I have about 2.5-3 weeks to decide upon what and where I’m going to be studying next year at university.
Probably the leading contender is to study electrical engineering at the University of Toronto.
I know all about the programme and everything, but I would like to know if anyone here (esp., of course, electrical engineers) could tell me about what sort of jobs elec. engineerings go into after university, citing personal examples, perhaps. Maybe people here may know friends who are elec. engineers; if so, what do they do, who do they work for, and so forth?
Employment prospects for amost any degree qualified engineer are very good indeed.
Electrical engineering is an immense field and it will depend on your electives what area you will be looking at.
Design work is possibly the most interesting as you need to keep up to date, try starting off in a large concern which will be able to provide you with a chance to look at several options and then possibly move on to the particular company and role you find you enjoy most.
Aside from the hands on aspect engineers can often sind themselves as managers in areas you would not expect simply because they are so versatile.
A lot of the EE majors I went to school with (back in the early 90’s) went into the computer science field, but without the requisite background that many CS jobs require, so the learning curve has been steeper.
Decide now if you’re more interested in computer science or actual engineering. If the answer may be CS, consider a CS or Computer Engineering program. In fact, if you are interested in computers in general, Computer Engineering may be the way to go…
Jason
I’m an electrical engineering major at Cornell, and I’ll be graduating this weekend…WOO HOO!!! Anyway, I’m going into the Army, because they paid for school, but a lot of my friends are working at many varied companies. Some to software companies, like Microsoft, some to computer companies (IBM, Seagate, etc.), some to electronics companies, some to companies that make components but not full products. It’s a very diverse field. I concentrated in digital signal processing, so I might try to get a job with Creative Labs or something after I get out of the Army.
Jman
I did the Electrical Engineering/Computer Science route back in the mid/late 80’s.
Both my undergraduate and graduate degrees are majors in Electrical Engineering, but the graduate minor was in Computer Science to reflect my changed priorities over the years (actually, I was always much better in programming than in circuit analysis and design - maybe because digital is cleaner and more black & white [indeed, binary is the ultimate black & white system] than analog, real world components).
Over the years, my friends who stayed in pure electrical engineering (circuit design - none were power engineering, which are usually in demand everywhere, and the acoustic engineering field at the time belonged to mechanical engineers) went first into the Defense Industry, then drifted either into the computing field or out into management etc.
I caution you, this will not be representative of all areas, since the electrical engineering field on Long Island (NY) during the late 80s-early 90s was dominated by defense engineering firms, and our ‘pure’ non-defense related E.E. industry was small in comparison, with several medium-sized firms dominating (e.g. Symbol Technology, Comverse, Telephonics, Harmon-Karden, etc.). Therefore, finding a programming job (and this was before everyone and their grandmother thought they were 3l33t kewl code-slingers cause they read a ‘Cold-fusion for Dummies’ book) was much easier than a circuit-design job [again, power engineers usually have it easier]. However, having EE & CS experience does work well if you present the <70’s term>Synergy</70’s term> the two fields have when combined.