yucca

One real quick question.
Have they tried other majors?
Or they simply know nothing about other majors but just complain about EE.

Mr Payne

If you are below the 75th percentile in ability you are going to work at any engineering college. Very few people "have it easy" doing engineering.

md5fungi

I have a different experience with this. The upper level math courses for a math minor at my school are considered to be rather easy compared to the electrical engineering curriculum, and I have a similar experience.

jessiehl

Who on earth are you talking to? I don't know a SINGLE MIT physics major who would say that, and I know a whole bunch.

The short answer to your question is that if you major in a technical subject, it is likely that you are going to have to work hard at most schools.

gthopeful

Well the courses I listed aren't exactly typical math minor classes. I took numerical analysis as my third upper div course - which is a typical math minor course - and it was a joke. Both classes were occupied mostly by grad students and the classes were entirely proofs-driven (which engineering majors are TERRIBLE at because our method of proving is so loose). Those math courses are taught from a completely different perspective: Unlike engineering, they teach you the fundamental, abstract concepts and you must find specific examples of these concepts in order to understand. In engineering, it's the exact opposite!

Slorg

EE hasn't been that bad for me. I have a life and 8 hours of sleep a night. I consider physics and math to be harder.

sang54

I always thought EE was more difficult than math and physics due to intense amount of labs, but not the material itself? Let's be honest, EE is a lot more time consuming than physics or math.

yucca

There are a lot of abstract things in math that are extremely hard.
Have you taken real analysis,abstract algebra and topology?

rixtehstix

well responding to the earlier post about a physics major at MIT saying that it is easy.

When you do pure fields like pure science or pure mathmatics, ie, theoretical physics or cosmology, or theoretical mathmatics, it is not hard to earn a degree, because it is only as hard as you allow it. Physics and math have the potential to get MUCH more difficult in engineering, but from what i hear, it is relativily easy to get your degree in either field, whearas electrical engineering things are forced on you like tensor dynamics and quantum eletrodynamics, from which I hear is so complicated that people want to shoot themselves in the head.

A standing joke among engineers especially in fields like electrical and nuclear engineering is calling the math "math", especially since it has more letters than numbers in it.

auscguy

In EE, there are not only lot of "abstract things", but also we need to apply those "abstract things" and make them into useful things. All engineering students have been exposed to at least some advanced math classes. As long as there is no meaningless proving, we are doing great.

Have you ever take any REAL EE classes like Analog Circuit or VLSI class that have ridiculous amount of lab and nasty projects? Have you ever done design on communication electronics using SPICE or put together useful device that has couple hundreds transistors using Cadence? Let's me tell you, these aren't easy,and extremely time consuming. However we learn a great deal from classes like those and that why we make big bucks.

jessiehl

That is not true at every school. Since we brought up MIT...MIT physics majors are required to take, among other things, stat mech, three terms of quantum, and, and the notorious "Junior Lab" which is considered to be one of the most difficult and time-consuming undergrad classes at MIT. And before any of that, they have to make it through a weeder class.

Both halves of what you are saying (the difficulty of the material, and the amount of work required) depend both on the school and what the individual person finds difficult.

This whole engineering vs. science thing is silly.

csprof2000

I would say that you will spend much more time doing engineering assignments, but the inherent difficulty of the material is marginally greater in the pure fields.

Engineers don't make more because their subject is harder; they make more because what engineers learn is more palatable - and more useful - to employers, by comparison to the pure sciences.

gthopeful

I've already shared my experiences having done both math and electrical engineering at the graduate level. Electrical engineers DO NOT get exposed to the hardest math has to offer - trust me. Engineering does not have anywhere near the rigor of math. Yes stuff takes a long time in EE (as I have explained in my first post with the nightmare microprocessors class), but there's always a guarantee that if you put in the work that your outcome will be favorable. I've spent days on proofs for my math classes with no such guarantee.

As far as salary goes, difficulty is not correlated with salary at all! This should be apparent from how lousy academics get paid.

vblick

As somone else said, it's going to vary person to person. I graduated EE from a top 5 school (Georgia Tech) and wasn't studying 8 hrs a day. Granted I did study alot and had the occassional all-nighter for some CS classes. The worst part of the degree was the labs. I actually disliked the CS labs MUCH more than the EE ones. EE labs were more hands on which I prefer. Anyway, one thing I wasn't prepared for was the competition amongst classmates for grades. Unlike high school where the teacher gives you a grading scale (usual 100-90 = A, 89-80=B...), the professor only gives out a certain % of A's, B's, etc at the end of the semester (at lot of times they just decide the % at the end too). So there were times were I knew stuff really really well but I came out with a C because in a class of 40, only 2 got A's and 5 got B's... So the 8th man in line, me, got the shaft. I'd been on the receiving end too, but it is a different flavor. Also, for EE classes the tests were impossible with grades usually in the 30's & 40's (i've has several in the teens) so where I felt like I knew all the material taught in class, the exams were so theoretical that I really felt like I learned nothing at all.

md5fungi

I COMPLETELY agree with that. EE labs are enjoyable comparable to CS ones. Spending time on EE labs never bothered me.

Another phenomenon I have experienced. In my opinion, the EE labs are nothing compared to the homework and tests, even though they are extremely time consuming.