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<p>It looks like you’ve never worked on a real-life project of any sort. That’s understandable, considering that a math major is so theoretical… I’m guessing that most of your education involves going to lecture, understanding the material on your own, and working out problems and proofs? Well, real life projects are much much different.</p>
<p>The thing is that college does not prepare you to go to work, unless you go to a trade school or technical school. College prepares you to go to college again, for graduate school. Which means that you are being conditioned to handle theory and research, not industry-level projects. I mean, most of my professors have never even worked in industry… how do you expect them to be able to show you how things work out there? Engineering tries to incorporate some level of training for industrial applications, but even so I notice very little in my education that is directly applicable to real-life projects. </p>
<p>From the outside-of-class projects that I’ve worked on so far, I’ve noticed that you just don’t care about a lot of theory… seriously, no one sits there figuring out Maxwell’s equations, or applying node-voltage and then mesh-current methods and what-not… you just develop a high level plan and use software (like Matlab, Pspice, Altium, etc) to develop your project and the software takes care of all the details. Sure, when complications arise it really helps to know your stuff, but on a first-order analysis, its really not necessary. Now this doesn’t mean that what I’ve learned in school is “useless.” It gives me all the understanding I need to be able to actually design a project, but the methods involved in realizing a project are quite different from the methods you’re used to employing in school. You really only need a solid high-level understanding of most concepts and you’re good to go. </p>
<p>So what this means is that no matter what you do, you’ll have to jump through hurdles even after you’re done with college. The fundamentals will stay the same (ie: nothing’s going to change about Fourier analysis, or Maxwell’s equations) but the specifics (ie: the softare involved, the protocols of design, and the huge variations in the application of theory from project to project) will continually change and you’ll have to “jump hurdles” to keep up with such things.</p>
<p>So it turns out that the only way to avoid having to jump a lot of hurdles upon graduation is to do NOW what you want to be doing LATER. You want to be an engineer? Then forget classes and school, you’ve got a lot of math on you, its enough to show that you have aptitude… figure out what you want to be working on and work on it NOW. Maybe you like signal processing? Well, find out more about the field and come up with a project to work on… design an equalizer for an audio signal, for instance (its a bunch of Fourier analysis). Get a book or two, invest into some software (ie: MATLAB) rather than shelling money for classes and school. Sure, if you have the time and money take a class or two in the field you’re interested in, but don’t expect class to somehow magically transform you into an engineer. To become an engineer you must do what an engineer does, and trust me if you are able to design and complete even two large projects on your own, you’ll already be ahead of most engineers who are simply banking on their education to get them a job (which the employers know is really not worth all that).</p>