I'm returning to school to get a BS in EE and I'm a bit worried. Like a few
>people stated, school only teaches you to plug numbers into formulas, but
>doesn't give you a chance to make you physically understand how things work.
I think you will find that your BSEE curriculum will be very different from your AA training. It will be much more analytical (much more mathematical) with a more thorough understanding of physics and electrical theory. In addition, you won't just "plug numbers into formulas." You will learn how the formulas were derived and you might be required to show that YOU can derive them. (Don't let this concept worry you. You will be given enough math training so that you will be able to perform these operations.) Such exercises bring real insight into the meaning of functions and equations.
As of recently I've been reading up on
>designing and even that is hard because a simple transistor circuit has a
>ton of calculations and each person has their own way of doing it.
Different people may do things differently, but designing with transistors (or anything else) is not haphazard. Certain things must be taken into consideration and results of certain types must be obtained. Design is an open-ended problem, meaning that there typically aren't fixed recipes for doing things. Engineering wouldn't be much fun if there were.
An EE curriculum will expect you to analyze a whole lot of circuits. Most of these problems are contrived so that the solutions are relatively straighforward. These sorts of exercises will get your feet wet and will give you a sense of what's important and how to attack various types of circuit problems.
You can probably expect to do some real, if rudimentary, design in something like a senior design seminar. Solving real problems like this in an environment where there are professors available for coaching and fellow student who can offer their ideas is very helpful.
BUT, when you get out into the real world and get real design assignments, you'll probably be lost for a while. Your real design training will be under the tutelage of an experienced engineer. This will happen if you're lucky. If you're not lucky, you'll have to absorb these skills much more slowly on your own. But there is still hope: transistor data sheets aren't really as daunting as they might seem right now.
For
>instance, school doesn't teach you how to read data sheets for transistors
Don't be so sure. You don't learn how to analyze transistor circuits without learning about transistor parameters.
If you calculate a transistor circuit naturally you wont get
>your exact calculations, but if you plug it into a spice program like Micro
>Cap or Multisim, you get exact answers.
Both of these statements are wrong.
So there has to be a calculation
>process where you can get exact answers. Granted those software programs
>probably have tons of formulas and they do it at a rate of billions of times
>a second, but there is a way to get ideal real world answers.
When you analyze a circuit with pencil and paper, you can only consider a few parameters at a time. Spice-type programs can consider many parameters at once. But Spice programs don't give you the insight that's possible with pencil and paper calculations, and they often give erroneous results. The problem with Spice programs is that they are strictly numerical and it is relatively easy to introduce errors and instability into numerical calculations. (Computers are not the be-all and end-all of problem solving.) This problem can lead to erroneous answers or even the failure to converge to a solution.
Then things I don't understand is say high frequency multipliers or
>harmonics. I deal with high frequency multipliers and I don't get how you
>can take a harmonic of a sine wave say 100MHz sine wave taking the 7th
>harmonic to get 700MHz out. School teaches you the points of a sine wave
>such as all the degree points (or radian points if you want to deal with
>radians) But how can a repeating sine wave have something on the so called
>7th harmonic that will allow it to multiply up to 700MHz?
Don't expect that you should understand this stuff BEFORE you go to school. The concepts needed to understand harmonics and frequency multiplication are simple. You will be taught all about this sort of thing.
There are tons of people in the world that just do things and don't know why
>they do it, but thankfully there are people out there who do know what they
>are doing. Too bad the school system couldn't have more people like that >teaching.
Don't be so quick to judge. Take the BSEE courses and I think you will change your mind.