ELECTRONICS ROADMAP

I have never studied, but that did not keep me from going into electronics anyway. A very good general book is "the art of electronics" , and I highly recommend doing a practical approach while you are learning by trying out everything you hear in your courses on a breadboard, its also valuable to just get a mixed bag of random electronics and identify parts in the evening. these are thing s that helped me getting the basic concepts into my head and beeing able to make the links from theory to practice.
Also our element14 series "the learning circuit" and "from DC to daylight" are great to look up a lot of basics.

I'll mostly repeat mayermakes's recommendations with one addition.

First, "Art of Electronics." It is a fantastic mix of theory, math, and practical application. At the very least, it provides a good foundation for what to search next. Do not let the price tag scare you. You will have and use this book for a very long time.

Second, build stuff. Until you build, measure, and debug circuits, you are not going to understand electronics.

Last, I hear, every day, from students whining that their program doesn't teach them anything. Guess what? It does not matter if you are in a "good" or "bad" program. It is your responsibility to learn something from the curriculum. Keep in mind, even when you narrow the scope of "electronics" to a discipline like "embedded design," it is very difficult to provide a lesson plan that is adaptable to new technology, addresses the basics, and applies to each individual's long-term plan. Some stuff won't stick... and that is okay!

The good news is that looking to see how you can self-learn in parallel is a great step forward. Just like any skill, the more you apply yourself to it, the more you'll get out of it. Having a context for the facts and figures will significantly help you get more value from your classes.

For example, get Art of Electronics, a breadboard, some resistors, and some transistors. Make use of the test equipment in your school labs to build and test the various amplifier circuits in the transistor section. (You may also find if you approach your teachers with "I built this circuit expecting this to happen, but this happened instead, you'll have a much better dialogue with them.)

This is mostly as it should be. If you spend/waste your time doing too much practical stuff, you'll never learn in any detail. I can't see how you'll learn much about communications without the theory. Sure you could build yourself a transmitter or receiver with a hobby-grade module and Arduino, but that's not 3rd-year undergrad type of learning; you're supposed to be learning _communication_theory_.

The weight should definitely be on theoretical stuff rather than practical (of course, practical is important too).

You're going to struggle to try to self-study from books alone. Also, you'll find that you don't know what you need to know, which is why there are teachers/lecturers to guide you.

It's hard to make a circuit in any reasonable time for (say) speech compression or spread spectrum modulation and demodulation. It's near-impossible to prototype up bits of a 4G or 5G communication network (no, working with cellular module is not the same thing) to know how it works in any detail. However, you can study the theory, and you can simulate bits of it (which is why a lot of labs are in front of a computer, not in front of a soldering iron), and you can try to do end-of-term or end-of-year projects with component-level circuits if you wish.

AoE is a fantastic book (I have had a copy since college days, and have two editions of it plus the X-chapters) but there's a reason it isn't (to my knowledge anyway) on any typical uni reading list (except perhaps for lab projects and so on); it's the book you use when you're actually working in industry.

By third year, you are just getting started into the interesting topics. It is normal to have knowledge holes as learning is a continuous process. Communications itself is a broad range of disciplines, analog hf, uhf, vhf,  digital, modulation schemes, antennas, noise, security, on and on....

Speak to your professors about resources for study or even helping them as an intern for research, or as a lab assistant.  You can do these and get paid for the service. 

Join some local club or local professional organizations to talk and get other perspectives. Again those contacts may need part time help where you get on the job training with a little pay as well. 

You learn alot by doing. 

After decades of teaching technical subjects... what baldengineer and shabaz said.  The foundation doesn't change.  Master the foundation - then the upgrades make sense.  Without the foundation... it's just magic.

baldengineer said:

It does not matter if you are in a "good" or "bad" program. It is your responsibility to learn something from the curriculum.

That's basically my thought on this topic, beautifully summarized into one sentence.

My understanding is that what you are experiencing is not out of the norm. I witnessed the same disillusion with my daughter during her university years. I speculate it is more common than we realize.

Post secondary education is a major commitment. In a world where delayed gratification is not promoted I can understand how an attack of conscience that questions the career path would happen after investing so much time and energy while appearing to get no where.

I would recommend talking to the University Guidance Councillor to get another perspective. If your activities that enhance the knowledge pursuit is less that successful it may deflate you even more. I would hope the University professional would recognize the struggle and provide some recommendation to make the journey less difficult.

I recall sitting through lecture after lecture on heat transfer coefficients thinking what the hell am I doing. A simple problem like my model race car set power supply constantly tripping off because the regulator overheated, gave me some insight many years later why I need to gain more knowledge on heat.

When I went to Electronics Tech School, the curriculum was built around learn by doing.

We would have an intro on the theory and then went into the lab to build the circuit so we could explore what it could do.

With that background, it was easy for me to take college level courses and apply what I knew to learn even more.

Plus it helped that I was working full time on advanced science and engineering programs, so I was actually doing more advanced things than the college professor knew about.

I feel your pain, even at 50 years distance form Uni course !

Nothing much has changed.

Almost nothing in the degree course was useful in the short term or the long term.

I'd like to to see a huge shake-up in engineering education - we need engineers or every kind, but we do our best to make uni courses as boring and difficult as possible - putting huge numbers of people off.

The best way to learn, IMO, would be some kind of apprenticeship mixed with theoretical stuff.

MK

I studied Electronics in  High School (long ago, at another time), and then in College. For starters grab a copy of this book Electronic Device and circuit theory 11th edition By Robert L. Boylestad (high school & college level) if you can't find it let me know friend me I have a pdf of it. I also have a copy of Hands-On-Electronics by Daniel M. Kaplan and Christopher G. White

on second thought maybe I will hang them on my server. 

www.nexgen-simulations.com/Library/Books/electronics/

BTW if anybody needs a book let me know, I might have it, as I have a few thousand of them. LOL one that I have in both hardcover and PDF just to let you all know this book is not for the faint-hearted, with tons of nasty math is MICROELECTRONIC CIRCUITS 5th Ed Adel S. Sedra and Kenneth C. Smith