engineering graduate school question

AH, well, I didn't... ;-)

I took the oral exam route, so no thesis needed. You see, I didn't have a BSEE going in, just a BS Psych, so I wanted all the course work I could get.

First thing I learned - If you had a choice between Course A in the undergrad classes, or course B in the grad classes, ALWAYS TAKE COURSE B! The material was more interesting, the grading was easier, the coursework more practical, and it was more fun. I almost flunked out before learning that...

Of course, it helped that I had been a hobbyiest and technician for a few years before doing this...

Charlie

Reply to
Charlie Edmondson
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The documentation provided at the site admits that it is a preliminary interface just to get the radio on-the-air after some months of engineering and construction; I hoped to make a fancy GUI but again that would require client-side installs or applets...

Anyone who doesn't like the java (used only for an embedded telnet client and and embedded IRC client) may access the receiver controls at:

telnet://cybertheque.org 1238

and for the chat to coordinate its use with other users:

irc://cybertheque.org#rcvr

The audio is available in an RTP stream by placing a SIP call to:

sip: snipped-for-privacy@cybertheque.org

These steps may be a little 'klunky' but so far I have not found an os-agnostic way to handle each of these media types without requiring client-side installs unless the user is willing to put up with a little trouble with java or the user is willing to make the effort to access the streams using separate clients as above.

Regards,

Michael

(msg _at_ cybertheque _dot_ org)

Reply to
msg

However, I forgot to mention that in order to establish a session if there already is a connection (in other words, to grab the session from another user) is to use the 'RESET' button on the main web page (which invokes a cgi program to clear the connection).

Regards,

Michael

Reply to
msg

wow, in the U.S. (with 50 states, some of which have only one school with an EE department), i didn't know there were many more than 200 EE programs in the country. are there any other countries with a lot more than 200 EE departments?

i went to a non-prestigious school (U of North Dakota in Grand Forks), too, and majored in EE and got both a BSEE and an MS (not an MSEE). if your school sees their role or niche as one of teaching and transforming the ignorant (not meant to be derogatory) to the knowledgeable, given the values that i have, i consider that to be an asset. when i arrived at Northwestern (supposedly a prestigious school), i was amazed at how shallow the EE knowledge and understanding was amoung my fellow EE grad students that got their BSEE from Northwestern. that was, i believe, because the profs were not encouraged to teach nor to really prepare for classes they taught. they were rewarded for publishing in high quantity (quality was not really measured since the peers of the prof relied on the journals to judge quality). publishing several papers per year left relatively little time to prepare for the teaching that they were principally paid to do. i really think, particularly for the undergrads who paid the most money and got the least attention, that they got ripped off.

anyway, i think you (and anyone except those who really cannot handle the advanced content of most graduate courses in EE and Math) should go to grad school and get an MS, not just for the potentially better job prospects and likely better earnings, but for the sheer advancement in knowledge you will get, if the grad school profs are any good. do it to be a better, more knowledgeable, and more capable electrical engineer. that reason should be sufficient in and of itself.

r b-j

Reply to
robert bristow-johnson

I think I see your problem.

Reply to
Richard Henry

Do you want to be a mangare or an engineer?

I hire based on experience and skill, not degree's.

Reply to
The Real Andy

I take it you aren't in the workforce! "Employed" by government or a university I presume!

Benj

Reply to
Benj

Oh Wait a minute! Larwe already said the above is "utter nonsense"!

And many times people are forced to attend things because the boss is a moron. One of my bosses somehow got the idea that my writing needed improvement, so I was ordered to attend an "effective writing" class. Ok, it was free and I was positive about it. You never really know when you might pick up a useful idea or two from ANYONE you talk with.

Well, hey, remember the "moron" thing? What the boss didn't know was that I was a published author who for a time had made a living writing articles for major magazines! So I started the class and pretty soon the woman who ran the class is looking at me funny. And finally (a la Billy Joel... I'm not kidding!) says to me, "What are YOU doing here?" Heh! So I explained how I was ordered to go to the class. :) Mostly she and I sat around telling writer war stories to each other while the rest of the class pondered the mysteries of the English language. Quite frankly it was one of the best times I ever had!

Benj

Reply to
Benj

The way it was originally stated, it is nonsense. It is the exception, not the rule - and a management-dependent thing.

I had a similar experience when, in an English class, the professor said "Your writing is very good; you should write a book" - to which I replied "I just finished my third and am starting on my fourth".

Reply to
larwe

Fortune 100 multinational. If you're really in the workforce, I pity you, because your employer sucks.

Reply to
larwe

You lost me here.

Reply to
larwe

In what way? Attributions are 'joe wrote:' initial lines. One goes with each block (depth) of quoted material. You stripped them. Look back at the message you originally wrote, and what you were replying to (if still available).

Reply to
CBFalconer

And hopefully a command of English spelling and grammar.

Jim

Reply to
RST Engineering (jw)

what abt pharmacy school also?

Reply to
me

How would he know?

messagenews: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Reply to
Richard Henry

"RST Engineering (jw)" wrote: *** and top-posted - fixed ***

This is totally ridiculout. So I fixed it.

Please do not top-post. Your answer belongs after (or intermixed with) the quoted material to which you reply, after snipping all irrelevant material. See the following links:

Reply to
CBFalconer

On Jun 18, 5:32 pm, "Joel Kolstad" wrote:

You hit the nail right on the head.

There is a situation that is even worse than working on some professor's pet poodle: having you own ideas and not being able to pursue them because every researcher in the field automatically insists that you work on their pet project. Utterly disgusting.

What is ironic is that, long ago, Ph.D.-like programs were typically confined to the domain of true thinkers - people who had their own, original ideas, and were unafraid to be left alone for 2 or 3 years in a (metaphorically speaking) empty room to come up with something brilliant.

Today, the Ph.D. program, for many students, is regarded as a program of entitlement - "If you do X, you can expect Y." You can test this assertion very easily. Go to any Ph.D. program in the country, good school, bad school, whatever...does not matter, and ask the aspiring Ph.D. candidates.."What is going to be your focus area?" Until they start in the program, most of them don't have a clue, and those that have already started the program are typically working on some professor's dog.

Now this is not to to say that this is immoral. Obviously, this program of entitlement has become institutionalized and is now consider a normal expectation of the academy.

What is criminal is when you have someone, who has truly original ideas, and that person is squeezed, unable to find a channel to explore, create, etc. Also, if I might continue my misanthropic rant, I do not believe this situation came about accidentally. I have learned that there is a constant struggle between the group and the individual. There is a TV commercial in the United States by the corporation GEICO that makes fun of this fact. But in truth, it is very sad. You have people who have zero creative ability, and rather than leave those alone who do, they pro-actively engage in behaviors to abate any distinction that might arise between their work and the work of others. I have seen this in the academy. I have seen this in industry. I think this is why there are so many other responsibilities that researchers might have, like teaching, etc - there are those who have enough ideas to last 100 generations, and there are those who could not think of anything original to save their lives. If both are in the same department with the same title, the former will attempt to promulgate any policy that allows him/her to do serious research, serious thinking, the kind that the great masters did. The latter will undermine any such policy. What's odd is that you can generally tell within one hour which category these two types of "researchers" fall in. The former will not be able to shut up about new ideas, possibly concocting original ideas in real-time as the discussion proceeds. The latter will be evasive of anything that might test his/her originality. They will be quick to steer the subject away from their work.

I think it is a travesty that these two types of people are typically mixed together in the same department. I wish someday the thought leaders of academia will learn that this is foolish, that it only delays the inevitable [true thinkers eventually find their path anyway, and charlatans die hard], and separate these people. One group will do pure research. The other group can do whatever the hell they want, so long it is not to interfere with the first group.

I've noticed over the last three years that there has been a bit of a backlash against the technorati. You might remember back in the

1970's that there were people who had vague, pseudo-technical titles, like "Business Analyst."

Let's look at this phrase for a moment to see what I am getting at. It has both the words "Business" and "Analyst". Most people who see the word "business" implicitly assume that the holder of the title has business-related skills, like sales, marketing, etc. Most people who see the word"analyst" implicitly assume that the title-holder has analytical ability, a trait typically possessed only by those with technical backgrounds or a proclivity to solve technical problems.

Now this title is extremely convenient. If you meet someone in the hallway, someone with this title earning $130,000US for essentially doing nothing butter uttering jibberish that s/he read in a "management" book at local bookstore, it becomes difficult to disprove that person's worth to the company. If you are a technical person, the charlatan can be excused of his/her technical incompetence because s/he can immediately claim, "I only know the business aspect of our processes." If you are a business person, the the charlatan can, again, worm his/her way out of accountability by claiming, "Hey, I'm just a techie who likes to communicate difficult technical concepts to executives to help them make informed decisions." Executives, many of them technically incompetent (not at all companies), like very much the idea of having a liason between them and the people who actually know what's going on.

So it's a perfect title.

I watched one company recently, in a shake-up, fire many of the contracting engineers, and start creating many "Business Analyst" positions in their place. There were open requisitions for engineers, but all the positions except technical positions were getting filled. I called the head-hunter for the technical positions to give her a heads-up on what was happening, which she later verified. This company has over $1,000,000,000,000US (trillion) under assets, and I had alway suspected that the management was full of caca, many of them grossly incompetent. They were part of an acquired company that had managed to squeeze every penny of profit out of the company and fatten their salaries with it. With 300 employees, there were 40 cases of nepotism, as could be determined from the last names on company intranet. Any how, the parent company got upset, trying to figure out what happened to all the profit, and called for a shake-up, and that's when all the engineers got fired and the "business analyst" positions were created.

This should have been obvious from parking garage. You can tell a lot about a group of people by how they drive in a parking garage (New York notwithstanding). There were one step away from the cut-throat, dog-eat-dog, save-my-own-ass first type of people who would cheat on algebra tests in high school just to get by with a passing grade.

-Le Chaud Lapin-

Reply to
Le Chaud Lapin

It sounds like you are falling into a common trap - assuming the past must have been better than the present, because its just to awful to believe things have always been this bad. In practice very very little changes over time.

Steve

Reply to
Steve Underwood

...

Ridiculout; n. foolish boor.

Amen.

Jerry

Reply to
Jerry Avins

Actually it's a bit worse than this. A PhD candidate is supposed to be required to contribute to the world's knowledge to obtain the title. The unfortunate aspect of this is that schools are usually highly centered upon class work. Practical skills (such as original research) aren't even mentioned, let alone taught. Class work tends to involve lots of memory and agreeing with the professor (even when he/she is dead wrong).

I knew this one guy, who was the ace student of the EE department. The guy never got a grade below an A in his entire life. But then suddenly classwork was over! He had not the SLIGHTEST clue where to begin doing research. And let me emphasize that this was not some clown who had no practical knowledge. He very much knew which end of the soldering iron to grab. But he had no idea where to start research. The poor guy literally freaked out! He couldn't handle it. He dropped out and I don't know if he ever got his degree.

Happily MSEE candidates aren't expected to do anything significant in the way of original work. Most any kind of bogus study will do. But I don't want to imply that the whole exercise is a waste of time. A masters candidate gets a good up front immersion in the whys and whatfors of productive work even though the final product may end up of questionable value. The Thesis is not the point. It is this practical experience in real life questions that actually makes the MSEE so much more valuable to an employer than say the BSEE who actually doesn't have any idea which end of the soldering iron to grab.

Benj

Reply to
Benj

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