I'm doing right now is in a related-area that is very interdisciplinary, but doesn't practice most of what we learned in school from EE. I believe this is a common situation but I really really wanted to become expert in microelectronics and design and such. I am finding out most of those jobs require at least a MS and are primarily filled by those from India and China here in the US. I still wish to pursue it because I am passionate about the are of study. But the main question is, should I pursue a degree in CS instead? I have had a knack for picking up programming languages in the past, and the math we did in EE was way more difficult than linear algebra, etc. that is required in CS. I feel I would be happy in CS and the job opportunities for CS majors appear to be endless. The sacrifice I would be making is never really fulfilling the vision from my undergrad experience and playing catchup in graduate school to be desirable to jobs in software.</p>

<p>With computer engineering I was hoping to mostly focus on hardware, integrated circuit design, computer architecture, and maybe learn one scripting language like Python. But these jobs seem very competitive to get into.</p>

<p>On the other hand, CS exposes you to areas that interest me like: Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Cryptography. These to me, are applied areas of CS that hold a lot of potential as I would like my main focus to be these types of critical thinking skills rather than just programming.</p>

<p>What do you think? Can a EE be accepted into a MSCS program? Are the opportunities in the future going to be much better for a CS than a CE? Any insight would be of the valuable to me, as this is the best resource I know of for these types of questions.</p>

2

<p>It should be no problem with a Computer Engineering degree. You have had enough basic programming to not require any remedial CS courses. However, the question is whether what you really want to study and practice is really out of your reach. My suggestion is to do a bit of research, talk to programs that offer the microelectronics and see what their placement reate is before you decide to change to software engineering.</p>

3

<p>I don’t think this is the best resource for jobs/industry outlooks. But yes you can get a CS degree from an EE degree with likely less prereqs that other majors. You can get a job in software if you are an EE or CE major too. It is less likely for unrelated majors but there are tons of people in software with degrees in EE, CE, Physics and math. </p>

<p>I think the main question is why you want to give up on what you really want? Did you look into it enough that jobs are scarce? If they are hiring overseas people then they are not finding qualified people here. That indicates a shortage of labor in relation to jobs available, not overage. Do you know what they want as far as education and is it possible to get the qualifications desired? Seems software job which what you will have is an easy fallback job for EE or MS in anything technical esp CE.</p>