engineering graduate school question

Jerry Avins <jya@ieee.org> wrote in 
news:pfqdnS0MMaFHmeXbnZ2dnUVZ_uvinZ2d@rcn.net:

> For 25 *years*, I wore jeans

Thanks-- for a second, I though Question Mark (of The Mysterios) might have 
reemerged!

-- 
Scott
Reverse name to reply

On Tue, 19 Jun 2007 12:31:20 -0400, Jerry Avins wrote:
> Jerry Avins wrote:
>    ...
>> For 25 tears, I wore jeans ...
> 
> For 25 *years*, I wore jeans

Paging Dr. Freud, Dr. Sigmund Freud....

;-)
Rich

"Bret Ludwig" <bretldwig@yahoo.com> wrote in message 
news:1182216882.444668.298530@m36g2000hse.googlegroups.com...
> Amateur Radio killed itself off by allowing appliance operators to go
> wild.

I have my amateur radio license and all, but at the end of the day, what does 
it get you?  The ability to go out and legally  transmit on a bunch of 
frequencies that you otherwise couldn't.

This is no longer all that horribly interesting to most people, especially 
when you consider that historically hams prmiarily used those frequencies for 
conversing about nothing in particular (their use for, e.g., propagation 
studies, coding studies, etc. has always been miniscule in comparison), and 
today anyone with Internet access or a cell phone can do the same thing... and 
a lot more.  I have a fancy PDA phone that let's me access any web site on the 
Internet -- including secure sites -- at speeds in the "many hundreds of kbps" 
range, and plenty of my colleagues do as well.  What does the *typical* ham 
have today?  A 2m HT that's hitting a voice repeater.  While I expect it's 
primarily lack of interest and funds that precludes hams from building similar 
systems, the fact that the FCC regulates amateur radio with rather obsolete 
rules -- only certain modulation formats are allowable, for instance --  
definitely doesn't help either.  (For every licensed amateur with a 2m HT, I 
suspect that something under 5% have any form of a digital radio system, and 
probably <0.5% have a *high-speed* system, say, 128kbps or better.  With cell 
phones, I'd guess that at least half have some data access, and at least 10% 
have high-speed data access... a number that will only increase over time.)

I'm not trying to "dis" amateur radio... I think it's a great thing, I very 
much enjoy it, and recommend those with an interest in radio give it a try... 
just pointing out that there's no longer the motivation to become a ham as 
there once was (i.e., years ago, if you wanted to talk with people wirelessly 
amateur radio was often the only choice).

> As a career decision the MSEE makes sense only if very, very
> carefully evaluated in terms of the future of the H-1B program, which
> has killed EE/CS as a desireable career path for many Americans.

I'd say it's only killed it as a desirable career path for those who really 
weren't particularly passionate or good at it in the first place.

On the other hand, I can definitely see why someone who's not sure if they 
want to be an engineer or a businessman deciding to go the MBA route instead 
of the EE route these days.  Plenty of competition there as well, of course.

> He couldn't get hired in any engineering job at any rate of pay,
> he even applied for engineering tech positions and they turned him
> down, of course, as overqualified.

It's not a crime to leave out some of your prior job experience and 
educational qualifications on your resume. :-)

There's also a lot more to the country than Silicon Valley.

> As it stands
> he dreads having to get California tags and insurance on the bus: the
> toad will never get past CARB.

It really sounds like he should try to find a job outside of California...

---Joel

"msg" <msg@_cybertheque.org_> wrote in message 
news:137ectun5v07180@corp.supernews.com...
> Do you see any hope of restoring an engineering orientation to the
> amateur radio services and if so by what instrumentality?

I don't see this happening.  People have successfully argued that many of the 
old tests (such as Morse code!) were outdated and should be dropped (quite 
reasonable, I think), but the culture today is very much against replacing 
those old tests with up-to-date tests in there place.  Hence, getting an 
amateur radio license today is not much harder than getting a driver's 
license.  Even that's not entirely a bad thing, but it makes it clear why hams 
today reflect a pretty "generic" slice of society (plenty of bad in with the 
good) compared to the largley "niche engineering" slice it once did (somewhat 
more good than bad...).

"Colin Paul Gloster" <Colin_Paul_Gloster@ACM.org> wrote in message 
news:f58scd$u77$1@newsserver.cilea.it...
> Almost everybody doing the evening and weekend version had a
> normal supposedly fulltime job in information technology while doing
> their degrees and the consequences of trying to do a degree and a job
> tended to be bad: inferior grades; a much higher failure rate; and
> many people would end up failing and repeating a year.

I know someone who used to teach for the University of Phoenix on-line.  She 
said there was a lot of pressure to dumb down the course, and she was having a 
hard time doing that and still making it particularly relevant.  Apparently 
UoP did this enough that at some point they were threatened with having their 
accreditation yanked (for those getting degrees on-line -- I imagine their 
physical campus courses are fine) if they didn't stop!

In my own MSEE program, a significant number of students (including myself... 
<cough>) took jobs after finishing coursework and proceeded to take a 
looonnnggg time (two to three years... <COUGH!>) to get around to finishing 
their theses.  Part of this is funding related -- none of us were given a 
funded quarter to *just* work on our theses, so for most people getting a job 
looked awfully attractive.  In retrospect it probably would be better to just 
bite the bullet and spend three months doing nothing but thesis work and 
remove the albatross around one's neck, so to speak.

I'm sure I sound quite whiney, though -- my late grandfather, who obtained his 
BSEE in l930-something? worked full time while going to school.  He commented 
once that he wished he had had more time to spend on his studies, that he 
literally was doing nothing but working, attending classes, studying, eating 
and sleeping at times.  His grades were fine, but not straight A's, and he 
claimed that they could have been if he had had that extra time for studying. 
Times have changed a lot, of course, and realistically someone without 
financial support today will be taking out student loans.  At least that does 
give them the option of spending more time studying... if they choose to do 
so.

---Joel

On Jun 19, 12:11 pm, "Mark Walsh" <mwa...@rogue-engr.com> wrote:

> >> will invariably advance the guy with the MSEE sheepskin over the
> >> smartest BSEE with all the company training they have to offer.
>
> > This is utter nonsense. You're not actually in the workforce, are
>
> This may be true for companies with large bureaucracies, but

It's not even true in this case. I should know; I work in a big, big
multinational with enough bureaucracy to make even a civil servant
gibber in terror. We have people from the senior engineering level all
the way up to the executive level who don't even have a BSEE and were
promoted on a merit/achievement basis.

Mark Walsh wrote:

> "larwe" <zwsdotcom@gmail.com> wrote in message 
> news:1182257764.827189.134090@m36g2000hse.googlegroups.com...
> 
>>On Jun 19, 3:26 am, Benj <bjac...@iwaynet.net> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>will invariably advance the guy with the MSEE sheepskin over the
>>>smartest BSEE with all the company training they have to offer.  Trust
>>>me on this!
>>
>>This is utter nonsense. You're not actually in the workforce, are you?
>>
> 
> This may be true for companies with large bureaucracies, but competence has 
> always trumped credentials every place I have worked.  And an MSEE typically 
> fails to add any significant competence outside of the narrow thesis area.

It depends.

I found that when hiring a freshman just from school, the BSEEs are 
worseless. They don't know anything, they can do nothing and, what is 
much worse, they don't want to do anything about that. It will be years 
and years till they reach the level of apprentice.

The fresh MSEEs and PhDs are lot better in the general; it takes only 6 
month or so to make them productive. The advanced degree is an indicator 
of diligence, discipline and ambition; this is good.

> We all have strengths and weaknesses in various areas, but I find that the 
> engineers that I hire who are generalists rather than specialists are much 
> more productive.

I consider the ability to work independently as the very important 
parameter. This includes setting and accomplishing the goals and the 
self education in the course of the project. BSEEs are not ready for 
that; they expect somebody to change their pants at all time.


> Mark Walsh


Vladimir Vassilevsky

DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant

http://www.abvolt.com

"Vladimir Vassilevsky" <antispam_bogus@hotmail.com> wrote in message 
news:wvUdi.2213$vi5.634@newssvr17.news.prodigy.net...
> It depends.

I think you're guilty of making some generalizations as well here, Vladimir. 
Yes, many BSEEs aren't able to "run a project" (even a very small one) on 
their own, but some are.  Similarly, I've had MSEEs and PhDs whose practical 
skills were so poor I honestly think I could have done better standing in the 
an engineering school's student union, talked to a couple dozen students as 
they walked by, and returned with the best candidate.

P.S.: Since this is related to your area... we did have a guy come in to 
interview about doing DSP work, and I asked him how he might go about taking 
some digitized signal he had in the memory of a DSP and reversing its 
spectrum -- preferably as efficiently as possible.  His answer was that he'd 
take the FFT, reverse it, and then perform an iFFT. :-(  That's the sort of 
answer I might expect from someone right out of school, but not from someone 
who'd been in industry for many years as he had.

P.P.S.: I clicked on your web page.  Shouldn't that circuit board photo you 
have at least be of a DSP rather than a microcontroller? :-)  Or do you do a 
lot of "hard core" DSP in microcontrollers?

---Joel

On Jun 18, 2:59 pm, panfilero <panfil...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I know this isn't really a technical question, but I was wondering if
> anyone in here might be able to offer some insight on this.  I
> recently got my BSEE, and am considering going for a Masters, and my
> question is, is it worth it?  

No.  Enroll in Law School.

"Jerry Avins" <jya@ieee.org> wrote in message 
news:pfqdnTIMMaENmeXbnZ2dnUVZ_uuqnZ2d@rcn.net...
> Mark Walsh wrote:
>> "larwe" <zwsdotcom@gmail.com> wrote in message 
>> news:1182257764.827189.134090@m36g2000hse.googlegroups.com...
>>> On Jun 19, 3:26 am, Benj <bjac...@iwaynet.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>> will invariably advance the guy with the MSEE sheepskin over the
>>>> smartest BSEE with all the company training they have to offer.  Trust
>>>> me on this!
>>> This is utter nonsense. You're not actually in the workforce, are you?
>>>
>>
>> This may be true for companies with large bureaucracies, but competence 
>> has always trumped credentials every place I have worked.  And an MSEE 
>> typically fails to add any significant competence outside of the narrow 
>> thesis area.
>>
>> We all have strengths and weaknesses in various areas, but I find that 
>> the engineers that I hire who are generalists rather than specialists are 
>> much more productive.
>
> I always asked about car and bicycle maintenance when I interviewed job 
> candidates. I've rarely seen a good engineer who was a poor mechanic. When 
> quizzing new graduates about technical competence, I asked what subjects 
> they felt they knew best and concentrated on that. There's no good comes 
> of sandbagging someone with a topic he's weak in, and if a person's best 
> is poor, I'm ready to accept his word that the rest is poorer.
>
> Jerry
> -- 
> Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.

This is an excellent approach to separating the engineers that can actually 
create a product that works from those who can generate the equations that 
show that it should have worked.  I've hired engineers fresh from school at 
both the BSEE and MSEE level who seemed to think that they should get 
partial credit for getting a project mostly done to spec.

I have received some offline communications:

   I sense some resentment/bias against advanced degrees in some of these
   posts? I'll stick by my original points: getting accepted to grad school
   indicates the person is a good student, they can handle advanced 
material,
  and they've done at least one major project that had a beginning, a 
middle,
  and an end.

My own MS was in applied mathematics.  It has been an valuable part of my 
education, but rarely used in the last 20 years.  I spend most of my days in 
the lab or the machine shop doing what I love to do.  Lifelong learning in a 
formal classroom setting, on the job, and through independent study is an 
integral part of being a competent engineer.  I send my engineers to classes 
of varying value frequently.  I am currently giving full support to one of 
my engineers who is pursuing his masters, both through tuition payment and 
extensive time off.

I have no beef with credentials, but they aren't an acceptable substitute 
nor necessarily an indicator of competence.

Mark Walsh