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jordan
Student
Middletown, Connecticut
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what do i have to do to become in eletrical
what do I need to become an electrical #electrical-engineering
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Mike Bradley
Marketing & Sales programs
10
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Austin, Texas
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Mike’s Answer
Hi Jordan, Electrical Engineering is a great field. I'm mechanical myself, but electrical engineers think about circuits, how materials conduct electricity, how computers work, all the way up to how electricity is created and sent over the wires on your street to your home. It's a huge field.
Study all the math your school offers, up to Calculus. Try to take apart things (unplug them first!) and see if you can determine how they work. Work on computers as much as you can, learn software like Solidworks that helps you design things. but mostly, try to solve problems...that really what any engineering is - using technolgy and math to solve problems. good luck!
Study all the math your school offers, up to Calculus. Try to take apart things (unplug them first!) and see if you can determine how they work. Work on computers as much as you can, learn software like Solidworks that helps you design things. but mostly, try to solve problems...that really what any engineering is - using technolgy and math to solve problems. good luck!
Daniel Chang
engineering director
10
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Redwood City, California
Updated
Daniel’s Answer
hi Jordan,
the most straight forward but least useful answer to your question would be: in order to work as an electrical engineer, one needs to obtain a degree in electrical engineering from an accredited institution (typically a 4-year college or university). Usually the degrees are for a major in electrical engineering (EE), or combined with computer science (EECS), and can be bachelors of science (BS, sometimes a BA), masters of science (MS), or Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) - listed in order of amount of time and work that is needed to achieve the degree.
Now, on to (hopefully) more useful, but certainly more opinionated answers. Mike is right, for any field of engineering, it does help a lot if you have some interest in analyzing and solving problems related to that field, and taking things apart to understand how they work (or fix them) is a fairly common trait for folks who are trying to learn. That said, today's gadgets (for example, a mobile phone) are much harder to fix compared to things made several decades ago (old stereo/TVs, PCs), so while it might be possible to figure out what module is broken and needs to be swapped out (for example, replacing the screen on a mobile phone), it isn't as easy to probe around inside the device and understand how it works. Most of the complicated engineered components are on various integrated circuits ICs), and there's some practical limits to what someone with typical bench tools (i.e. not specialized to that I.C.) can debug in those ICs.
Math. Pay attention in math classes. Try your best to learn the reason for doing various math operations, not just the mechanics of how to do those operations. Please ask your math teacher to provide some real-world examples for the math analysis techniques that they are teaching, because it may help you get a more intuitive understanding of how the math is applied in the physical world. If you want to design portions of an integrated circuit (both analog or digital ICs), then you will certainly need to be comfortable with calculus, possible more (partial differential equations, statistics, maybe some quantum physics). If you want to design algorithms (for example, for use in artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, multiple types of communications networks), then you would likely also use linear and non-linear algebra, advanced trigonometry (for signal processing), stochastics (study of random processes), discrete mathematics (especially useful for computer programming), vector calculus. The list goes on, and I'm rapidly getting in over my head (if you can't tell, math doesn't come intuitively for me). The reason that there's so much math involved in all engineering, and especially EECS, is that the more specialized techniques help the engineers transform a complicated new problem into something that we already know how to solve, or that we can program a computer to solve (after all, a computer is, at its very core, a machine that performs mathematical operations - it computes).
I studied EECS in college back in the 1980 (yikes, I don't feel *that* old), before a lot of significant innovations made possible by portable digital devices. I got interested because I wanted to know how to build my own stereo system (the insides of those black boxes, not just hooking the boxes together with cables :-)). I mention this trivia because that interest helped me push through some of the more difficult classes and homework. I think it still helps to know why you are interested in becoming an electrical engineer, because there is even more foundational coursework that you would need to learn now, and your motivation will be tested. And it doesn't stop there - even after you put forth the effort to attain an EE degree, half of what you have learned will become obsolete (or at least not cutting edge) in roughly 5 years. That half life has accelerated compared to when I graduated (I recall ~7-8 years back in the 80s). Two lessons to draw from that statistic: (1) count on the need for lifelong learning, since you will need to refresh your knowledge in order to keep up with innovation in the field; and (2) it is much more important to hone your understanding of the analysis and problem solving techniques, compared to the exact technique (or math operations) used to implement a solution. The tools (math/analysis techniques) that you use will change over time (esp. as automation/AI gets more advanced), but your ability to solve problems in a systematic way, your ability to learn new techniques - those will likely serve you well for a *long* time.
Lastly, the most immediate thing you could do is to find a group, a community of folks who share an interest in the type of engineering that you want to investigate (for example, robotics clubs, hackathons, repair shops, even DIY audio clubs). I believe that most people learn a lot just by doing, even if they haven't dived into the theory and math that underlie the work. Ask lots of questions (you may be surprised by how many introverted folks are in the engineering profession, and how much they are willing to share if someone only asked).
Hope this helped, and that you find an area of study that really interests you.
Dan
If you want to get a sense of the type of math used in introductory EE classes, you could try working through the material at Khan Academy: https://www.khanacademy.org/science/electrical-engineering/introduction-to-ee.
the most straight forward but least useful answer to your question would be: in order to work as an electrical engineer, one needs to obtain a degree in electrical engineering from an accredited institution (typically a 4-year college or university). Usually the degrees are for a major in electrical engineering (EE), or combined with computer science (EECS), and can be bachelors of science (BS, sometimes a BA), masters of science (MS), or Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) - listed in order of amount of time and work that is needed to achieve the degree.
Now, on to (hopefully) more useful, but certainly more opinionated answers. Mike is right, for any field of engineering, it does help a lot if you have some interest in analyzing and solving problems related to that field, and taking things apart to understand how they work (or fix them) is a fairly common trait for folks who are trying to learn. That said, today's gadgets (for example, a mobile phone) are much harder to fix compared to things made several decades ago (old stereo/TVs, PCs), so while it might be possible to figure out what module is broken and needs to be swapped out (for example, replacing the screen on a mobile phone), it isn't as easy to probe around inside the device and understand how it works. Most of the complicated engineered components are on various integrated circuits ICs), and there's some practical limits to what someone with typical bench tools (i.e. not specialized to that I.C.) can debug in those ICs.
Math. Pay attention in math classes. Try your best to learn the reason for doing various math operations, not just the mechanics of how to do those operations. Please ask your math teacher to provide some real-world examples for the math analysis techniques that they are teaching, because it may help you get a more intuitive understanding of how the math is applied in the physical world. If you want to design portions of an integrated circuit (both analog or digital ICs), then you will certainly need to be comfortable with calculus, possible more (partial differential equations, statistics, maybe some quantum physics). If you want to design algorithms (for example, for use in artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, multiple types of communications networks), then you would likely also use linear and non-linear algebra, advanced trigonometry (for signal processing), stochastics (study of random processes), discrete mathematics (especially useful for computer programming), vector calculus. The list goes on, and I'm rapidly getting in over my head (if you can't tell, math doesn't come intuitively for me). The reason that there's so much math involved in all engineering, and especially EECS, is that the more specialized techniques help the engineers transform a complicated new problem into something that we already know how to solve, or that we can program a computer to solve (after all, a computer is, at its very core, a machine that performs mathematical operations - it computes).
I studied EECS in college back in the 1980 (yikes, I don't feel *that* old), before a lot of significant innovations made possible by portable digital devices. I got interested because I wanted to know how to build my own stereo system (the insides of those black boxes, not just hooking the boxes together with cables :-)). I mention this trivia because that interest helped me push through some of the more difficult classes and homework. I think it still helps to know why you are interested in becoming an electrical engineer, because there is even more foundational coursework that you would need to learn now, and your motivation will be tested. And it doesn't stop there - even after you put forth the effort to attain an EE degree, half of what you have learned will become obsolete (or at least not cutting edge) in roughly 5 years. That half life has accelerated compared to when I graduated (I recall ~7-8 years back in the 80s). Two lessons to draw from that statistic: (1) count on the need for lifelong learning, since you will need to refresh your knowledge in order to keep up with innovation in the field; and (2) it is much more important to hone your understanding of the analysis and problem solving techniques, compared to the exact technique (or math operations) used to implement a solution. The tools (math/analysis techniques) that you use will change over time (esp. as automation/AI gets more advanced), but your ability to solve problems in a systematic way, your ability to learn new techniques - those will likely serve you well for a *long* time.
Lastly, the most immediate thing you could do is to find a group, a community of folks who share an interest in the type of engineering that you want to investigate (for example, robotics clubs, hackathons, repair shops, even DIY audio clubs). I believe that most people learn a lot just by doing, even if they haven't dived into the theory and math that underlie the work. Ask lots of questions (you may be surprised by how many introverted folks are in the engineering profession, and how much they are willing to share if someone only asked).
Hope this helped, and that you find an area of study that really interests you.
Dan
Daniel recommends the following next steps: