I’ve gotten REALLY into electronics in the past year, without really having had any previous experience with anything “under the hood.” I’ve gone from “what’s AC and DC?” to breadboarding small projects, replacing capacitors in old amplifiers, and I even have some rudimentary designs in mind for some original projects.
I think I might really want to study this formally and make a career change in order to become some sort of electrical engineer. I’m still pretty young - 27 - and I already have a B.A.
What do I do?
Do I need to get a B.S. in electrical engineering? As I already have a B.A., I’d imagine that a lot of the general ed classes would be covered and I could knock this out in a year or two of night school. Should I just try to become someone’s apprentice, or does it not work that way?
My eventual goal is to do something involving electronics for a living, to be able to repair and modify consumer electronic devices for my own amusement, and to create my own projects. I’m specifically into musical devices that this relates to, like guitar amplifiers and effects devices, and I’d like to be able to repair and modify them, and eventually even design my own.
If you want to get work as an electrical engineer you pretty much have to go back to school and get at least a BS in electrical engineering. You are not doing that in a few years of night school. There might be a path with an associates where you work a number of years as a technician and get promoted to an engineering position but those sorts of opportunities are few and far between.
The days of modifying consumer electronics are largely passed. Most everything is inside ICs. With almost everything else being teeny tiny surface mount components on 10 to 24 layer boards.
Guitar amps may be the last thing around the people can still mess with.
On the other hand things like MITs OpenCourse program has lots and lots of stuff that you can look at right now at no cost to see if you like it.
If you want to repair things and mess around with circuits and a soldering iron, you’re probably not going to want to be an electrical engineer. As an electrical engineer, you’re more likely to work at your desk with an electronics design package and come up with schematic designs to hand off to people who actually build them.
What you want is a one or two year technician/technologist program. A technologist program can get you an associate degree in applied engineering. You’ll learn how to use the equipment on a test bench, how to design and build circuits, some digital logic, maybe some assembly-language programming.
I work for a company that makes programmable logic controllers for factory automation. I’m in software engineering - we write the control programs, HMI screens, device drivers, and more advanced factory control and visualization software. The guys who design the PLCs are electrical engineers. The people who install them, maintain them, program them, hook up equipment to them, troubleshoot them and repair them are technicians. The guy running a group of technicians and having responsibility for keeping things running could be a technologist or an engineer.
Before I went to university, I went through a 2-year associates program in electrical/computer engineering technology. I learned more in that program than I did in university. The labs were tougher, and the coursework was just as hard - we took math all the way through differential equations and linear algebra, plus assembly language programming, solid state electronics, several courses on circuit design, several courses on radio and transmission line theory and application, microwave theory and practice, computer design, microprocessors, etc. Plus courses in technical writing and other ancilliary subjects you needed to do your job efficiently. It was a lot of fun.
That sounds interesting - I like the idea of doing “grunt work,” though I’d eventually be much more interested in the design side of things. Let’s say I just wanted to go as far as becoming a technician - is that a feasible career, or a $10/hr. job?
Electronics engineering technologist here! I graduated from a three-year program (class of '85) with a diploma.
I studied both digital and analogue electronics. This would become known as the “general” option; there was later a "digital-only"option that did not include as much analogue stuff, like Smith charts and antenna theory. Digital became very popular, but the analogue folks had the last laugh, as clock speeds of electronics went up so much that every signal line had to be treated as a transmission line…
What Sam Stone said. The engineers design the things; we technologists get to mess around with the hardware. I have assembled products, tuned radios, done troubleshooting, programmed test equipment (in LabView, easily the most fun thing I’ve ever done at work), and these days I write manuals.
If you want to go into electrical engineering (which is the design side of things), you’ll almost certainly need the BS, and unless your current degree is pretty technical, you’re probably not going to be able to cut much time off it. Take a look here (pdf) for the undergrad EE curriculum at my alma mater for an idea of what you might be getting into.
Even if you get a job as a technician fixing cell phones or something, you’d probably be looking at close to $20. Some technician jobs can pay huge money, if you get into the right industry and and right company. But in general, technicians make less than technologists, and technologists make less than engineers. As an engineer, you might make $60K to $150K depending on skill, experience, and the demand for your particular skills. As a technologist, you’re probably in more of a fixed salary band if you stay in the specialty. I have no idea what those salaries are like these days, but back in the early 80’s when I went through engineers were generally starting in jobs in the $45K range, and technologists were at $35K, and technicians maybe $25K.
Sorry about your job. Unless you meant you were simply using VIs, and not having to create them - that’s not so bad. I avoided it myself, and never heard anything but complaints from people trying to get it working - though once it works, it’s great.
I used to have one of the few EE jobs where I got to do both board-level design and testing (it was a small company), but really there are only a handful out there at this point. Even then, half the work was programming. Some sort of technician or technologist job is probably what you want to go for if that’s the fun part for you.
Yikes…I really can’t imagine trying to work an entire full-load four-year program into 9-5 working life, so I guess I’m screwed unless I want to somehow live off of student loans for four years (not &@!$ likely). Likewise, it doesn’t seem like a “maybe one day get up to $20/hr.” technician-level job would even be worth the amount of time and money I’d have to invest in it on top of working a 9-5 job. Caught between a rock and a hard place.
Everything Sam Stone has said is gold. SpouseO’s an EE, and he’s dying for a technician who could put the boards together for him - they currently don’t have anyone on staff who has all of the required knowledge that he can trust. Yes, the engineers generally design and program while the technicians put together those designs, but if you get in the right company, you might be able to do more.
All that said, the best advice I ever got was that school’s not going anywhere. I think that if you’ve found a passion, you should grab it with both hands and not look back. If I were you, I’d look into going the technician route. Then after you get yourself a job and work at it for a year or two, decide then whether going full-on EE is something you’d like to do.
Last piece of advice - look for jobs in controls. SpouseO’s title is “Project Engineer” (I think) but what he does is build systems that control other large pieces of hardware through user interfaces and software. Basically, he designs and helps build large cabinets that contain all the circuitry to control the system and the user interface and software that controls that circuitry. His first job was working with industrial laser cutters; this current one he’s working for a place that primarily builds pressure regulators - he’s just started up their systems group and created a new system to test said regulators. He’d love to have an experienced technician that he could work with.
And there is a niche out there for circuit board assemblers. SpouseO worked with a contractor up here who made pretty good money taking designs and putting them together. He worked for himself and did good stuff, but I don’t really have a good idea of how he got up off the ground.
ETA: I also don’t think that pursing a technicians certification would necessarily be really expensive or time consuming. Round these parts, I think you can get said certification from a technical college, and they’re all about fitting into your schedule. At least check it out.
According to salary.com, a technician I (entry-level technician job) has an average salary in the U.S. of $36,529, with a salary range of $31,000 to $41,000.
That’s the kind of job you can expect after a 1 or 2-year technician course at a college. So consider $20/hr or close to it to be more like the starting salary for an entry-level position.
Here’s a good description of the job, training required, and what you would be expected to do, at The U.S. Department of Labor. The median salary across all experience ranges is $46,000. If you can get a job in government, it’s $64,000. Get a job with a major telecom company, and it’s $51,000.
If you go back to school, you’ll probably be starting when you’re 28. That gives you four years of school, and then at least 33 years of working with something you enjoy for a good salary. What are your other options for those 37+ years that makes that unappealing?
The four years of school should get you to an engineering position which pay more like $30 going up to $60 with about 15 years experience starting salaries on the west coast.
One of our engineering managers just retired, and in chatting with him the other day I found out that he had gone back to school for an engineering degree at age 33, graduated at 37, and never looked back. He said it was the best decision he ever made.
Once you’re out in industry for ten years or so, four years will seem like nothing. Hell, I’ve been working on one project almost that long. Once you’re in your forties, four years will blow by and feel like a couple of months.
Don’t let the fear of spending a few years studying freak you out. If it’s what you love, go do it.
The one caveat I’d make, however, is that if you want to go into a real B.Sc engineering program, you need to have the intelligence and math ability for it (not saying you don’t, but if you struggled with math in school, or avoided the hard math courses, university engineering might be tough for you). Engineering school is not easy. You’ll be taking a lot of math courses - at a minimum, differential and integral calculus for two years, linear algebra, differential equations, complex functions, and boolean algebra. Plus, there’s just a lot of coursework. There’s no way you could do it part-time in any reasonable length of time - while an arts or science degree may only require 15-20 hours of class time a week, engineering requires all that plus the labs. A typical engineering curriculum will be at least 30 hours a week, not including study time and the time needed to actually write up the lab reports. It’s one of the tougher faculties to go through.
My suggestion would be that at your age, and with your worry about being tied down for four years, you should look into a 2-year applied program that has good transferability into an engineering program. Some such programs even start as one-year technician courses, which you can then extend into a 2-or-3 year technologist/associates program, and then continue from there into a university program if that’s where you really want to go. You can take the technician course part-time while working, by correspondence even, and spread it out over a couple of years.
By the end of it, you’ll have done lots of fun stuff and have a really good grounding in practical electronic application. You’ll learn how to use an oscilloscope and a multimeter, how to use a breadboard to build circuits from schematics and make modifications to them, and how to troubleshoot and repair electronic devices. Even if you never go further, those are good skills to know, and if you truly like electronics you’ll have fun doing it.
Another option you could go down right now if all you’re looking for is a way to formalize your education and have some fun, is to get a ham radio license. Specifcally, a technician license or advanced amateur license. You can find all sorts of coursework on the web, you can take practice exams online, and then write the real exam when you’re ready. It’ll be fun, and when you’re done you’ll have something valuable to add to a resume. And as a radio amateur, you can have a blast building transmitters, receivers, decoders, and all kinds of other fun stuff.
Or, you could get yourself a robot kit and have a hoot with it. Lego Mindstorms NXT, the new Roomba discovery robot, etc. You can also build your own computer interfaces - get a single-chip microcontroller with some I/O circuitry, and have fun.
