<p>For those ESEs, what are your specializations? My school has 3, General, Microelectronics, and Telecommunications. I don't really know what I'm interested in. Which one has a better future career? BTW, I'm a girl...</p>
<p>What does you being a girl have anything to do with your specializations? In my experience the toughest is Microelectronics. Telecommunications is really math-intensive and I don't know what General is. Take some undergrad courses in all the areas and see what you like.</p>
<p>just choose whichever one interests you</p>
<p>Nobody knows the future, so if we told you a particular field is better than the other, we would be lying to you. Pick something you're interested in, try to keep yourself diverse, and be open to learning new things.</p>
<p>only 3? my school has 7,8. Besides, we can choose to do mix and match between courses, capstones, labs, and technical electives too.</p>
<p>It's up to you to choose. If you find circuit courses interesting and easy, pick microelectronics. If you like communications courses, choose telecommunications. If you don't like either, choose general :D</p>
<p>Thanks a lot guys. I think I will choose telecommunications. Happy New Year ~~</p>
<p>My school offers specializations in Power, Telecommunications, Microelectronics, Avionics, Biomedical Engineering, Automation and Space Technologies. It's also possible not to specialize in anything and follow the general curriculum.</p>
<p>I would recommend checking out the classes offered in the different specializations and choosing the one that offers the classes you like the most. You will still end up graduating with an EE degree no matter what and future employers won't really care what specialized classes you took. You might as well take the ones that interest you the most.</p>
<p>More often than not there is an overlap these days. My elective coursework/research interests are in a mix of signal processing, communications, and integrated circuits. As someone interested in realistically practical fields, I personally was put off by the math-intensiveness of the work in academia in the area of communications as a standalone field. </p>
<p>I mean, you can really combine any fields these days. One of the hot issues out there right now involves trying to design low-power anything, be it dsps (digital signal processors), wireless communications, transistors, and the list goes on.</p>
<p>In just about every academic field, there is a lot of 'inter-disciplinary pollination.' From a practical standpoint, the best practical knowledge you can get out of an undergradate EE/degree specialization, is simply a good foundation to learn more in-depth knowledge later on. Every employer is different, engineering is a diverse practice, lots of answers to solve 1 problem. So basically, your employer will need to train you on a bunch of practices they use within their business (which may or may not be the same as the practices used at the next door competitor.) That's something which isn't useful to teach in the university-level, because practices go in and out of fashion like T-Shirts and pants.</p>
<p>This doesn't answer your question directly. In general you'll want a good balance of 'vocational' and 'theoretical' coursework to give you the best chance of starting a job on the ground running. It's up to you to determine your strongpoints and weakpoints, and polish up on areas for improvement. Many universities offer 'extension engineering courses' (web-programming, DSP-programming, low-power design for digital logic, etc.) which emphasize vocational/practical techniques more than theory. Regrettably, I think these cost a lot of $$$, since at must unis, they're offered outside the undergraduate school, and aimed at the professional market ("continuing education")</p>
<p>At my undergrad school, I picked signals & systems for my specialization, which amounts to 3-4 extra tech-electives. (At UC Irvine, that was digital communications, digital signal processing, and 1 other i forget.) It was enough to give me a feel for the subject matter, but not enough to do industry-level work in that field (not without subsequent training and workplace mentoring!)</p>
<p>As for what has the best career prospects, well everything in engineering is circular. What's hot today might be out of fashion tomorrow, and yesterday's technology might become hot again the day after tomorrow. For the short-term at least, low-lower anything is important (but that's a broad, broad application with many different meanings.) DSP is the most 'accessible' from an undergrad standpoint. Transistors, wireless-comm really need a lot of advanced math and practice to reach a marketable-skill in industry.</p>