<p>Hello Everyone,
I need some suggestions from experienced people here in this forum. I am an electrical engineering major and I have started my junior year. But I am kind of confused about the track/concentration of EE. In my university, Power, System&controls, DSP, Telecommunication, and electronics are offered as concentration. There is also a computer engineering major. I took electronic device and electric motor control principle class and those were not bad. I actually did well on those courses. I took microcontroller design and dropped it since C and assembly programming seemed super boring to me.
I also had a process control engineering coop in a manufacturing plant where I programmed PLCs(Allen-Bradley)
Now I have to choose more electives for the concentration. I have some general thoughts about each of the concentration.
Power: It seems like the salary is comparatively lower and I have to work in the plant setting for the whole life- Not in a corporate setting. Plus there is not much flexibility. Very few power companies.
DSP: This is a narrow field and they are not many jobs.
Systems and controls: I liked my first internship but I dont know if it will be a good field to get into.
Computer: People say this would be the best- Stable jobs, very high pay, plenty of jobs. But when I think of microcontroller programming , i dont feel like doing this.
I am very confused. Again, these are only my thoughts. I am not sure if these are misconceptions or there is truth in it. I would be glad if anyone suggests me about the track.
Any help will be appreciated. Thank you</p>
<p>I am not sure what you are confused about. It sounds like you are having a hard time deciding on one, but that is not the same as confusion.</p>
<p>I have my BSEE from Penn State, and am very familiar with those concentrations (and all the others you didn’t mention). Here is my opinion on the concentrations you mentioned:</p>
<p>Power: It does seem that the salary is a little lower, and that most of the jobs are relatively routine jobs working in power plants. There are some jobs doing research and design and other such tasks, but they are a relatively small part of this specialization.</p>
<p>DSP: This field is actually (in my experience) doing pretty well, because it requires very specialized and somewhat difficult skills that few obtain, but which can be applied to a wide variety of tasks and industries.</p>
<p>Computer: If you don’t like doing it, then it will for you be a terrible job.</p>
<p>Any info about telecommunications? That what I plan on specializing in.</p>
<p>Cosmicfish, Thanks for your reply. For me, its a tough decision to make. I will have around 35k loan when I will graduate. So I am worried. I want to make sure that I will get a stable job right out of college. What do you think would be better between power and dsp/telecommunication in terms of job opportunities, future career etc.
I have heard that I have to be good at programming (specially in C++ and matlab) to do well in dsp. Is that true?
When I searched for internships or when i went to the career fairs, I didnt see anyone hiring DSP engineers. May be I missed. Do you know what type of companies/industries hires dsp engineers?</p>
<p>
Telecoms is similar to Power, but skewed a bit more towards research. Ultimately, they have a heck of a lot of engineers whose jobs is basically to keep the systems going, but there is still a lot of investment in improving the systems and developing “the next big thing”, so I think it is a pretty safe bet.</p>
<p>
I think either DSP or Telecoms would be better than Power.</p>
<p>
Yes. Compared to most EE specialties, DSP dives DEEP into the software side, and you need to be pretty solid in programming if you want to excel in the field.</p>
<p>
Any industries dealing with signals - telecommunications and remote sensing are the biggest users.</p>
<p>You should also consider which areas the department is actually strong in. How many faculty and how much research is done in each area? Even a department as big as Penn State’s is not uniformly strong in all areas of EE.</p>