Career in Electronics Design

[adept]

Hi people who live on this forum. I'm new to this forum, but not to electronics. I've been a viewer for a while at the EEVBlog on Youtube. A friend recommended it to me. I'm a high school student who is extremely interested in electronics. So, what classes do you recommend someone to take who is interested in a career in electronics design. This stuff is really catching up to me. I'm a sophomore.Are Digital/Analog Electronics and Communication Theory high on the list of good things to take? I'd also like any other ideas of classes that may be offered Dual-Credit through the local University or Community College.
On a side note, I'm a big Cemetech user. I don't know if that means anything to you or not, but that's another electronics forum. I love the community there, but most are hackers/makers, not professionals like I know are here.

[EEVblog]

Hi
Yes, basic digital and analog theory are top of the list of things to take, communications theory less so but still very useful.
No idea about US courses or colleges though, sorry.

Dave.

[ArtemisGoldfish]

If you're serious about electronics as a career, you could go to your local community college, figure out what transfers to whatever university you can go to, and get prerequisites out of the way, then transfer.

If you're poor like me or don't want to leave school with debt, you could see if the community college has an Electronics Engineering Technician program. It's not transferable, but it gives you a working knowledge of electronics and can get you a reasonable job fairly quickly.

[adept]

Dual Credit is totally free college in high school. They pretty much transfer anywhere. Are there any other recommended classes for me to try?

[Valhallasmith]

Dual Credit is totally free college in high school. They pretty much transfer anywhere. Are there any other recommended classes for me to try?

Depends on where your interests are.  You can probably cover the basic classes in high school.  But some of the advanced coursework is going to have prereqs that you won't have yet.  I'd say take courses that give you a sample across engineering rather than focusing on one thing in particular.  So a basic circuits class is a good start.  Diff Eqs and EM are also necessary classes.  Taking some courses out of mechatronics and bio eng if available would also probably be fun.   

[Zad]

Be careful. Here in the UK, Universities prefer you to have Mathematics and Physics as core subjects, then another science or similar subject. They don't consider electronics as a good foundation for an electronics degree! Consider what your Uni/College might want.

[EEVblog]

Be careful. Here in the UK, Universities prefer you to have Mathematics and Physics as core subjects, then another science or similar subject. They don't consider electronics as a good foundation for an electronics degree!

As crazy as that sounds, it's usually the case.
The majority of electronics/electrical engineering courses are spent teaching you advanced math and physics that most will never end up using. Unless you go back and teach it that is.

Dave.

[Zero999]

Make sure the college has a decent microcontroller course, as I mentioned in another thread, the college I studied at had a crap microcontroller course so now I'm learning PICs from scratch.

[Bored@Work]

The majority of electronics/electrical engineering courses are spent teaching you advanced math and physics that most will never end up using. Unless you go back and teach it that is.

I thought the same for a long time. Until I had to fix a certain embedded system. Some value drifted off / just didn't add up after 72 hours of operation. And it was a system to run 24*7.

The previous four programmers "fixed" it by introducing correction factors. The first implemented the original software and "fixed" it using a single correction factor. The second had added a linear correction function, the third fine-tuned the correction factors, the forth added yet another correction function.

All these worked, for some value of "worked", with certain input parameters (the once they tested with), but totally blow up with others. So the company decided to hire an engineer instead of cowboy programmers to fix it.

To cut a long story short, after a week I found the core function in the system was an inverted statistic distribution function for mapping the input values to output values while enforcing a certain distribution of the output values. Everything looked OK. I calculated the rounding errors, they couldn't accumulate to the observed errors. I integrated the function over time and then it suddenly didn't look so great.

I digged out my old statistics textbooks and started reading. I was glad that I still remembered 10% of the basics and upset that I had forgotten 90%. With what I was still remembering from uni it turned out the distribution function that was used was a continuous one, inverted to produce the desired distribution. But the inverted function was only evaluated at fixed, discreet points and rounded to the nearest discrete output value. This didn't add up to a probability of one and accounted for the drift of the output.

More textbook studies and googling brought a discrete distribution function to light that was simple to implement, had the desired distribution properties and didn't suffer the errors of the original one.

That was good money and more jobs. And I was so glad I once had learned some math and statistics at uni, as opposite to the cowboy programmers.