Calculas, Soldering and Electrical Engineering

[Tom Priore]

I've been following the posts on calcual, and the lack of teaching soldering
in school. Here's my take.

1. you need calculas.
2. a math department will never teach you any good real world examples of
why you need calculas.
3. if you major in engineering all the reasons for having to know calculas
will very quickly becom evident. my first electical engineering class used
diffeq, laplace transforms and forier series. to even take this basic EE
course you needed at least 3 calc courses, and if you couldn't pass the
requirments when you first got into school, a bunch of trig.
4. Soldering is a very very very very very small part of electrical
engineering. i agree that it is important that a engineer must know his way
around tools, but, if i'm a dsp engineer doing signal analisys on matlab, a
soldering iron is pretty useless. very few EE go on to do basic circuit
design. not every ee is going to graduate and build circuits. those who do
want to do that will learn to use a soldering iron.
which brings me to 5:
5. you will learn what you want to learn. if your an EE and you feel you
school doent teach you what you want to learn, teach yourself. after
spending 4 years learning to be an EE, I have learned that school doesn't
teach you what you need to know, it gives you the tools to allow you to
teach yourself what you need to know. of all the thing you could do with an
ee degree, it is impossible for a universty to teach you everything about
electrical engineering.

Tom