Another education advice thread

[iampoor]

Hi All

I have recently decided to start formal education again, and could use some advice.

I have very specific career goals. I want to be a self employed business owner in the audio/visual arts field (currently focusing on audio). The past few years have been spent working on building up my business, and I have been doing alot of independent learning. I feel very comfortable with analog circuits and have been able to design quite a few. The analog side of things is really pretty simple. However, I have realized that the future is moving to digital processing, and that I really need to become experienced/proficient at DSP and Microcontrollers. That does not come too intuitively. Good audio dsp guys in the effects industry are very few, and very far between. I have talked this over with several small business owners in my field, and they have all unanimously agreed that there is potential for this to become a good career, and that their are not enough consultants (I can think of maybe 2 or 3), and those guys are VERY busy!

My fundamental math background is lacking, and its really starting to show. I have decided that going back to school is probably the best option, but I am at somewhat of a crossroads. How should I continue my education? I do not have any formal education background outside of high school. Looking at bachelor degree programs, there are so many classess that do not apply to what I want to do professionally, and my life is already pretty hectic as is. Are there any accelerated engineering programs that offer online degrees with a focus in dsp/microcontrollers? I am currently in Central California, and have some pretty good colleges in my area, but not many of them seem to have dsp classess, or offer much in the way of embedded computing until you go for a masters degree.

Ultimately, I am willing to compromise and do what I have to do to make my education happen, but it sure would be nice to be able to focus just on my current application. I am really only interested in a very narrow field of engineering, and it has taken quite a few years to realize that!

Any advice, experience, or school recommendations would be highly appreciated! 

[Alex Eisenhut]

Become an auditor or even better, an independent student first. Taking the exams and handing in papers makes it a bit more challenging than just auditing.

I'm pretty sure universities around the world have the equivalent of "program 9999" classes which are available to all.

Plus you might even be able to apply the course credits towards a program.

For example:

https://www.concordia.ca/admissions/independent-students.html

[iampoor]

Become an auditor or even better, an independent student first. Taking the exams and handing in papers makes it a bit more challenging than just auditing.

I'm pretty sure universities around the world have the equivalent of "program 9999" classes which are available to all.

Plus you might even be able to apply the course credits towards a program.

For example:

https://www.concordia.ca/admissions/independent-students.html

I know we have edx for auditing courses, but the independant student route sounds really good. I have been trying to find what the USA equivalent is marketed under, but I am finding suprisingly little. Must be missing a keyword, or exhausted...or maybe both. 

Thats the goal. I would like to be able to apply them to something, depending on where the future takes me. 

[Alex Eisenhut]

I don't know, I've only ever seen it called independent student or "étudiant libre" (free student, as in "free to choose", not "free as in beer") in French.

[Tom45]

You might check with community colleges in your area to see if any have courses related to your goals.

If you find something like, say, DSP 201 which you really want to learn, it is likely that there are prerequisites you would need to take. But that guides you to a series of classes suited to your goals without getting you into a 4 year program.

[AndyC_772]

There's a good reason why people doing audio and video processing in DSPs are few and far between. It's hard!

Specifically, there are a couple of quite separate disciplines with which you need to be intimately familiar.

Digital filtering is all about maths. You'll need a really solid understanding of wave theory, information theory, Fourier transforms, working in both time and frequency domains, and converting between the two.

Then, you'll also need an equally solid understanding of how to program a CPU, DSP or FPGA to implement the algorithms you're interested in. This is, again, maths as much as anything else, with a focus on numerical methods and good, down-to-earth pragmatism, as well as all the I/O and application code that you can probably learn about on the job if you haven't already.

Speaking as one myself, I'm not entirely sure this level of specialisation is actually a good fit for being a small business owner as well - depending, of course, on what you want that business to be. My customers generally need a complete product designing, not just a chunk of code, so I have to have a broad (though admittedly shallower) set of skills.

If you want to be one of those perpetually busy consultants, then by all means go ahead. You'll be a technical specialist first and foremost, and provided you can find customers that keep you busy, you could make a good living at it.

Tip: make sure you retain ownership of as much IP that you create as you possibly can. 'Write once, licence many times' is a much better business model than 'write once, avoid ever writing again in order to avoid potential infringement lawsuit'.