<p>I'm considering majoring in electrical engineering in college. Something that seems appealing to me is how one of my EE friends, who already graduated, had to do hands on projects every week for his electrical engineering class. According to him, his professor gave him descriptions and he had to go out, find the materials and make a device that fit those description.</p>
<p>My question is:</p>
<p>Is it common for top engineering colleges to assign hands on projects similar to the one mentioned and to what extent do they assign them? I do understand this may be specific to the school.</p>
<p>No in the sense that in a lot of classes you’ll learn the theory, and maybe do a few labs and taking down data, but you won’t be asked to apply the knowledge in a unique way. There are a few classes that will truly challenge you to be innovative and inventive, but a lot of times your labs will be “Design a _______ using a ___<strong><em>" and sometimes "Design a </em></strong> using a _________ or ________.” I wouldn’t bank on all of your classes or even most of them to have hands on projects.</p>
<p>Yes in the sense that you will probably take several design classes, some of them relating to a Senior Design Project, which I believe most schools offer and/or require. This is probably the most hands on thing you’ll do in your four years of study, unless you choose a more research-oriented approach. Your university might also offer some hands-on projects you can get involved with as extra-curriculars.</p>
<p>To expand on md5fungi, every school is required to have a senior design (or capstone) project in order to be ABET accredited so you will have that no matter what. That is usually one to two semesters of working on one single project where a company comes to you with a problem, and you solve it however you want using everything you have learned in the previous 3 years.</p>
<p>In addition, you will probably have 1 to 3 classes before that (depending on school and major) that are almost entirely or entirely based on projects. For me, as a mechanical engineer at UIUC, we had two classes called Mechanical Design I and II and they both were almost completely project based, plus senior design. Different classes for me also had projects in them, such as a heat transfer project where the prof asked us to design a CPU heat sink based on him giving us the size and power of the chip, and an FEA project where we had to model the solid rocket boosters on the space shuttle and perform FEA on it to reproduce the reason for the Challenger’s midair explosion.</p>
<p>However, at any good university, you will spend a lot more time learning the theory behind all of that. Unfortunately for the hands-on folks out there, a lot of that is based on theory, and in order to do a good job on the hands-on part, you need to have a good grip on the theoretical side as well. I had projects in several other classes as well, but I won’t keep listing them.</p>
<p>EE is definitely hands-on, and I don’t think it is specific to any particular school. Most of the core courses will have lab components. I recall spending 20-40 hours a week in one of my (non-senior-design) classes modifying a microprocessor circuit incrementally for the whole semester. I came out with some really cool stuff though.</p>