EE undergrad preparation and difficulty

<p>I was wondering if any EE's that read this board were graduated or near graduation that might be interested in talking about their undergraduate experiences at their schools. I always wondered whether I should've gone to MIT over Rice, but in retrospect Rice was the only school for me due to medical issues with family, so I could do school and help out at the same time. Nevertheless, I think it would be cool to compare schooling with other students.</p>

<p>At Rice, the EE curriculum really doesn't begin till about Sophomore year if go about it as planned, but it's a nice mix of lab and theory. </p>

<p>EE 241 is the weed out course and involves all topics from circuit design with op-amps, transistors, etc up to coding schemes and signal processing topics. The lab is to build an optical telephone and communicate with some friends across a room.</p>

<p>242 involves making a mini elevator, position control system using phase locked loops and goes into schmitt triggers, 555 timers, the beginnings of motor design, filter circuits, transistor circuits, etc.</p>

<p>After that, most every course involves material and a project, and as I went with Signal Processing and Systems for my specialization, I did the following:</p>

<p>-Create an Eigenface algorithm for face detection
-Create a audio source separation algorithm
-Design a programmable AM transceiver
-Design an autonomous quadrotor (part of a course I designed and helped teach)
-Weiner filters for noise reduction in Image Processing
-Backprojection algorithm for Image Processing (what MRI machines do)
-Guitar Effects Processor with 4 effects + autotune
-Some digital logic stuff I don't remember involving verilog
-Made a breathalyzer</p>

<p>I was more of a signal processing guy and took a lot of math, but there was some good project work IMO.</p>

<p>Anyone else like to share their experience?</p>