I’m a rising Senior Electrical Engineering student at the University of Texas at Austin. I’ve been trying to think critically about graduate school for some time and so far my searches for forum posts that address my concerns have been fruitless.
From what I hear an Engineering masters degree from a good graduate program is worth it: it is often paid for or subsidized, it advances your career and income expectations more quickly than the same amount of time in industry, and it allows you to learn more about your passion. Unfortunately I’m not sure if I can get into a “good” graduate program.
This leads me to think that I should go into industry for a few years and then pursue a masters degree, but according to one of my professors what normally happens to people with this attitude is that they:
Never want to leave industry and never return to school (in his words: “maybe 1 in 1000 return to school”)
Have a company pay for their part-time graduate education if they continue to work 40+ hours a week (in his words: “you won’t have a life for about five years”)
I would particularly benefit from a masters degree because I’m pursuing our Integrated Circuits track and without a masters degree I’ve heard that it’s likely that I’ll be a test Engineer for my entire career.
To give more personal details, my resume/details:
I’m on track to graduate in 4 years (only ~ 50% do)
I have a 3.08 cumulative GPA (roughly average) and a 2.98 major GPA (possibly slightly below average)
I had an internship last summer with a international Electrical Engineering business with decent name recognition
I will be returning this summer to intern with that same company
I haven’t studied for nor have I taken the GRE but I did quite well on the SAT and I’m confident in my standardized test preparation abilities
I’m passionate about what I do (majoring in Electrical Engineering wouldn’t be worth it at all otherwise)
I’m a good studious student but somehow I’ve never been able to excel as much as I would like to
As a person soon to be graduating with a Master’s in this field, I can confirm this is correct.
I would not worry about getting into a “good” master’s program for engineering. A “good” master’s program is only a tiny boost for landing your first job. Once you have been in the industry for a while, everyone cares about your job experience instead. Graduate school is your chance to prove that you can excel. Not just through course work, but through the research work you do. Independent research projects and thesis work are paramount. A person with patents, publications, competition awards on their resume looks many times much better than a person without from a better school.
Check early on with your current or future school as to whether you can land a teaching assistantship position to support yourself. As time passes, you will want to become a graduate research assistant if at all possible. Have initiative, talk to professors, start your own projects, lookup corporate sponsored competitions. It helps. Believe me from first-hand experience.
Edit: Some anecdotes: As an undergraduate, I entered a competition among mechanical and electrical engineering students in my area to present an independent research project and its results. I won for a project for designing high speed shift registers and an arbitrary waveform generator. It started as a project overseen by a professor whom I talked to about starting a project. It led a graduate assistantship for my masters and I filed for a patent later on.
Another teaching assistant with the same faculty adviser ended up receiving a job offer from xilinx after winning an autonomous lawn mower competition. He now programs FPGAs.
My school is very low-tier but it still has many success stories. Go for it by all means (just make sure its ABET accredited).
I really appreciate the reply! I keep changing my mind on the subject and I’m running out of time to decide.
I have a couple of other questions for you in particular:
If you don’t mind me asking, what’s your financial situation for graduate school? If you’re a teaching assistant/graduate research assistant what does that pay? Was your tuition reduced in any way & roughly what cost is an unsubsidized tuition?
What does Integrated Circuit work look like in industry? I enjoy the amount of analysis & intuition it takes in school, but if I’ll just be starting at some simulation program all day in industry maybe it wont be quite as enjoyable. I think Integrated Circuits is the right side of Electrical Engineering for me, but it’s particularly hard to dedicate myself to the idea of graduate school without a good insight into the long-term career effect of those actions.
This is a really niche issue and I’m glad to have this discussion.
Where I go to in the U.S, $10,100 for a commuting student is about the cost for 2 semesters of graduate study (not including living expenses). It is very low as far as colleges go. I’d expect it to be more if you went elsewhere.
As a graduate research assistant, I have full tuition paid each semester plus a $5000 stipend each semester. Teaching assistants have a similar setup but I am unsure of the stipend amount. Since I live at home for the meantime, I get to keep most of it instead of spending it on living expenses. The college I go to is literally down the street from my residence. It is a steal.
I am unsure of what your specific studies have been; however, I would guess that you have been studying digital design as an undergraduate student. At my school, we use a CAD tool called Cadence to draw out IC layouts and schematics. We also work with VHDL programming for FPGAs. For digital design, these custom ASIC designs that are drawn by hand are falling out of favor. Programming an FPGA in a few days is much more cost-effective than designing a custom-made IC circuit over several months or even years. If you want to go this route, I suggest computer engineering courses that also touch upon other areas of hardware programming such as micro-controllers and PLCs which are similar but used for different applications. I think its fairly easy and just about any engineer can do it.
Now where the big $$$ is in this field and where ASICs are still commonplace is in analog design in integrated circuits. Forget the computer science-like familiarity of digital design; analog IC design is very difficult and challenging in comparison. Analog design crosses over a lot with wireless transmission, radar, and microwave fields. Wireless receivers and transmitters are the most common applications. All the digital data in your cellphone for instance needs to be received first as an analog signal modulated by OFDM or CDMA techniques. For a receiver chain, we might require a bandpass filter to select our desired frequencies, followed by a low noise amplifier at the front end, followed by a mixer to down convert to baseband, then a lowpass filter to reject the unwanted images produced outside of the first nyquist zone, followed by a series of variable gain amplifiers and a feedback control loop with a peak detector to maintain a constant signal amplitude, followed by another set of mixers and lowpass filters to demodulate the signal and/or equalize the channel, and then a very large analog to digital converter. Stuff like this (aka my current thesis work) is what you will be studying. It is only because of the recent advances in the shrinking of transistor sizes that we have been able to take these relatively huge circuits and fit them onto a single IC.
If you want to go this route, you need to be good at the mathematics in your linear systems courses. Analog IC design is very mathematics intensive requiring you to model transfer functions, filter impulse and frequency responses, and model parasitic capacitances and resistances in transistors. Try to take courses that touch upon operational amplifiers beyond the mere basics. You need to know about bode plots, op-amp stability, modelling poles and zeros, and the actual transistor design of them. DSP courses are good as well since they cover how to build more efficient higher order filters and many different optimization techniques for them.
I hope that is what you were looking for, if not, keep asking away.