Engineering classes

[c4757p]

"Easy" means you hold hands and sing Kumbayah, sometimes startlingly close to literally. "Hard" means you contemplate suicide (or professorcide) by textbook.

Remember the last night of hell when all of your teachers gave you huge assignments all on the same night because screw collaborating to find out when the other teachers are giving assignments? Picture that every night for a season.

[IonizedGears]

  Was he at least going for a Phd?

[c4757p]

I think so.

I must add that despite being barely able to breathe between turning pages, typing and writing, he was happy. Some people just like that kind of thing. If anyone I know is cut out to pursue a Ph.D. it's him.

[IonizedGears]

Wait, is it possible to have made it so he got half the amount of classes at one time but more terms? If so wouldn't it cost much more money even though you are technically getting the same amount of classes in the long term?

[c4757p]

Yes, you would spend a lot more, and waste a lot of time too. It takes a long time to get a Ph.D. even going full throttle, if you can't be bothered to push through piles of hard work you'll be lucky to get it by the time you're 70.

The vast majority of my classes don't go beyond "medium", don't be too scared. Though if you slack off the difficulty quickly increases as you're incrementally left behind. Don't slack off. Especially not because you know all the material in the class already (What? You think I'm saying I've done that? ), you'll always find there's some tiny detail that you miss that leaves you good and screwed.

[IonizedGears]

Do you have any tips for when i do start my uni trek of EE? The tip for not slacking off might just save me later.

[IanB]

I am 15 so i have no idea what hard means from a college students perspective. 

It sort of depends on how you find high school now. The things you study are not "harder" as such, but the workload tends to be much higher.

In college and university courses you have to be much more self-motivated. Nobody is going to be chasing you to get work done, you have to keep on top of it and make note of the deadlines. If you miss submission deadlines you just drop grades you will never get back.

There is also a strong emphasis on self-study and personal learning. You are not likely to learn what you need just by listening in class. You will have to go away and apply it, do the tutorial exercises, read books and keep at it until you fully understand it.

[IonizedGears]

Ian- Well it is a good thing i am going through the art of electronics and reteaching myself java right now. Should be a great way to get used to self learning and such.

[Fsck]

Wait, is it possible to have made it so he got half the amount of classes at one time but more terms? If so wouldn't it cost much more money even though you are technically getting the same amount of classes in the long term?

At my univ, 6 courses (~25 +/- 25% hours per week) per semester per year is standard (50ish courses over 4 years, a couple of 1hour/week gimmick courses)
You can technically do less courses per term here, but there's a time restriction on the degree, as it has to be completed within 6 years. Some students take some of the courses over spring/summer terms so they don't have to do the full 6 over each of fall/winter.

Hard is when you're the only undergrad in graduate level courses. Though from what I've noticed, this isn't so common with engineering as it is with physics.

[EEVblog]

3 classes a week for calculus with the same Prof or with different Professors? Same for physics?

No, usually only one maths and one physics class per semester (6 months).
Almost certainly different teachers as I said, they often "shop out" these classes to the math and physics departments.

[EEVblog]

In college and university courses you have to be much more self-motivated. Nobody is going to be chasing you to get work done, you have to keep on top of it and make note of the deadlines. If you miss submission deadlines you just drop grades you will never get back.
There is also a strong emphasis on self-study and personal learning. You are not likely to learn what you need just by listening in class. You will have to go away and apply it, do the tutorial exercises, read books and keep at it until you fully understand it.

That's the huge difference between tertiary education and high school.
It is not compulsary. No one cares if you turn up, no one cares if you pass or fail, that's entirely up to you.
You usually don't have to turn up for anything but the assessable stuff like practical classes and tests. If you think you can pass the course without attending any lectures, then you don't have to attend lectures at all.

[EEVblog]

Hard is when you're the only undergrad in graduate level courses.

That's the other thing. If you want to sit in on the 4th year lectures and you are only in 1st year, no problem, just get a timetable and turn up.

[IonizedGears]

Do you have to be a student at a uni to attend lectures? If not, that basically means you are only really paying for the record of grades But thanks for telling me I could shadow lectures like that, certainly a thing I will try when I am going to uni.

[EEVblog]

Do you have to be a student at a uni to attend lectures?

Legally, by the book, likely not, you could get booted out for trespassing or whatever.
But in practice you could just rock up. They usually don't take roll call or ask for ID. But depends entirely upon the school and how they work.
You hear stories about people spending years hanging around uni's without ever being enrolled there.

If not, that basically means you are only really paying for the record of grades

Basically, yes.
You can do the entire MIT EE degree for free via online videos, you just don't get the degree.

[Fsck]

Hard is when you're the only undergrad in graduate level courses.

That's the other thing. If you want to sit in on the 4th year lectures and you are only in 1st year, no problem, just get a timetable and turn up.

Actually, EE and Honours Physics degrees (that I'm sure of) at my school allow you to take many of the 500 and 600 level courses (whose class prefix is the same as your department) for credit for exceptional students. Makes curve grading that much more fun.
EE even allows some biomedical engineering (BME) category courses in MRIs.

[sub]

These are the courses that my uni requires:

• Plain EEE: http://ecms.adelaide.edu.au/current-students/enrolment/study-plans/eleceng/beng-electrical-electronic.pdf
• EEE with Maths (this is the current version of what I just finished): http://ecms.adelaide.edu.au/current-students/enrolment/study-plans/eleceng/beng-electrical-electronic-b-macompsci-maths-major.pdf
• EEE with CS: http://ecms.adelaide.edu.au/current-students/enrolment/study-plans/eleceng/beng-electrical-electronic-b-macompsci-compsci-major.pdf

They are for the most part three lectures and a tutorial per week, as well as 3hr/week in the lab for each discipline.  I did a double degree in pure maths, which has been reasonably useful to me, but YMMV.

A brief summary: The first year is taken up by introductory courses in maths, physics, CS, and EEE.  In second-year one takes 50% EEE, the rest split between applied maths and computer science.  The third and final years are all EEE unless you are doing a double degree.  Final year includes a reasonably substantial project (mine involved designing a simple PCB, about 10k lines of FPGA/C++ code, and about three lab books worth of maths, to give some indication of the work involved).

The workload varies.  At first I didn't feel it to be substantially more difficult than high-school, but those who were not as mathematically inclined tended to struggle.  Your life will be much easier if you turn up already able to program reasonably well.

[skipjackrc4]

Nobody's mentioned the fun classes like Antenna Design, Wave Propagation, Transmission Lines, Microwave Design, Computational Electromagnetics...  Come on people 

Seriously though, I've found that the first few years of EE were not too bad in terms of workload.  That doesn't mean you can skip class or ignore assignments, but I've completed 3.5/4 years without ever pulling an all-nighter, and I'm one of the top students in my class.  Plan your time well and don't be an idiot. 

A few of my tips:

1.  Read the book, even if you don't have to for class.  You learn so much more from them than the professor will cover in class.
2.  Try to apply it to the real world.  So many students have no interest in learning things because they've never dealt with them before and don't realize how important so many things are.
3.  Study as you go, not on the night before the exam.  Last minute cramming is stupid and you will learn nothing in the long run. 

At my school, you have a lot of choice about which classes you can take after you are done with the basics.  From my list above, it should be pretty clear what I am doing.  The sooner you figure out which emphasis you want, the more classes you can take in it.  The classes get more intense as you move forward, but your ability to handle it also improves.  At least in my experience. 

[Smokey]

About computer engineering, since that's what I ended up getting my degree in.  It depends on your school, but I got a good balance of CS and EE classes.  You have to take the same intro CS and EE classes as everyone else in those majors, then the required upper division stuff starts getting an embedded systems feel to it, which uses both the CS and EE stuff.  The last year you pretty much get to pick technical electives to suit your interest.  If you are more into EE, take more EE technical electives, otherwise do more CS ones.  For my senior project I got to pick if I wanted to do an EE or CS project (I did the EE one).  All you can really expect straight out of college is having a good knowledge base.  Especially the way modern electronics integrates embedded systems with everything I think my CE degree was a good choice, for me at least.  I know I used both CS and EE aspects right off the bat at my first job and I was glad to have been exposed to both in some detail.  You can always check the course plans for the various majors and see how they differ.  If all the classes in one major sound more interesting to you, then take those.  You can always (with a little pain and suffering) change your mind later.

It's never too early to start reading about/working with the stuff you are interested in.  It's amazing how much easier it is to learn and retain lecture material if you have some idea of what it is before you go in to it.  That's why they recommend you read the chapters before you go to the lectures (even though most people don't). 

[tom66]

In my university:

We have(/had) one maths course in the first year, all exams are taken online and there is a MATLAB module. It covers basic algebra to differentiation, complex numbers and Laplace transforms.

We have advanced circuits course, and a less advanced more practical circuits course.

And a communications class.

And a physics class, mostly covering semiconductor theory.

And a programming/microcontrollers/digital logic course.