[sdiy] Help for a budding young engineer...

[Thomas Strathmann]

Am 8/11/10 14:05 , schrieb Justin Owen:
> A colleague has asked if I might be able to offer some help and advice to her young Nephew who is looking at a career in Electrical Engineering.
>
> I've had a chat with him about some ways he can be doing his own projects on his own time but as I'm completely self-taught I'm not able to offer him any advice on possible course/subject selection at Uni.
>
> So - time to put your fancy degree to some use ;) - what subjects were helpful/real-world relevant, what was a waste of time, what will help him get a good job, what might help him future-proof his degree - and other relevant questions/answers for a young lad.

I'm in CS with special focus on embedded design. From all the activities 
both academic and commercial going on here and the rate at which some 
academic projects become commercial I'd say that they'd love EEs who 
know very much about some of the following topics (talking about future 
proofing an education): hardware/software co-design (because in some 
cases it is better to have a real EE instead of just CS types working on 
a project, ideally he should be able to communicate with CS people), 
low-power design (increasingly important, not only in the embedded 
world), DSP and how to implement complex DSP algorithms in hardware 
(i.e. FPGAs). Another interesting field might be nanotechnology where 
they always look for bright and very handy people who can build robots 
with very delicate manipulators, robot platforms with all sorts of wild 
methods of moving about, and so on. Suggestions: robotics, control 
theory (which might have the added bonus of getting him interested in 
analog synths if he is not already *g*), technical mechanics (I wish I'd 
had taken such a course, would have made understanding some things 
easier). Some basics never get old: Math, lots of it, linear algebra, 
calculus, ordinary and partial differential equations, systems theory. 
Most people (including me when I started out) take math far too lightly 
either thinking "Hey, I can do that" or "Man, what a drag." Knowing math 
however does not replace pratical knowledge which he'll get if he just 
keeps tinkering on his own or maybe in some labs if they are any good. 
If available I'd do courses on both SPICE and Matlab (including as many 
"relevant" toolboxes like filter design for instance) if they are 
available. That's certainly knowledge that is very, very useful and will 
probably do not look too bad on a resume. Now I've probably written far 
too much. Maybe some of it is helpful, at least to get a glimpse of what 
some people out there do and need to know in order to do it. I wish him 
good look.

	Thomas