Hey so I hope you have feedback. Seriously, I wrote this up with deep care. - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: renzoms
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 01:43:29 am
content: So I've got these 5 textbooks(Fund. of Digital Logic, Fund. of Electric Circuits, PEFI, Sendra/Smith, and TAOE).https://imgur.com/a/4I0V2tJAnd Long story as short as I can make it and my background, I've literally done mv calculus, differential equations, and kinematics, about 3 to 4 times each • at university and MIT's OpenCourseWare. Literally all of the exercises. I'm about to finish these two entire textbooks; Fundamentals of Digital Logic and Fundamentals of Electric Circuits. Literally all of the exercises. Their both about 700 pages and 1500 exercises in total. And wrapping up, I just finished my sophomore year / associates degree checkpoint in ee • so the work I've done fits my college progress.So the problem I stumbled on (written in string-y thoughts):I'm wrapping up these books. I started to go through Practical Electronics for Inventors. I planned on going through Sendra/Smith / TAOE, when I finished these (2) books. I flipped through PEFI and realized it was not like I remembered it from when I had first read through hundreds of it's pages about 2 years ago. So now I think that book is a waste of time. And this Digital Logic book appears more to me to be distant from the contents of the Electric Circuits book. i.e. simple processors versus Linear circuits and Laplace Transforms. So now, I'm certain it's worth going through Sendra/Smith and TAOE to advance my skills, to ultimately earn an occupation I love, and I'm kind of like hmm... I know people out there use this information, I know people out there have all sorts of jobs, and I'd like to hear from you folks. Like do you like your job and what is it and what parts of your education do you use. Do you have some recommendation about where I may find it worthwhile to focus based on the jobs I may catch, that turn out to be fun. Do you have any ideas in which I can combine my c programming, and verilog, ee skills, and undergraduate math and physics intellect. Like big picture, fun jobs/careers/fields. Worthwhile projects in my small home lab.I think F1, sea craft, aircraft, spacecraft, off road vehicles are cool. I also find the idea of automated, smart, voice-activated, app-controlled, home/car/and life technology interesting. I find the idea of electric circuit/device creation cool. I like coding, but I wouldn't give everything up for coding. I see the Gravity suit, the Translogic Mech suit, the fighter jets, the speedboats, the UTV's and racecars, space ships, like Rockets and "Cool" stuff and think "that has some electrical engineering in it".Then I peek into the ends of these textbooks and see graphs; x and y graphs plotting like changes in the characteristic of a polystyrene capacitor at various frequencies or something. I think maybe I should step away from the textbooks at some point, maybe there's a book I should get soon, maybe you folks can advice me about what to specialize in/do/look into these final 2 years of college.

author: rstofer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 08:37:43 pm
content: Were it me, and it's not, I would spend the last two years taking every CS course I could take. The growth in EE isn't much of a fraction of CS and, when you graduate, it's jobs that matter. If there is any chance of taking a Machine Learning course (or any other branch of AI), go for it. Today, everything is large data and databases. If you have taken a course in Linear Algebra, you are all set.I did the undergrad EE and grad EE/CS bit and used the FFT once in 27 years. I ultimately wound up doing project management with a focus on electrical. I did a couple of projects with my CS background and that was kind of fun but, more or less, I drove projects. Sometimes you don't wind up working in your major.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 09:02:39 pm
content: It’s been a long time since I was in college (but it wasn’t for EE, which is new to me as a career), and if I could go back and give young me some advice, it’d include “do more internships, if you can afford to.” They a) get you a foot in the door with companies that might not give you the time of day otherwise, and b) give you exposure to real world stuff.The latter, IMHO, is important not even so much for finding what you think would like to work on (since you might not get that lucky), but for showing you what youdon’twant to work on, what youdon’twant in a workplace, etc. Knowing what you don’t want is something that I think is wildly underrated.If you haven’t already, befriend a bunch of the professors who do interesting stuff. Ask them to show you what they’re working on. Pick their brains on their specialties. You could end up with just the right person across from you. (And it’s nice to be able to go visit your old school 15 years later and still have a professor remember you and smile!)True story like that: towards the end of my college career, I had to talk to the dept chair for my minor, linguistics, about some administrative something. After that was done, I casually asked her what her ancestry was, since she had a clearly Slavic last name, and I’m 1/8 Russian and 1/8 Ukrainian ancestry. (But my grandma was a big personality so it got more than its fair share, heheh!). So we got to talking about our stories, and she asked if we’d ever been there. I said that we wanted to go, but didn’t even know where our Ukrainian ancestors came from. We knew they were from the Carpathian mountain region, and that they’d had arrived in USA through Ellis Island, but our searches for their immigration records had come up empty. So the professor asks, “Is it possible they were Rusyn?” I didn’t have any idea what she was talking about. Turns out, the Rusyns are a distinct ethnic group from exactly that part of Ukraine, with their own culture, dialect and identity — and this professor was a higher-up in a national Rusyn organization. This one bit of information was the missing puzzle piece. My great-grandmother’s first namewasn’tUkrainian, it was distinctly Rusyn. It explains why Granny said her family spoke a different dialect of Ukrainian than “regular” Ukrainian. And it explains why we couldn’t find our ancestors’ records: theyweren’tlisted under “Ukrainian”. (Apparently, it was very common for Rusyn immigrants to eventually give up on explaining it and just default to saying they were Ukrainian.) My aunt returned to the National Archives a few days later (a perk of living in DC) and searched again, this time under “Rusyn”. And she found them — with a hometown listed! She’d been trying to find that for years and years, but it all came down to a single word in a chance encounter with just the right person.

author: renzoms
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 11:48:08 pm
content: Thanks. I hope you can look at my post here _. I am keeping your advice in mind, elevated and attracted to your advice, and I'm waiting to see what your thoughts are considering this latest post.Thanks dude. I appreciate it._https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/ive-decided-i-want-to-build-computer-controlled-cnc-machines-like-5-axis-mills/new/#new

author: renzoms
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2021, 11:49:20 pm
content: Thanks for sharing that. That was pleasant. I did have an internship working with radiation dosimetry and learned I do not like that. That story is out of this worldand good advice