Electrical Engineering Degree

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Getting a degree would most likely be a full time commitment.  Are you willing to take on 5 years of debt? When you graduate you would be competing with 21 year olds for an entry level position. This could be an advantage or disadvantage,  but the salary would be pretty similar.

Do you like math,  physics? Are you good at it? There will be a lot of it. Plus a lot of EE classes that have nothing to do with audio. You will get barely any (if at all)  audio specific classes,  but you will learn a lot that you can apply. 

If your only interest is audio you really don't need a degree.  But it can open up other non audio career opportunities.  Would you be happy in a non audio EE job?

Do you already have a college degree? If so you could be done sooner,  if not you need to take a bunch of general education courses.  Do you have a curious mind and enjoy learning in general? Will you be comfortable being around 18-21 year olds most of the time?

Not tying to sway you either way,  just things to think about.

It is very hard to advise someone to invest 5 years in anything. Investing in your own education, however, is almost always worthwhile. Whatever route you decide to take, you will need to thoroughly grasp the fundamentals and practice applying them to real design problems and for that task I am a great believer in good old fashioned books. The standard text for electronics students is The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Art-Electronics-Paul-Horowitz/dp/0521370957

I am also a great believer in learning by doing and there is a second book by Horowitz and Hill called Learning The Art of Electronics: A Hands on Lab Course that I would highly recommend:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Learning-Art-Electronics-Hands-Course/dp/0521177235/ref=pd_sbs_14_img_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=2JZCK9EEPJYY829D9XQB

If you can work your way through these two books you should gain a good understanding of the fundamental basic building blocks of all electronics devices.

Cheers

Ian

My advice is to only do it if  you can't imagine yourself doing anything else.
By the time you finish school, you will find that the non-audio jobs will pay so much more and have real benefits/insurance/savings plans.
I went through all that years ago. Played the corporate game for years, but ended up going back to audio even though the financial rewards are much lower.
Why? Because I can't imagine myself doing anything else!

80hinhiding said:

Since I'm enjoying this so much I've looked into a Electrical Engineering Degree that's offered at a university local to me.  It's a 5 year program, with a mandatory co-op work term program.

I'm 36 and already have a professional career and tried my hand at lots of things.  My music career did well until I shelved it for creative reasons, and then three years ago started working on a new album.  That led me to getting a little gear nuts, even though I know gear is only part of the equation, I just find it fascinating and artistic in itself.  And now, as many of you probably know, I'm in the process of making a small mixer.

It's still up in the air what direction I'll go, but I'm considering going back to university.  I think this is partly me discovering a new passion in audio electronics, and the fact that my current path sees me spending a lot of alone time in studio creating.. in isolation.  If the album does great, then what?  I get attention that I don't necessarily want.  Oh my.

Any advice on degrees in this wonderful stuff?

Adam

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The question to ask yourself is what do you expect from a BSEE? It will not magically give you all the tools to design products, but without the basic tools it is harder to learn the rest.

Not to be repetitive but what are you trying to accomplish? There may be more focussed ways to acquire the specific skills.

Today thanks to the WWW you can almost educate yourself for free by reading WIKI pages. Back in the day I had to buy actual books to find specialized information.

There are a number of good books out there, read and digest as many as you can.  Circuit design is like writing. First you must accumulate a vocabulary of words (knowledge about components), and then understand grammar (how to connect components together), then more abstractly how to write better prose than what has gone before. To do this you need to study what has gone before.

Sorry for the abstract analogy but it seems to fit...

JR

> I always liked school but the general first year killed me.  I don't think I was ready.

In EE (as in several other fields), the school's strategy is to admit a LOT of freshmen, take their money, and hammer with low-paid instructors until the slackers drop/flunk out. That money supports better Jr/Sr and Graduate programs.

No, co-op work almost never pays enough to count.

But do you really want to be an EE? CPU cores, micro-radios, display driver chips? Learn Chinese? "Audio" is rarely taught now; the few dozen Degreed Designers the audio field can support already have jobs. A number of non-degree designers do well in the field-- it's what you know and can deliver, not your papers.

The first few years of an EE program DO teach you a lot of stuff that does get used in audio. But the University charges too much IMHO, unless you go on for a full degree.

The "vocational schools" do an excellent job of elementary EE, at half the price, dirt-cheap for in-county. And if you do ace a couple years there, University EE schools will gladly consider crediting those hours. They prove you CAN do the work, something unknown when a bright 18yo fills an application.

And when you talk to the university, ASK what they know about local associate and 2yr program. Most will be happy to share what they hear and what they see coming out of these schools. They won't say "BCC sucks!", but they may say that 'MCC students usually come in as excellent Juniors while BCC students often need remedial courses to place as sophomores'.

OTOH, be very wary of commercial schools. People have built careers on a DeVry education, yes. But these schools can be student-loan sharks, encouraging you to take on heavy debt then dumping you in a tight job market.

Take Expository Writing! Most engineers can't write for chit, which means they can't put-over their ideas. My EE father learned this in his career. I must say my two EW courses didn't do much immediate good, but they left me wondering things that I built-on later.

And:

> you need to study what has gone before.

IOW: plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize!! You can go very far *understanding* and re-stitching work done before.

PRR said:

> I always liked school but the general first year killed me.  I don't think I was ready.

In EE (as in several other fields), the school's strategy is to admit a LOT of freshmen, take their money, and hammer with low-paid instructors until the slackers drop/flunk out. That money supports better Jr/Sr and Graduate programs.

No, co-op work almost never pays enough to count.

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During my brief (mechanical engineering) matriculation at a school that alternated school with co-op assignments (NU) I experienced two different co-op jobs. One was as a draftsman... I'm so old we used pencils and paper.  The job was pretty boring but if you are alert and keeps your eyes open, you can learn about the company's industry and business. A career being a draftsman could be suicide inducing, but to learn about a different business was worth investing a few months, and you get paid while doing it. My other coop gig was as a QC technician for a heavy metal sintering factory... Again more mind numbing work but another opportunity to learn about a whole different industry and process. 

On the other side of that coin, Peavey employed a few co-op students.  None worked directly for me, but i remember one who worked in the digital group and he was sharp as a tack... It was kind of a win-win since the kid was trained about the latest cutting edge digital technology so he was able to apply that fresh knowledge on the job.  As i recall he was offered a full time gig at Peavey after he graduated, and he came but he moved on after only a few years for greener pastures (I said he was smart).

But do you really want to be an EE? CPU cores, micro-radios, display driver chips? Learn Chinese? "Audio" is rarely taught now; the few dozen Degreed Designers the audio field can support already have jobs. A number of non-degree designers do well in the field-- it's what you know and can deliver, not your papers.

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The cutting edge analog EE design stuff these days is designing inside ICs not pedestrian stuff like designing circuits from cookbook application notes.

The first few years of an EE program DO teach you a lot of stuff that does get used in audio. But the University charges too much IMHO, unless you go on for a full degree.

The "vocational schools" do an excellent job of elementary EE, at half the price, dirt-cheap for in-county. And if you do ace a couple years there, University EE schools will gladly consider crediting those hours. They prove you CAN do the work, something unknown when a bright 18yo fills an application.

And when you talk to the university, ASK what they know about local associate and 2yr program. Most will be happy to share what they hear and what they see coming out of these schools. They won't say "BCC sucks!", but they may say that 'MCC students usually come in as excellent Juniors while BCC students often need remedial courses to place as sophomores'.

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or better yet talk to companies that make and sell gear like you are interested in, ask them who they hire and why?

An interesting (or not) trend is that big contract manufacturers, the companies that assembly gear for everybody else, have branched out into offering design services, this is logical since they probably end up fixing other people's designs all the time. While the CM  may not be capable of defining a killer feature set, they can tell you how to best execute a given definition for a good price.

OTOH, be very wary of commercial schools. People have built careers on a DeVry education, yes. But these schools can be student-loan sharks, encouraging you to take on heavy debt then dumping you in a tight job market.

Take Expository Writing! Most engineers can't write for chit, which means they can't put-over their ideas. My EE father learned this in his career. I must say my two EW courses didn't do much immediate good, but they left me wondering things that I built-on later.

And:

> you need to study what has gone before.

IOW: plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize!! You can go very far *understanding* and re-stitching work done before.

Click to expand...

You don't need to literally copy stuff, but if you do you will learn from that, even if it doesn't work. ;D  Read every schematic you can find and try to understand what every part in it is doing. Good designers rarely add spare parts with no purpose. 

When I managed an engineering group the goal was to copy or recycle as much of the existing company technology as possible to use inside new designs. This is the exact opposite of what good engineers want to do (me included). The trick was finding a balance with enough original design work to keep the engineers happy and still productive without reinventing the wheel every single time.

JR

Not to confuse things further,  but going to school doesn't need to mean stopping artistic pursuits.  You can also spend school time taking classes in music or other interests.

Imo the hard part is really the financial side,  figuring out how things will affect your overall future  earnings and career trajectory.

In regards to learning,  MIT open course ware publishes a lot of free lectures online.

Instead of, or perhaps in addition to an EE degree, Georgia Tech has a "Music Technology" program that covers a whole lot of things in the music industry. I have three years of college toward an electrical degree 40 years ago (but I've worked a lot in the field as well as as a hobby, so I have lots of knowledge), so I hesitate to even ask them about anything without having a degree, but having seen it I'd like to be a student in that program and/or get a job there. I've participated in the last two Moog Hackathons held there - both the students and professors seem to have a wide range of knowledge about music, electronics, and anything related, so it feels like a good atmosphere.

There's value in a BS (that's Batchelor of Science) degree no matter what it's in, so if you can get one without too much extra schooling, that can only help your career. I've lost out on many interviews because the company policy requires a degree.

JohnRoberts said:

You don't need to literally copy stuff, but if you do you will learn from that, even if it doesn't work. ;D  Read every schematic you can find and try to understand what every part in it is doing. Good designers rarely add spare parts with no purpose. 

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This reminds me of another good set of books, looking online shows 7 volumes (I only have the first 6) of "encyclopedia of electronic circuits." A lot of these schematics are taken from "Design Ideas" pages of Electronic Design, EDN and similar trade magazines. I've also seen a few neat schematic ideas in the 1980s in NASA Tech Briefs, but they were just a few nuggets in a lot of non-electronic, but still perhaps interesting technical stuff.

80hinhiding said:

Thanks to everyone for the thoughtful replies.  I've decided to continue on my current path, and use books, the Internet and hands on learning to keep going in audio electronics as an offshoot/hobby/compliment to the other things I do.

I'm so deep into the arts now that the lifestyle change going to university would be a lot for me.  I'd probably feel like I was neglecting the things I've spent years of my time and energy invested into.

I really appreciate the advice.

Adam

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So, haven't posted here for awhile, but just thought I'd chime in, since I did something like this in my mid twenties.  Short story is, about 3 years after I completed a BA in Studio Art & Art History, I had become very interested in audio/electronics, met a girl in a nearby city, wanted to move there but didn't find a lot of job opportunities there, so enrolled as a "second Bachelor's" student for a BSEE.

I'll say, it was among the most interesting three years of my life, but pretty much everything everyone else said here is on target with my experience. 

From the standpoint of my personal interests, I was lucky enough to be in a school that still had a fairly solid (and almost old-fashioned) focus on analog, and it was long enough ago that embedded digital systems hadn't totally overwhelmed that yet.  (Even so, a lot of the analog focus was directed at getting graduates into companies doing buck/boost power supply chips, which were not yet totally old-hat.) 

I finished, and it has served me well in the long run, but personally, I'm not sure I would have been able to make it happen ten years later.  It took pretty much all of my time and attention, and in the process I nearly stopped playing music and naturally, I broke up with the girl. (Everybody saw that coming, I bet!  To be fair, I was in my mid twenties, and the time I was spending on school wasn't the only reason.)  I will say that being able to write coherently (thanks to the Art History BA), and having cultivated creative thinking (thanks to the Studio Art BA) were both very useful skills that not a lot of the incoming freshmen had at their fingertips.

Also, over the process of doing it, I got more and more caught up in being funneled into industry, leading to an internship with a chip maker, etc., which wasn't really my cup of tea.  Ultimately, I had a bit of an identity crisis trying to remember why I wanted to do all of it in the first place.  As it ended up, I didn't go into that industry, but I would say the BSEE did help me get a decent job that is a reasonable compromise with my interests.

In addition to the piece of paper that reads BSEE, the best things I got out of it are lots of training/practice in problem solving, a foundation in the aspects of electronics that a lot of books assume you'll already know (although others have already pointed out some of the better books that are smart about the basics), some friends I'll never forget, and some fun stories.  Example: fairly early on, while still trying to stick with playing music, I got held up after playing a wild Halloween show ~300 miles away from school, and ended up on a series of trains that got me back to campus maybe half an hour before a final exam, which I attended still in the remains of the costume I'd worn the night before, with guitar case in hand, which I propped in the corner of the classroom while taking the test.  At least the costume wasn't anything too wild.

On the other hand, I slept little, went into debt, had only part-time jobs, and put most other interests (including relationships) on the back burner, so yes, it was a major lifestyle change, even for my mid twenties.

EE has the worst math out of all engineering fields , optics and nuclear not far behind,

do you like j operators and partial diff?

start your own company, in five years you might have a product, and a house on the lake,ski boat optional,

join the Navy. they got the best electronics program in the world.

lie about your age, they will take  you considering today's political state of affairs,  might have to sail under the North Pole, but hey, 

...  I still have nightmares about the math    ... and that was 35 or so years ago!

Don't even get me started on the math in transmission line theory, magnetic machines or power electronics.

CJ said:

do you like j operators and partial diff?

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Yeah, so the class in partial differential equations, that was ... interesting. We asked the professor point blank: "Will eigenvectors be on the exam?" and he told us, "They will NOT be on the exam."

They were on the exam.

I did an  city & guilds (trade course)electronic test & servicing course in the UK 30 years ago financed by the government during a recession in an attempt to retrain unemployed people.   

Then maybe 10 years ago I did an HNC electronic engineering course at a college I was working at, which was free as a perk of the job.    The HNC was part time and felt like it took forever, in the end I just really wanted to get it finished.    The reality is the HNC was very much based around industrial electronics, motor servo control programming PICS etc, & although it was interesting I don't actually use much of the information I learnt on it for what I do now.    There was some very heavy maths in the HNC, which was interesting at the time but I don't really remember it now & I've never had to do things like  fourier transforms for anything I've done for work.

The City & Guilds course was taught by an ex Post Office engineer who was a brilliant teacher, & allowed us to build audio gear or whatever we wanted amplifiers, stereo compressors etc.  I still use a 24v bench PSU that I built on the course.  We did pcb design & etching, how to build things in a safe way with mains,  cable forms  etc  We did a whole section on valves. It was really interesting.  Almost all the information I use on a daily basis was what I learnt with this guy.  I was lucky to have him as a teacher because he delivered the information in a way that really resonated with me.      It is fair to say that when I took the course 30 years ago there was not so much digital around as it was more an up and coming technology & today it would probably be different.  we did a whole section on valves.

So in a nutshell I think having a solid grasp of the basics is very useful, & then get some good books on audio electronics to pad out the basics in the exact area you are interested in.      Books by people like  Walter Jung, Doug Self etc

My formal education was in machining technology. Essentially  milling and turning. That was between mid and end of 70s. Then I did a one year course and obtained 2nd class electricians certificate in 1982. My dad was an electrician, so I grew up in the business. I got interested in electronics around mid 70's. But then the literature that we have now did not exist in Turkey. I saved up for a hole month to buy my "100 circuits" from Elektor.

When John said he was old as he used pencil, so did I.  However, you could not replace that education. Today everything is laid down for you and it is very easy to learn. It is great but also makes one lazy. Inquiring minds are replaced by cutting/pasting minds. In technical drafting exams the tutor would put a pretty complex mechanical part in front of you. Draw, three views, two sections and a perspective. Fully dimensioned and annotated.You have one hour and go.

Anyhow, I have spent the past 36 years full in a multi discipline professional life from electrical engineering onto modelmaking/prototyping, onto product design, robotics, electronics and a bit of music. Jack of all trades, master of none. I am currently doing maths in open university to bring my math chops upto the scratch and in September I am going back to the uni to do a full time EEE degree. If all goes according to the plan I will have my degree when I am 60.  People retire earlier than that but I plan to die with soldering iron in one hand and the guitar in the other.

On books. Yes. You can never have enough of them. It only dawned on me when I sold my building and was moving into a smaller office. I had half a ton. Unfortunately I had to skip quite a lot, particularly the data books. So I am down to about 250Kg now.

Eigenvalues, don't you just drop an orthogonal projection in 4 space and regurgitate the 3D determinate matrix?

fortunately they have computers nowadays,but watch out for the Hubble syndrome,

math is to get you to think clearly and honestly, ,the real problems are solved in the wind tunnel,

80hinhiding said:

Since I'm enjoying this so much I've looked into a Electrical Engineering Degree that's offered at a university local to me.  It's a 5 year program, with a mandatory co-op work term program.

It's still up in the air what direction I'll go, but I'm considering going back to university.  I think this is partly me discovering a new passion in audio electronics, and the fact that my current path sees me spending a lot of alone time in studio creating.. in isolation.  If the album does great, then what?  I get attention that I don't necessarily want.  Oh my.

Any advice on degrees in this wonderful stuff?

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NB: I have a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, and I do it for a living (not audio gear, though, that would be crazy).

For the most part, you need the degree if you want to get a job working as an EE. If you have no experience in the field, the degree is your entry point to an entry-level position. If you want to build analog audio gear, the degree is rigorous, expensive and time consuming and you won't learn how to design audio gear.

A real-world example: a good friend in town, another live sound guy, was staring at age 40, married with a young child. The calls for tours stopped coming, and he was working gigs at the clubs for the relative pittance those gigs pay. He's a smart guy, and after some consideration, he though he would enroll, as a freshman, in the local land grant research university's electrical engineering program. Before he did so, he asked my advice, and I told him basically what I wrote above.

Enroll he did, and he completed the first year and did very well.  And then he had the second thoughts about the whole enterprise -- "what will I do with this degree? Where will I work?" And in my town, the best option for the freshout engineer is, unfortunately, the local bomb factory. So he chose to not continue. Instead, he partnered with a friend to run a coffee-roasting business. Everyone needs good coffee. And he still does the gigs at the clubs.

if you do get an EE be prepared to go back to school every two years,

your first job will probably have something to do with cell phones,

sahib said:

I plan to die with soldering iron in one hand and the guitar in the other.

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Same thing here ... though hopefully not too soon!

CJ said:

if you do get an EE be prepared to go back to school every two years,

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Not true if you define "school" strictly as a university or other degree program.

Obviously, if you get a job as an EE, you need to keep up -- I've gone from 74-series TTL to simple PALs and PLDs and now we're into big SoC FPGAs. Anyways, they don't teach that stuff in college.

your first job will probably have something to do with cell phones,

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Come on, man, keep up! The buzzwords this year are "Internet of Things." You know, like putting an insecure web server into your toaster so it can be taken over and used as part of a botnet.