engineering graduate school question

I agree with the other posts. If we can't interest students in Ham Radio early, it's going down the drain. If anyone wants to speak to someone new now, they can get on a chat room...

We are becoming a consumer nation, producing less and less as time goes on. Technical jobs, even some computer jobs are being off-shored, removing the desire for new students in colleges to pick non-technical fields.

Math and Science/Physics is being dumbed down in early schools, and many schools can't afford to pay the better teachers. In part due to the need to allow Hispanic students to compete. Some schools, I've heard, even require Spanish education for prospective teachers!

The PC (Politically Correct) slant is affecting the Universities most of all. My son was going for a Math degree but was turned off with the requirement of 30 semester hours of multicultural core classes, and dropped out with only two Math classes to go! Literature replaced American Literature, with only 3 of the required books being written by authors in the US!). A BSEE at several Universities now requires 20%-50% more hours of Liberal Arts than 30 years ago, probably due to the low number of tenured Math/Sciences professors when graduation requirements are voted on...

A class in Black Studies was a required course in both my boy's High School too. I would expect that to change if the current Amnesty Bill passes, as the largest minority would be Hispanic then. (Well, after the over 55 who don't count -- we're too old to get "real" jobs when we're let go due to downsizing and outsourcing.)

Gary KB9CG

Reply to
Gary
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True. They will actually promote the guy who wears a suit. I've seen smart people wear a suit every day from graduation, and I've seen idiots do it. I've never seen anyone wear a suit every day and fail to make rapid progress, though.

Steve

Reply to
Steve Underwood

what abt at age 49 as I am?

I'm thinking of getting an BSEE at 49

Reply to
me

In news: snipped-for-privacy@corp.supernews.com timestamped Mon, 18 Jun

I am aware of two broadly similar software engineering primary degrees from a faculty: one an evening and weekend version of the regular version. Almost everybody doing the evening and weekend version had a normal supposedly fulltime job in information technology while doing their degrees and the consequences of trying to do a degree and a job tended to be bad: inferior grades; a much higher failure rate; and many people would end up failing and repeating a year.

I myself am a Ph.D. candidate in electronic engineering and as such, attending lessons and trying to pass exams is not as major a component of the degree, but I still had to do some. Though all the lectures (and, if the assessment was based on a sat exam instead of project work after the course, the exams) were held during normal working hours, I would need to conduct my research during the remaining normal working hours so I would study for the exams during my supposedly spare time (e.g. when trying to eat dinner). This was technically doable and my grades were fairly okay but some of the grades could have been better and grades do not actually matter for this Ph.D.

Anyway, though I technically could cope for a few weeks with doing research (or a job) and attending lectures and exams and doing projects and homework for a subject without a sat exam, I realized that those people doing primary degrees while also working must have been suffering. Most people who have responded in this thread supporting working and studying seem to have tried it themselves, but I would recommend restricting activities to either chiefly working or chiefly doing a degree for any stint lasting more than a few months. I do not wish to suggest which of these options is a good one, just that mixing them together seems to be a bad idea to me. "I was a little disappointed that there were various HP employees in some of the classes I took who were there only because HP required them to get a degree to advance in title and hence salary. [..] from a corporate point of view, I'm amazed that HP condones such activities. ---Joel"

Many people attend things because they are forced to and because the people who force them to attend do not really realize how the privileges are unappreciated and misused. E.g. people who attend conferences but do nothing there except read a newspaper instead of paying attention to the presentations; people whose expenses to attend conferences actually end up being used to pay for their vacations as they do not bother to attend the presentations; and people whose employers pay them to attend C++ standardization meetings who play computer games during the meetings. I did not make up any of those examples.

Sincerely, Colin Paul Gloster

Reply to
Colin Paul Gloster

I have to disagree a little here. If your goal is to be, e.g., an analog IC designer, unless you're Jim Thompson's kid it's very difficult to do these days without the formal education. The problem is that building ICs requires big bucks, which implies big companies, and big companies are notoriously bad about using academic credentials as the first "gatekeepers" to employment.

On the other hand, for someone who wants to write software, do some digital design, perhaps some power supply stuff, etc. (i.e., decent chance of getting a job in a smaller company as a "general-purpose useful person), it is reasonable to just learn on the job. Perhaps not the most secure career strategy, but I certainly know several people who've taken this route and it works just fine for them.

Reply to
Joel Kolstad

This may be true for companies with large bureaucracies, but competence has always trumped credentials every place I have worked. And an MSEE typically fails to add any significant competence outside of the narrow thesis area.

We all have strengths and weaknesses in various areas, but I find that the engineers that I hire who are generalists rather than specialists are much more productive.

Mark Walsh

Reply to
Mark Walsh

For 25 tears, I wore jeans and flannel shirts (with a sports jacket for the pockets) most days at work. I wore a suit when I had to attend a meeting with outside people for the first few times, and I kept a necktie in my bottom drawer "just in case". I several times turned down offers to become a manager. For me, the extra pay wasn't worth the hassle, and I would have hated giving up my soldering iron. I was much better off doing what I enjoyed.

Jerry

Reply to
Jerry Avins

I always asked about car and bicycle maintenance when I interviewed job candidates. I've rarely seen a good engineer who was a poor mechanic. When quizzing new graduates about technical competence, I asked what subjects they felt they knew best and concentrated on that. There's no good comes of sandbagging someone with a topic he's weak in, and if a person's best is poor, I'm ready to accept his word that the rest is poorer.

Jerry

Reply to
Jerry Avins

...

For 25 *years*, I wore jeans

Jerry

Reply to
Jerry Avins

Jerry Avins wrote in news:pfqdnS0MMaFHmeXbnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@rcn.net:

Thanks-- for a second, I though Question Mark (of The Mysterios) might have reemerged!

Reply to
Scott Seidman

Paging Dr. Freud, Dr. Sigmund Freud....

;-) Rich

Reply to
Rich, but drunk

I have my amateur radio license and all, but at the end of the day, what does it get you? The ability to go out and legally transmit on a bunch of frequencies that you otherwise couldn't.

This is no longer all that horribly interesting to most people, especially when you consider that historically hams prmiarily used those frequencies for conversing about nothing in particular (their use for, e.g., propagation studies, coding studies, etc. has always been miniscule in comparison), and today anyone with Internet access or a cell phone can do the same thing... and a lot more. I have a fancy PDA phone that let's me access any web site on the Internet -- including secure sites -- at speeds in the "many hundreds of kbps" range, and plenty of my colleagues do as well. What does the *typical* ham have today? A 2m HT that's hitting a voice repeater. While I expect it's primarily lack of interest and funds that precludes hams from building similar systems, the fact that the FCC regulates amateur radio with rather obsolete rules -- only certain modulation formats are allowable, for instance -- definitely doesn't help either. (For every licensed amateur with a 2m HT, I suspect that something under 5% have any form of a digital radio system, and probably As a career decision the MSEE makes sense only if very, very

I'd say it's only killed it as a desirable career path for those who really weren't particularly passionate or good at it in the first place.

On the other hand, I can definitely see why someone who's not sure if they want to be an engineer or a businessman deciding to go the MBA route instead of the EE route these days. Plenty of competition there as well, of course.

It's not a crime to leave out some of your prior job experience and educational qualifications on your resume. :-)

There's also a lot more to the country than Silicon Valley.

It really sounds like he should try to find a job outside of California...

---Joel

Reply to
Joel Kolstad

I don't see this happening. People have successfully argued that many of the old tests (such as Morse code!) were outdated and should be dropped (quite reasonable, I think), but the culture today is very much against replacing those old tests with up-to-date tests in there place. Hence, getting an amateur radio license today is not much harder than getting a driver's license. Even that's not entirely a bad thing, but it makes it clear why hams today reflect a pretty "generic" slice of society (plenty of bad in with the good) compared to the largley "niche engineering" slice it once did (somewhat more good than bad...).

Reply to
Joel Kolstad

I know someone who used to teach for the University of Phoenix on-line. She said there was a lot of pressure to dumb down the course, and she was having a hard time doing that and still making it particularly relevant. Apparently UoP did this enough that at some point they were threatened with having their accreditation yanked (for those getting degrees on-line -- I imagine their physical campus courses are fine) if they didn't stop!

In my own MSEE program, a significant number of students (including myself... ) took jobs after finishing coursework and proceeded to take a looonnnggg time (two to three years... ) to get around to finishing their theses. Part of this is funding related -- none of us were given a funded quarter to *just* work on our theses, so for most people getting a job looked awfully attractive. In retrospect it probably would be better to just bite the bullet and spend three months doing nothing but thesis work and remove the albatross around one's neck, so to speak.

I'm sure I sound quite whiney, though -- my late grandfather, who obtained his BSEE in l930-something? worked full time while going to school. He commented once that he wished he had had more time to spend on his studies, that he literally was doing nothing but working, attending classes, studying, eating and sleeping at times. His grades were fine, but not straight A's, and he claimed that they could have been if he had had that extra time for studying. Times have changed a lot, of course, and realistically someone without financial support today will be taking out student loans. At least that does give them the option of spending more time studying... if they choose to do so.

---Joel

Reply to
Joel Kolstad

It's not even true in this case. I should know; I work in a big, big multinational with enough bureaucracy to make even a civil servant gibber in terror. We have people from the senior engineering level all the way up to the executive level who don't even have a BSEE and were promoted on a merit/achievement basis.

Reply to
larwe

It depends.

I found that when hiring a freshman just from school, the BSEEs are worseless. They don't know anything, they can do nothing and, what is much worse, they don't want to do anything about that. It will be years and years till they reach the level of apprentice.

The fresh MSEEs and PhDs are lot better in the general; it takes only 6 month or so to make them productive. The advanced degree is an indicator of diligence, discipline and ambition; this is good.

I consider the ability to work independently as the very important parameter. This includes setting and accomplishing the goals and the self education in the course of the project. BSEEs are not ready for that; they expect somebody to change their pants at all time.

Vladimir Vassilevsky

DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant

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Reply to
Vladimir Vassilevsky

I think you're guilty of making some generalizations as well here, Vladimir. Yes, many BSEEs aren't able to "run a project" (even a very small one) on their own, but some are. Similarly, I've had MSEEs and PhDs whose practical skills were so poor I honestly think I could have done better standing in the an engineering school's student union, talked to a couple dozen students as they walked by, and returned with the best candidate.

P.S.: Since this is related to your area... we did have a guy come in to interview about doing DSP work, and I asked him how he might go about taking some digitized signal he had in the memory of a DSP and reversing its spectrum -- preferably as efficiently as possible. His answer was that he'd take the FFT, reverse it, and then perform an iFFT. :-( That's the sort of answer I might expect from someone right out of school, but not from someone who'd been in industry for many years as he had.

P.P.S.: I clicked on your web page. Shouldn't that circuit board photo you have at least be of a DSP rather than a microcontroller? :-) Or do you do a lot of "hard core" DSP in microcontrollers?

---Joel

Reply to
Joel Kolstad

No. Enroll in Law School.

Reply to
Simon S Aysdie

This is an excellent approach to separating the engineers that can actually create a product that works from those who can generate the equations that show that it should have worked. I've hired engineers fresh from school at both the BSEE and MSEE level who seemed to think that they should get partial credit for getting a project mostly done to spec.

I have received some offline communications:

I sense some resentment/bias against advanced degrees in some of these posts? I'll stick by my original points: getting accepted to grad school indicates the person is a good student, they can handle advanced material, and they've done at least one major project that had a beginning, a middle, and an end.

My own MS was in applied mathematics. It has been an valuable part of my education, but rarely used in the last 20 years. I spend most of my days in the lab or the machine shop doing what I love to do. Lifelong learning in a formal classroom setting, on the job, and through independent study is an integral part of being a competent engineer. I send my engineers to classes of varying value frequently. I am currently giving full support to one of my engineers who is pursuing his masters, both through tuition payment and extensive time off.

I have no beef with credentials, but they aren't an acceptable substitute nor necessarily an indicator of competence.

Mark Walsh

Reply to
Mark Walsh

RF Radio Interference issue abatement for an ever-changing number of tower sites (and company names) (from as little as 12, to as many as

8,000 towers. And all types: cellular, paging, AM/FM/TV, rotatable log periodics, C-band uplink, etc...)

At the time, I refused to get my Amateur license. (Even at the encouragement of my radio friends, who could never quite understand my aversion to it.)

What turned me off most were the countless "back-to-back Mitrek mobile repeaters", and the ensuing interference complaints & extra workload that would often generate. And having met many a HAM, I just didn't feel like I ever fit into that crowd.

Now that I'm a bit older, and more importatnly not doing interference work anymore (unless someone pays me big bucks!), I've warmed up a little. HAMS are definitely a social bunch, but I'm not sure as a whole, they are advancing the art anymore..?? I think THAT is the "decline" we're all trying to put our fingers on. A lot of HAMS just buy gear off the shelf. And finite element analysis (which exceeds most amateur's comprehension) took over the rest.

That's a far cry from "Honey, can you bring home some milk?"

-mpm

Reply to
mpm

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