<p>Why is Electrical Engineering considered harder than other disciplines, is it because you cant see it?</p>
<p>Yes.
But I just want to remind you that,many disciplines involve lots of things that you can't see.EE is not the only one.</p>
<p>Not harder than Cen</p>
<p>To use structural engineering as an example because you can obviously see things like steel girders and concrete slabs, most of what I do actually involves figuring out the forces that flow through the steel girders and concrete slabs... but you can't see that flow of forces. So I don't think that not being able to see what you're working with is what makes people perceive electrical engineering as being difficult.</p>
<p>I also am not at all convinced that electrical engineering is the "hardest" engineering discipline. I personally think it's perceived that way just because electrical engineers are particularly whiny. ;)</p>
<p>It depends on what you do in EE really. As an EE grad specializing in semiconductor devices, I must disagree with you aibarr. The learning curve is extremely steep, requiring classes in quantum mechanics to serve as a baseline.</p>
<p>Dr.Horse, Electrical and Computer Engineering are generally lumped together, but I'll agree that CE is harder than the easiest EE subdisciplines like circuits. The difficulty just doesn't approach things like signals or E/M though.</p>
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The learning curve is extremely steep, and unlike other engineering disciplines you need more than calculus/differential equations to really grasp some topics.
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<p>As someone whose brother is an EE grad specializing in chip architecture, I can tell you that I've compared notes with him and that our fields are similarly complex. I find it unfortunate that you think that my mathematics education ended with calculus and differential equations, and I resent the implication that the topics in the upper eschelons of my field don't require a thorough grasp of difficult concepts.</p>
<p>You want signals? Welcome to seismic engineering and dynamic analysis.</p>
<p>It can vary widely by school.</p>
<p>You can look at it like this: No majors are usually inherently harder than any other majors. It is just the percentage of people that understand them. An engineer might be great at math but horrible at writing essays. Therefore, to him, English would be a much more difficult major.</p>
<p>The difference though, between the different majors is a) the number of people that enjoy them and b) the number of people that are capable of doing them. English may have more people that fit into both categories than EE. </p>
<p>In conclusion, I feel EE is less enjoyed by most. A lot of people end up transferring out depending on the college. Sometimes statistically as well as verbal, higher rates of transfer-outs = harder. BUT, it could, and probably does equal the fact that many people may just not enjoy it.</p>
<p>I still disagree with the idea that all majors are inherently equal; it is my opinion that disciplines with less salient concepts are more difficult, of which electrical has less than say mechanical, of which math/physics has less than enginineering. As the topics become more fundamental and less related to specific, every day examples, I believe that's what constitutes difficulty.</p>
<p>Edit: My previous reply wasn't in good taste, apologies.</p>
<p>(np, I've had days like that...)</p>
<p>You make a good point, in the less-salient-concepts thought... I hadn't thought about it in those terms, and that sounds like it might just be the answer to the OP's question... I just disagree with you when you say that electrical has more of those types of concepts to deal with than mechanical or structural engineering... I think it's widely known that there's some out-there-ness to EE, and maybe that's why it's perceived as being more difficult, particularly in comparison to the very generally-accessible concepts that one sees in undergraduate civil and mechanical curricula... (Any idiot who's put his or her hand on a hot stove knows something about thermodynamics, and pretty much everyone who drives past construction can probably figure out what's going on, but when I press the magical button on my computer and it turns on, there's something very black-box going on in there...) </p>
<p>I just think you're missing the fact that there's a <em>lot</em> more to mechanical and structural engineering than meets the eye... And the further you get into your graduate studies as a mechanical or structural engineering student, the less salient and more not-in-Kansas-anymore it gets. In fact, the weird thing about higher science and engineering is that at the top, where you end up at the forefront of what's known about your field, all the disciplines begin to merge... That's a weird thing to witness.</p>
<p>I've cited a previous anecdote where I was on a road trip with my friend, the physics doctoral candidate who once explained to me what her research is about. She started off by saying, "Oh, it's really easy." and that's where I stopped understanding... Anyhow, we were on a roadtrip from Chicago to Boston for a friend's wedding, and she started talking about this horrendous advanced theoretical mechanics course she'd had to take that semester. She then started to plow through a generic overview of the curriculum. I resigned myself to not being able to understand a thing that she was talking about when things suddenly started to sound familiar... Tensor calc, check... Obviously my genius physics friend would know about Einstein notation, too... okay... Wait, constitutive theory?? ... hold on, <em>now</em> she's describing Ritz approximations!! .. The finite deformation form of the principle of virtual work??? </p>
<p>o_O</p>
<p>Dude, that's my graduate structural mechanics course. Some of the terms were a little different, and the theorems were often named after Physics dudes instead of Engineering dudes, but it was the same stinkin' course.</p>
<p>Point being, it doesn't matter which discipline you're in. If you delve into it far enough, you're going to start seeing the same fundamental theories over and over. Every discipline eventually focuses on the smallest workable bits and pieces that those scientists and engineers work with, and how those bits and pieces behave, so it's logical that eventually we all find our way to the same fundamental laws of physics. So, if that's your definition of difficulty, that the topics become more and more fundamental and less related to specific, everyday topics... darned if we don't all get there eventually...!</p>
<p>I thought you civs were just construction workers with TI-89's</p>
<p>^ Lmao........</p>
<p>I wouldn't cheese off the person who has the tower crane operator at the other end of her two-way radio, there, champ.</p>
<p>I think the main reason why EE is viewed as more difficult than other engineering majors is because a lot of the concepts are more abstract than what most people are used to. I've encountered many times where I've had several people explain to me a concept, read text on it, tried to find a visual analogy, and not have an epiphany of understanding until weeks later.</p>
<p>It might also be that because of the abstract material, different people learn different ways to do things, so it becomes hard to communicate (and a lot of times hard to learn all the ways; a lot of times you just end up sticking to one). So when you get stuck doing a problem YOUR way, and no one around you does it that way, tough luck.</p>
<p>I think it's kind of dumb to say it's the definite hardest though, because it's a very subjective matter.</p>
<p>Yeah, I'll definitely agree that "hardest" is a very subjective term. I have a really difficult time in courses where everything is based off of math with very few physical concepts tied in. Other friends I have find it nearly impossible to reason through what's going to happen give a situation unless they're given an explicit set of equations they can work around with. I think that's what makes some of us experimentalists and some of us theoreticians. :)</p>
<p>Like many others before have stated, I think one of the reasons EE is viewed as more difficult than most other engineering majors is because some of the concepts can be very abstract. For example: the convolution operator. That took me forever to grasp.</p>
<p>And it also depends heavily on what you are interested in. Difficulty can range widely between device physics, analog design, digital design, and computer engineering.</p>
<p>We get convolution in materials science. When you're doing any sort of x-ray diffraction there's multiple things being convolved (?), as well as in TEM work when there'd diffraction going on.</p>
<p>As aibarr said above, just about any method you find in one form of engineering will be found somewhere in another. I was actually pretty amazed when I started doing some higher level thermo stuff and it turns out that you use very similar methods for determining stuff in information theory stuff that I had thought were useless abstract math concepts.</p>
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It depends on what you do in EE really. As an EE grad specializing in semiconductor devices, I must disagree with you aibarr. The learning curve is extremely steep, requiring classes in quantum mechanics to serve as a baseline.
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I feel that electrical power is a hard branch but few people mention it.</p>
<p>lol, ridiculous. What is "hard" supposed to mean in this sense? That fewer people want to do it, can do it, or that the people in that major are somehow smarter? If that's the implication, then it's obviously false.</p>
<p>Majors aren't equal, but that's not because they couldn't be. You could take the easiest major on campus and make it arbitrarily hard. By the same token, you could take the hardest and make it so easy a drunken monkey could do it. Students determine how much they want to get out of any major... I, for one, believe in making mandated standards lower and encouraging more personal initiative. In other words, make all majors easy, but encourage students to make their lives harder.</p>
<p>I don't think anybody wants someone designing bridges who has the mental facilities of a drunken monkey.</p>
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I don't think anybody wants someone designing bridges who has the mental facilities of a drunken monkey.
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<p>Agreed... I also think it's a little cruel to intentionally reduce the rigor of engineering curricula in comparison to what the job actually requires. It's not an easy field. If a freshman decides he/she can't hack it in engineering, that's one thing, but if someone works four years on an easy degree and then gets into practice and finds they can't hack it <em>there</em>... what else do they have? What will they do then? That's four years that they could have spent working towards a career that they enjoy and that they can be successful at...</p>