ELECTRONICS ROADMAP

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.

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.