<p>I am having troubles deciding between the two majors. I have got opinions from everyone I know. Unfortunaetly, I still am stuck. I enjoy programming alot, but Electrical Engineering sounds very interesting to me. I think that I will succeed in both well, unless Electrical Engineering is hard. Which I still am trying to figure out, because my brother got an A in every class his freshman year except the main EE course.</p>
<p>This may be a personal choice I'm going to have to make, but I still am looking for advice.</p>
<p>Where will I end up for both? I currently live in Montana...and would go to M Tech, which is a state school.</p>
<p>A lot of EEs (especially those with a heavier computer engineering concentration, depends on your school, your exact major, your tech electives, what’s offered, etc.) go on to work in embedded systems. It’s a pretty stable field, from what I understand. An EE (with sufficient CE experience, again this depends on your school and study tracks) can do almost any practical programming a CS major can do, though they may need more tech electives or experience to show it. Obviously, the theoretical CS is not covered by most EE degrees, nor does it need to be.</p>
<p>Also, any software area where strong math skills and/or in-depth understanding of the hardware is important, are perfect areas for EEs/CEs. F’instance, cutting-edge real-time graphics requires both, as does scientific simulation software. In video games, a programmer who can make hardware do stuff nobody thought it was powerful enough to do, has a guaranteed job.</p>
<p>If you want to work at places like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc, doing CRUD you’ll probably be served well with a degree in Software Engineering. </p>
<p>If you’re more interested in the actual (interesting) problem your’e solving, as opposed to the tools used to obtain a solution, EE is fine. A minor in CS would be an excellent combination.</p>
<p>And yeah, what TomServo said.</p>
<p>Disclaimer. I’m a Computer Engineering major. Previously a Software engineering major.</p>
<p>CS is definitely not " much more math " . Thats simply ignorant of you to say that. Its all about the field you go towards relative to your degree. EM waves/ signals/ systems/ all are math intensive. CS guys end math way before ee undergrads. </p>
<p>Logic is essential to all engineering fields not just CS ( its not engineering to begin with ). </p>
<p>Foundations is usually taken in the junior year. Algorithms is usually taken in the senior year. These are considered CS courses by those outside of CS but they really are math theory courses. You could add compilers, parallel computing, graphics, etc.</p>
<p>Eh, you’ll have to keep current in either. Hopefully by the time you’ve been out of school long enough to become obsolete, you’ve branched off into some sort of more management-y role.</p>
<p>Just a quick visit to dice.com paints a very grim picture of ageism in the computer field, though…</p>
<p>The bottom line is that your productivity determines your pay, which by definition determines whether you have a job or not. Unfortunately, merely having skills does not necessarily make you productive, all engineers come with a basic skill set. It’s what you can do with those skills, how talented you are at creating products with market value, etc., that makes you productive.</p>
<p>I get the feeling that a lot of engineers crying ageism just aren’t as talented as other engineers and never really were. Either that, or they never bothered to learn new technologies and new skills that were becoming standard and thus a lot of their knowledge is obsolete. That’s a bitter pill to swallow, but that’s how I see it.</p>
<p>If there was really a surplus of super-talented older engineers out there who couldn’t get hired, then one of two things (and more likely both things) would happen:</p>
<p>1) Some employers out there would snatch up these engineers for cheap and bury the competition. Alan Greenspan did this by hiring all female economists for his business earlier in his career. Restaurants, factories, and various other businesses do this today by hiring immigrants of questionable documentation.</p>
<p>2) These engineers would create their own companies with a different corporate culture.</p>
That’s fair. By “math”, I mean math in the sense of proving things are true. Most math and CS majors don’t really consider the kinds of things other science and engineering majors do “math”… they certainly use the results of mathematics, and may even study some mathematics, but mathematics is the means rather than an end. Calculus and differential equations… and a lot of more advanced courses… wouldn’t even be considered math by a lot of math majors, just service courses for engineers. I speak from experience.</p>
<p>“Thats simply ignorant of you to say that.”
How many proofs to EEs have to do in a standard curriculum? I would estimate that math majors do approximately 50 proofs per class, and say take 10 actual in-major courses (at least), so we’re talking 500 proofs. CS majors… it’s less, but I would imagine somewhere in the neighborhood of 300.</p>
<p>"Its all about the field you go towards relative to your degree. EM waves/ signals/ systems/ all are math intensive. CS guys end math way before ee undergrads. "
As has already been pointed out, CS majors do a lot of actual mathematics in CS classes; EE majors do a lot of plug-and-chug service courses in the mathematics department, but advanced applied calculator operation and applications doesn’t really fly as math with people who know any better.</p>
<p>"Logic is essential to all engineering fields not just CS ( its not engineering to begin with ). "
Logical thinking, perhaps, but formal logic? I know EEs do some digital logic, but from my experience it’s more fundamental to CS than to EE.</p>
<p>“Go with EE, minor in CS.”
I would say just major in EE. Like I said, most people who are good fits for CS don’t really have any interest in EE anyway. Interest in EE indicates you’re probably an EE at heart. Everybody likes CS a little bit.</p>
<p>Auburn, you should try looking up topics like communications theory, control theory, E&M and signal processing (I’m not even going to mention grad level courses) if you truly believe CS is more math intensive than EE. </p>
<p>I don’t quite understand how you can actually say that “CS is much more math- and logic- centric than EE”. Seriously. Aside from algorithms (and multidisciplinary fringe topics like image processing or compression) what has math got to do with computer science? I hope you won’t mention interdisciplinary topics since you believe that applications aren’t fundamental to a CS education.</p>
<p>Neither do l see how you can call, most likely, 70% of the topics any decent math major would take “plug-and-chug service courses in the mathematics department”. Obviously an EE wouldn’t be subject to the rigorousness of a Math major at the undergraduate level. That doesn’t change the fact that they are very much the same math courses.</p>
<p>You can sufficiently get past CS without math. Attempting to do so in EE would be suicide.</p>
<p>CS does not have more of a math requirement than EE.
But the field of CS is closer to mathematics than EE.</p>
<p>I view CS as something more pure, less applied (due to the abstraction of software) while EE deals more with physics since its at a lower level.</p>
<p>As an electrical engineer OR computer scientist, you will get to do none of these.</p>
<p>Most useful algorithms and equations have already been derived and all you need to do is figure out which one you need to use for a particular problem.</p>
<p>With that said, there are more CS jobs than EE…but either way you will find a good job.</p>