Question of the Month: How To Keep EE Degree Programs Current?

I'm going to be slightly controversial and say they were never appropriate. I had the pleasure of a couple of universities for various reasons and what I learned there which was useful in year one of working was nothing which I hadn't learned at College in physics. However I did start my first electronics job with reasonable skills and competence - it's just very little of it came from university. 

The difficulty I face is that whilst I wasted a lot of time at university studying basic electronic design (op amps and stuff), you can learn that in a few weeks (a university year was only 26-28 weeks including 4 weeks of exams so we weren't really flat out! In reality that's all they/we were doing really but under the guise of a year of study) and go on to be commercially useful. It's only 20 years later that I wish I could go back for the other year of knowledge and experience that I got at university. That stuff would make so much more sense and have much more application when not muddled in with trivial stuff like understanding GBW product and calculations about switching on times of transistors - again Q=It is college level stuff. 

The last year was just full of nonsense such as budget/management stuff which is useful but looking through the notes and syllabus, largely outdated by the time it became useful except for the few core weeks of knowledge like critical paths etc. and none of that is particularly mind breaking (mind numbing perhaps!).  

To revisit this as I would like I would have to book into a two year program of study (maybe I could just quit after the first (ie second teaching year) year and it wouldn't really matter if I passed the exams or not - £9k to just sit in those lectures would be good value. Not only do I think that an engineer with experience would be able to deal with that level of information in half the time and with half the effort, but it would mean more to them, work wonders for their careers and give them a break from boring work! It would really define the difference between an engineer and senior/principle engineer. Most of all, it would be a bit more affordable - when I was 18 I didn't have a penny! Now I could easily take a year (7 months really - see academic year lengths above) off work, probably be supported by my employer anyway (they're nothing special in that respect, just coherent thinkers) and not really have to worry about passing the exams because a certificate of attendance is more useful than exam grades beyond 30. 

What's more, at the peak of my career, I could be learning up to date, relevant syllabus material instead of programming in assembly on a Motorola 68k! Even the university at the time said that was going to be useless but they weren't sure what the next step needed to be as industry hadn't yet settled so I'm willing to forgive them on that - the principles stood and to be fair, it was still a relevant skill at the time, just not very forward thinking. 

In fact, now I've written this, I wonder why I'm not doing it. However I think this fits in with what DAB said - formal education builds around some key skills that get you started. By 30 you shouldn't need to think about designing an op amp circuit but as a graduate at 21 you can't yet build an op amp circuit with the same confidence. Once you can do that in your sleep you can start thinking about other building blocks. 

I'm going to be slightly controversial and say they were never appropriate. I had the pleasure of a couple of universities for various reasons and what I learned there which was useful in year one of working was nothing which I hadn't learned at College in physics. However I did start my first electronics job with reasonable skills and competence - it's just very little of it came from university. 

The difficulty I face is that whilst I wasted a lot of time at university studying basic electronic design (op amps and stuff), you can learn that in a few weeks (a university year was only 26-28 weeks including 4 weeks of exams so we weren't really flat out! In reality that's all they/we were doing really but under the guise of a year of study) and go on to be commercially useful. It's only 20 years later that I wish I could go back for the other year of knowledge and experience that I got at university. That stuff would make so much more sense and have much more application when not muddled in with trivial stuff like understanding GBW product and calculations about switching on times of transistors - again Q=It is college level stuff. 

The last year was just full of nonsense such as budget/management stuff which is useful but looking through the notes and syllabus, largely outdated by the time it became useful except for the few core weeks of knowledge like critical paths etc. and none of that is particularly mind breaking (mind numbing perhaps!).  

To revisit this as I would like I would have to book into a two year program of study (maybe I could just quit after the first (ie second teaching year) year and it wouldn't really matter if I passed the exams or not - £9k to just sit in those lectures would be good value. Not only do I think that an engineer with experience would be able to deal with that level of information in half the time and with half the effort, but it would mean more to them, work wonders for their careers and give them a break from boring work! It would really define the difference between an engineer and senior/principle engineer. Most of all, it would be a bit more affordable - when I was 18 I didn't have a penny! Now I could easily take a year (7 months really - see academic year lengths above) off work, probably be supported by my employer anyway (they're nothing special in that respect, just coherent thinkers) and not really have to worry about passing the exams because a certificate of attendance is more useful than exam grades beyond 30. 

What's more, at the peak of my career, I could be learning up to date, relevant syllabus material instead of programming in assembly on a Motorola 68k! Even the university at the time said that was going to be useless but they weren't sure what the next step needed to be as industry hadn't yet settled so I'm willing to forgive them on that - the principles stood and to be fair, it was still a relevant skill at the time, just not very forward thinking. 

In fact, now I've written this, I wonder why I'm not doing it. However I think this fits in with what DAB said - formal education builds around some key skills that get you started. By 30 you shouldn't need to think about designing an op amp circuit but as a graduate at 21 you can't yet build an op amp circuit with the same confidence. Once you can do that in your sleep you can start thinking about other building blocks.