[sdiy] EE Degree

[Jim Patchell]

    I am not so sure about expensive here in the states.  I got my degree from
UCSB (University of California Santa Barbara).  It has a fairly highly regarded
engineering department and it only cost me $220/quarter (this was from 73-75, I
transfered from a local comunity college where I got my lower division for free)
plus books which ran about $50/quarter.  Even back then, this was a hard price to
beat.  And, since I already lived there, staying with my parents for those 4
years also ment no rent.

    However, UCSB is probably not quite so cheap these days.  While the tuition
is about $700/quarter now, if you are from out of town the rent will kill you.  A
typical appartement goes for about $1200/month.

    -Jim

Tony Clark wrote:

> > I would say if you are in the US, move to another country, go to school for
> > less, get your EE, and come back to the states.. Yeah, you will have to
> > learn another language, but it won't take you 7 years to finish, nor 100k
> > dollars.. I regret not having stayed in Germany to get my citizenship and
> > going to school there.. :(
>
>    I don't know about all countries, but I can certainly tell you that
> _some_ engineering programs overseas will not prepare you for proper EE
> work.  I know for sure that nearly every Indian we've gotten here at the U
> that has claimed to have taken EE can't even look at a schematic with a
> simple inverting op-amp block and tell you what it does.
>    The sad truth of it is that their programs lack hands on experience,
> so the only thing that they can do is quote verbatim from whatever books
> they might have used.  Nice having the theory, terrible to not have any
> practical applicative knowledge.
>    Even many of the programs in the US may not be that great either.  I
> remember looking to transfer out of the U to a state college to save
> money, but once I discovered that the equipment was still 60's-70's
> vintage and lacked many of the modern tools, I knew it would have been a
> bad mistake!
>    So, to sum up, I think that it is definately a wise choice to be in a
> program where they DO give you a good workload, where you have access to
> good equipment, and more importantly, have enough time left over to
> tinker.  :)
>    BTW, for anyone that's interested, I did my senior project programming
> FIR filters (non-resonant) into a TI 320C30 DSP chip.
>
>    Cheers,
>
>    Tony
>
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> "We wouldn't want to ship something that doesn't work"
>    - Carl Stork, general manager, Microsoft Windows division
>      Excerpt from EE Times April 2, 2001