<p>What exactly do Com/Elec engineers do?</p>
<p>Title says it all.</p>
<p>I'm curious because I am planning to major in one of the two because I have an interest in electronics and, mainly, computers.</p>
<p>thanks</p>
<p>I have the same question and need to decide if I should major EE or CE. Well from what I have observed at my college most of the required courses for a Computer Engineering major at are composed of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. I will problably end up following computer engineering because of the fact that it is a combination of ECEand Computer Science and might have a greater flexibility career-wise. In fact in my school one can declare a minor in EE without taking any extra courses because all of the required courses for CE meet the requirements for a minor in EE.</p>
<p>As much as I hate to just refer people to other websites, I think the answer is too broad to be able to do any justice to your question... so here you go:</p>
<p>Electrical engineering:
Electrical</a> engineering - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</p>
<p>Computer engineering:
Computer</a> engineering - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</p>
<p>CompE is really a sub-discipline under EE. It is similar to both EE and software because it works at the interface right between the two. ASIC and FPGA development is probably part of the typical description of a computer engineer. EE is rather hard to typify because there are just so many things you can do with it, and generally you have to delve into other sciences, such as chem (semiconductors/MEMS), physics (photonics or MEMS, instrumentation, electromagnetics), or mathematics and CS (signal processing).</p>
<p>Therefore, I think EE is actually more flexible, especially since its broader than CompE. However, you may need additional training in a discipline of your choice if you stray too far out of traditional EE territory, which is basically circuit design/theory.</p>
<p>EE is a broader field but in order to get a certain job, like the above poster mentioned, you will need to focus on one area. Therefore once you graduate you may actually be more limited to your job choices than a CE. A CE can do pretty much anything computer related, whether it be software engineering, computer hardware, networking, database admin, Web...a CE could even move into EE work or systems engineering. An EE can also do these things but they will probably need additional learning.</p>
<p>If you know you mainly want to work with computers, then CE is the choice. You just have to figure out what kind of training you want. CE is what you would major in if you wanted to work with computer hardware. For electronics, there is the hardware side and there is the signal processing side, so both CE and EE are involved, but EE gives you the training to cover more aspects.</p>