MIT EECS Only Focuses On EE. Agree or Not?

<p>Thank you for coming in and special thanks if you're from MIT. I just want to ask a agree and disagree questions about MIT's EECS course:</p>

<p>1) EECS course mainly focuses On EE. Agree or Not?</p>

<p>2) If "1" being disagree. A Doctoral Graduate from EECS can be called both a electrical engineer and a computer scientist. Agree or Not?</p>

<p>3) A MIT EECS graduate learns as much CS Knowledge as a Stanford CS graduate does, although the EECS graduate only spends half of his/her time on CS. Agree or Not?</p>

<p>Thank you for your valuable opinions!</p>

<p>EECS - undergraduate, anyway - is more CS-focused than EE-focused.</p>

<p>1) Disagree
2) Agree
3) Depends. There are three paths at MIT within the EECS Department you can choose from: EE only (6-1), EECS (6-2), and CS only (6-3). If you don’t care about EE then you can declare 6-3 and take only CS classes. Even if you are 6-2 you can still take a heavy load in CS and take the bare minimum in EE (which is 3 classes), or vice-versa. </p>

<p>Also, it sounds like you think learning EE is a bad thing. I hope you realize that the computing industry was built from a foundation in EE, not CS (since programming languages was nonexistent up to the late 1950s).</p>

<p>And just a FYI: Stanford and MIT have 2 of the best EE and CS programs in the world. So you can’t go wrong with either. They might teach it differently but the end result is the same: a solid foundation in the field that can be used to tackle the toughest challenges in the world today.</p>

<p>There are more fine distinctions than just being a EECS grad - like iceui2 said, there’s three different tracks in EECS itself, each one with a different focus on CS. There’s also 18C which has a greater math requirement and mostly required CS courses from the EECS department, and 6-7 which is similar, but with biology. So it’s not as if all EECS students spend exactly half their time on EE and half on CS; in fact, that’s not true for the majority of people in EECS.</p>

<p>This is even more true for the PhD program. It is very possible to graduate with a PhD from MIT in EECS, and not know any EE. Honestly, I think you’re reading too much into the fact that at MIT, EE and CS are in the same department. There’s a lot of variation in what you can do, since it’s so broad.</p>

<p>Would it be fair to say that Area 1 of EECS (Systems, Communication, Control and Signal Processing) is one area that especially involves a lot of Math within EECS? While I want to major in EECS, I am also very interested in Math. So, I am thinking that focusing on Area 1 of EECS might be a good fit for me. Any thoughts/suggestions? </p>

<p>Thanks.</p>

<p>I think that if you get into MIT (or any other lovely school) you should try out a few classes in electrical engineering, math, and computer science, and judge for yourself. If you like two of them, you can double major.</p>

<p>Why are you posting so many threads bashing computer science? It’s a legit field. Pinky swear.</p>

<p>Computer science has countless interesting and useful applications, and many interesting problems in a variety of fields. I am majoring in computer science and molecular biology and math at MIT. My primary interest is using computer science and some math to solve emerging problems in analyzing genomic data. I have not taken any electrical engineering classes, and I don’t intend to. Many of the most interesting computer science and computational biology classes I will be taking are actually in the math department. The rest are in the computer science department. A few are cross-listed.</p>