Subject specific courses

[Six]

I've always found it strange that universities offer courses in Electronics but also specialist courses in Avionics, Robotics, Audio Electronics etc etc.

I would have thought getting a good grounding in all matters electronics would be the way to go rather than painting yourself into a corner with something subject specific.

Any thoughts?

[jpb]

I think that you are right.

As a teenager I wanted to do electronics, hence electronic engineering. The university I went to only did Engineering Science covering all engineering but allowing you to specialise in the 3rd year. I specialised in electronics of course but I think it was good to get a basic understanding of all aspects of engineering even structures and surveying (which I hated). You never know when it will come in useful such as when I had to analyse the structural strength of a gold airbridge on a monolithic integrated circuit.

[Tris20]

I agree that specialising should generally come later. In reference to audio electronics-
I had an interest near the end of high school. I decided to take a few years out and get a job and during this time looked through a number of courses. Too many of them did seem to pigeon-hole the student straight from the start which is very limiting in terms of employment to say the least.

In the end I picked a course "Electronics with music". It's 2/3 EE and 1/3 Music. Perfect balance if you ask me. We get a very broad maths education so skills are applicable to other fields. With the music option we have a separate module from the Arts students (they can choose it if they like though) which goes over a lot of things we also cover in electronics. This makes electronics a lot more interesting as you can see first hand the application of the electronics knowledge (such as filters) which is something that the other EE students don't get. We also get early exposure to DAC and Nyquist etc.

I remember looking through a good 5-10 courses before picking this and this course did seem very much like the exception though