I havent learned anything in college so far ( EE Junior)

Lacero
Sun, 08 Nov 2009 11:50:22 +0000

I get the feeling the reason they want academically “experienced” students is that by junior year+ most students would have covered the major design classes such as digital design, software engineering and embedded design.

The big companies give the impression that what they are really interested in is how we used the little technical knowledge that we had in these large and complex projects. It gives an indication on the work ethic, raw talent, passion, and creativity of a student.

I don’t think most students under junior year would have covered these projects.

Projects are also a good way of learning important technologies and skills beyond the basic curriculum. For example our sophomore embedded project required us to design an autonomous robot using the mindstorms NXT and program it to complete some task. It was a large mix of Java, multi-threading, distributed computing, signal processing, control theory, and fault tolerance in real-time. There is no way they could have required those 6 classes to be pre-requisites so we learnt what we could in class and the rest on our own.

A decent amount of time in an interview with a company like Lockheed or RIM is spent on that and similar projects.