<p>OK, I am a junior is EE/CS program with a 3.27 gpa. My major gpa is 3.5+ and I want to say something I have been trying not to think about:</p>
<p>What did I learn that i couldnt/ or havent learned since HS?</p>
<p>Circuit analysis - check ( knew it before and the professor sucked so i watched online videos)</p>
<p>Electronics - Doing it currently along with signals</p>
<p>C++ Programming - check ( learned it in HS, could have done it without college)</p>
<p>Physics , Math ( calc --> Differnetial equations) ( ok i learned something new)</p>
<p>Now.... Intel, Microsoft, Cisco, Lockheed ...... all want junior status + and i cant figure what they want from us. I dont know squat about electronics, or signal analysis so how can hire people before the junior year ends?</p>
<p>Do engineers at UG level even do technical stuff during internships? I just feel stupid that Im in 15+ debt so far. What a waste.</p>
<p>You said you had Circuit analysis 1&2(DC/AC) and that your taking Electronics. You can not do much designing until you had Electronics 1&2. There is not much you can do with a inductors, capacitors, resistors by them-self. Just making filters </p>
<p>After you had Electronics 1 & 2. You should be able to design power,audio amplifiers for both low and high frequencies. You should also be able to design basic RF receivers/transmitters. </p>
<p>But your not going to get into designing say a new router at the UG level.</p>
<p>Despite what most people will lead you to believe, I personally dont think youre going to learn a whole lot of practical things in undergrad engineering. The aim is to give you a basic understanding of the concepts and theories that are used and, in my opinion, to see if you can make it through the classes. </p>
<p>Even in the senior level design classes you will most likely follow near the coattails of your professor, or a pretty standard and basic design that has well documented instructions which you might add a few tweaks to. Much of what you will ever actually use will be learned on the job - and in many cases this probably doesn’t require(from a learning perspective) an engineering degree. I look at it as a right of passage, more or less…</p>
<p>I don’t think you’re alone in the way you feel.</p>
<p>Yes I did take design project class, which is in digital logic course. We basically learned a few things about FPGA chips and played around with the logic gates / Flip-flops/ registers/ MUX and thats it.</p>
<p>The reason why i even posted this is to see what others had to say. I really want to work for a good company but I dont see how 2 years of UG engineering changed my knowledge and skills.</p>
<p>My professor said the same thing the other day by telling us that at UG level, you wont be needing anything your doing right for most jobs atleast. Most research is handled by phd’s and other very experienced people at the company ( hopefully I’ll be at point some day). We are just trained to understand its operations.</p>
<p>I get the feeling the reason they want academically “experienced” students is that by junior year+ most students would have covered the major design classes such as digital design, software engineering and embedded design. </p>
<p>The big companies give the impression that what they are really interested in is how we used the little technical knowledge that we had in these large and complex projects. It gives an indication on the work ethic, raw talent, passion, and creativity of a student.</p>
<p>I don’t think most students under junior year would have covered these projects.</p>
<p>Projects are also a good way of learning important technologies and skills beyond the basic curriculum. For example our sophomore embedded project required us to design an autonomous robot using the mindstorms NXT and program it to complete some task. It was a large mix of Java, multi-threading, distributed computing, signal processing, control theory, and fault tolerance in real-time. There is no way they could have required those 6 classes to be pre-requisites so we learnt what we could in class and the rest on our own.</p>
<p>A decent amount of time in an interview with a company like Lockheed or RIM is spent on that and similar projects.</p>
<p>You are not going to graduate an expert. Nobody is going to come fresh out of college and be 100% prepared for the working world. You will learn a lot of things on the job. What is invaluable is experience working in teams and on large projects.</p>
<p>@member, I see what you are saying. But I learned most of electronics from open course wares online and reading the book. We weren’t taught SPICE but I did it myself anyway to simulate circuits. Im just saying that there is not enough material in my head to convince myself that I actually know enough to work as an intern at the very least. I did not expect this after 4 semesters.</p>
<p>Those A-Ha moments come when you do projects and you work on something for hours and then finally get it. I had to make a soda machine in my digital systems class, and it was pretty tough at times. Lots of Mux’s and switches, lots of control. Though once I got it it was great. We then had to program the machine in mips assembly, then had to recreate it on a FPGA and use Xilinx. </p>
<p>Though I was a CS student and all of this was not really my taste, but I still got a lot from it. </p>
<p>I suggest you start taking classes you like, things you want to learn. EE can be incredibly bland, which I why I switched to CS. Take some computer engineering courses instead, Microprocessor programming is incredibly challenging.</p>
<p>BTW I graduated and I still feel everyday that I simply am not good enough. Its a common feeling. </p>
<p>If there is one thing you get out of engineering school, it should be to acquire the ability to see a problem and derive quickly and precisely a solution to that problem. Dont worry about the specifics, they are not as important as you think. If when you go to a interview and you compete against a 4.0 from MIT and in-front of you lies a problem, the person with the better grades from the Top U doesn’t mean he is better at solving the problem at hand. It just means he has stored more info. Work on the problem solving, thats what will get you the job. Companies don’t hire data stores, they hire practical and critical thinkers who bring worth to the company. You don’t need a encyclopedic knowledge of engineering and its subsets to be a good engineer. Even on the PE and FE exams, you are given the formulas, you just need a basic idea of how to use them. Then logically deduce from that.</p>