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"What courses were most and least useful to you in your engineering career?"

danzima

Hey there, community! It's a pretty muggy Friday here in Chicago, but also it's Friday, so on the whole things are good.

 

One of our Chicago colleagues is writing an article for another publication on the topic "What courses were most and least useful to you in your engineering career?", and he thought it would be interesting to get input from our community, so I wanted to open the question up to the members area.

Any response that makes it into the article will be credited to you, so maybe that'll be the start of your second career as a public intellectual and you'll wind up doing TED talks in Palm Springs soon enough?

 

Thanks in advance for your input!

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  • Hi Daniel!

     

    I feel the same as Gene, in that pretty much all courses were useful. Some vocational stuff can become obsolete quickly though.

    Bullets successfully dodged: B-ISDN, Microsoft certifications.

    Flak that hit me: I spent some time learning some voice technologies that are now obsolete - but still it was useful for a while, and was a spring-board to other stuff.

    Most useful for finding jobs for me: Micro-controllers and digital design, computer architecture, assembler, C - I felt a bit fake for the first year in my first real software engineering job, since I only knew C and assembler and no real computer science or engineering stuff, but I stuck at it for a few years, and read as much as I could, not just on language but also techniques and design patterns, did a formal course on server admin to use the machines at my disposal properly, and finally was confident enough to realise I was doing adequately, and that there are plenty of other things I'd picked up that helped in the job - such as some maths, and some knowledge of how processors worked.

     

    If I have to pick the least useful course from uni, for me personally it was accounting, I was just not interested in it and it showed in my test result (22%! : ) But apart from that, everything was either useful or interesting to me.

     

    I still try to select courses and webinars these days too, typically just single-day courses.

  • in reply to shabaz

      wrote:

     

    ....

     

    I still try to select courses and webinars these days too, typically just single-day courses.

    I do the same. My favourite one is the Coursera Power Electronics series (University of Boulder, Colorado). Switch mode power circuits are excellent tools to (re-)learn a wide (and tough) range of analog electronics concepts.

     

    I've also refreshed knowledge by completing the Coursera Linear Circuits training - Kirchhoff and Thevenin again, network resolving, impedance.

    All things that I got rusty on. It's been 30 years ago that I learned those.

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  • in reply to shabaz

      wrote:

     

    ....

     

    I still try to select courses and webinars these days too, typically just single-day courses.

    I do the same. My favourite one is the Coursera Power Electronics series (University of Boulder, Colorado). Switch mode power circuits are excellent tools to (re-)learn a wide (and tough) range of analog electronics concepts.

     

    I've also refreshed knowledge by completing the Coursera Linear Circuits training - Kirchhoff and Thevenin again, network resolving, impedance.

    All things that I got rusty on. It's been 30 years ago that I learned those.

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