Brads Electronic Projects Forum

20 Tips for Engineering Students

Tip #1: Take good notes, and keep them all after your classes are over.

http://www.electricalengineeringschools ... -students/

There needs to be something about really making the connection between the math & theory and the application. Unfortunately math tends to be presented in an ultra-sterile way, separate from the circuits. I've had engineers who could throw around the matrices and equations and Greek letters better than I but who, when it came down to it, couldn't design their way out of a wet paper bag or make the connection to what was happening in their circuit on the workbench. A medical doctor who also got a BS in mechanical engineering because she wanted to go into prosthesis design said to me that she did great in her transforms classes but still didn't really know what the Fourier transform does and what it's useful for. So I was explaining this to this person whose formal education was far beyond my own. I recently worked for a few years with an engineer who could work his way around the S-plane far better than I, but who couldn't design circuits. There was an EE student in India who was constantly emailing me for a couple of years asking about things like the FFT and the convolution integral. The school apparently took the approach that they were going to produce top-notch engineers by working them really hard; yet this made the students barely able to hang on, and they certainly had no time to slow down and take the time to really understand things.

I think you're right Garth. I am faced with this all the time at work when teaching. The students want to know how they can use the theory, how they can apply it in the real world instead of just understanding how to pass an exam.