Electronics at University?

[Cosmic Software]

I am currently half way through studying my A-Level courses, and we are now expected to start thinking about what we intend to do afterwards. I have decided that I would like to go to University to study an Electronic Engineering course.

To complement the research that I am doing, I would like to take this oppertunity to ask members of this diverse community (prefrebly living in the UK) if anyone has already taken a similar route to what I am looking at doing, and whether they could offer their opinion or recomendations on selecting a University or specific course.

I am sorry that this post is not related to Picaxe, but it seems like a good a place as any to find people with the same interests as I have.

Thanks.

 

[manuka]

Happy to help, as having had a lengthy tertiary career (mostly in NZ) I may have worthwhile insights. I've been lucky in many ways, as my life long fascination with electrotech. has been kept on the boil by the rapid tech. changes that have paralleled most of my career. This has often made for VERY stimulating work indeed, & although I'm pretty self propelled,at times it's been almost a bonus to also get -gasp!- paid as well!

It's VERY important to realise most uni. electrical/electronic engineering courses initially have little to do with electronics, & that in Y1/2 you'll just be force fed advanced maths/physics/algorithms etc. "Hands on" electronics may well be disregarded until final year projects, by which time you may have lost heart & taken up studies in -argh!- higher paying accountancy or law. I've seen this happen SO many times...

It's like joining the army in a way- where leaping off tall buildings with blazing machine guns makes up a near trivial part of military life- you spend 99% of the time on subservient drill & boot polishing! At least soldiers get paid/fed/housed- as a poverty stricken student the mind numbing slog sadly often leads to heavy engineering drop out rates from the disillusioned. A large part of my 2003- PICAXE enthusiasm related to their ability to motivate students who were otherwise near overwhelmed with the weeks of work needed just to "flash a few LEDs".

A major issue thus relates to your own drive to see thru' all this- mentors & enthusiastic educators can be a goldmine. It's hence worth looking at institutions that may foster higher student morale- many are just after your money for their own pet R&D projects! It's even more important to know what working in the field ultimately involves too. Many engineers end up as stressed out managers where people skills, finance & admin. constitutes their daily lot- they rarely see a soldering iron!

Perhaps the ultimate benefit of most engineering courses is that it'll let you get a foot in the door for more satisfying careers,with 4 year degrees ranked higher than 3. Such jobs may NOT BE HIGHER PAYING however -many "sparkies" earn far more than electronic engineers! Your knowledge of sexy op.amps & micros may be worth peanuts compared with someone who is a wizard with boring but valuable copper cables. As the Yorkshire lads say - "Where there's muck there's brass" Stan

 

[moxhamj]

Hmm, careers choices. What do you want to do in life?

A cynical careers counsellor once told me to choose the thing I love in life the most, and make that my hobby, and choose the second preference and make that my job. Ideally that second preference would fund the first one. I had no idea what he was talking about till a lot later. My dad said some of his friends combined their favourite hobby and their job into one, and became gynaecologists.

There is no perfect answer. My dad is an engineer, and he said, "for goodness sake, don't do engineering. Do medicine" (so I did). A friend of mine's dad is a neurologist. He said to his son "for goodness sake, don't do medicine. Do engineering". So he did.

Both of us are very happy with our jobs. But one thing that appears to be true whereever you live is that the harder you are prepared to work, the better off you will be. So it is worth working hard and trying to get into the best university you can.

And you probably won't like me saying this (because I didn't at the time), but I would suggest putting 100% into your A levels to get the very best marks you can, and that might mean putting picaxe onto the back burner a bit.

Of course, if you can somehow get picaxe into your A levels, that would be a bonus. It might be different in the UK, but here in Australia, subjects like picaxe at A level equivalent get the marks scaled down. And the really hard subjects like physics and maths and english literature get scaled up. It was always hard to work out if it was better to go for a hard subject one wasn't all that good at or an easy subject that would be scaled down.

It helps to try to think about what you want to actually do with electronics. If you want to build little widgets and sell them on the high street, you may find it hard competing with certain countries in Asia. But if you have a career path mapped out it can be a lot easier. My cousin did electronics engineering, then got into making radios, then building things for the defence industry and now even builds things for NASA.

My experience is that careers teachers don't tell you about specific career paths like that. You kind of need a mentor who has already been down a specific path.

Actually, this forum could be the perfect place to ask!

[Manuka posted at the same time as me. He has posted some excellent advice!]

 

[Technical]

Bath University has a good course, and there is one particular local company with some interesting placement possibilities.... ;-)

 

[Cosmic Software]

There is some really helpful advice here. Thank you.

I am studying Maths and Physics as my core subjects, both of which I do well in and more importantly enjoy. I also do IT (although the teachers are not so good), and finally; Systems and Control, which is a combination of electronics and mechanics.

I have managed to use Picaxe in last year’s project to create a wireless controller for a CCTV system. The electronics aspect was found in here, and the mechanical side was in the housing that I made for the camera that could pan and tilt using stepper motors.
The coursework invigilator commented that it was the best piece of coursework that he has ever marked at any school/collage, and I ended up with a grade A.

Although we have not yet officially started the A2 piece of coursework, I am so dedicated that I spent most of my holiday in school getting a head start on it.
It again uses Picaxe, this time as part of a data logger. Function that it already and others that it will include are among a 128*64 GLCD with a touch screen overlay, and a communications bus that will allow for external sensors to be connected both physically and wirelessly, and uniquely identified.
The data collected will not only be displayed on the GLCD, but also hopefully have functions to analyse the data using graphs, etc.
The only problem is that my teacher has admitted that it is beyond him, so I hope that there are some people here that could give me some guidance if I may need it!

Although there have been no guarantees made yet, I am hoping to be sponsored by JCB or another big company, who pay for me to go to university, and then provide me with a guaranteed job at the end of the course.
I have not done much research yet, and do not know how much JCB pay post-graduate engineers, but their under-graduate paint sprayers get £40,000 per year! Of course I realise that this will not be a starting sallery.

Anyway, that is my past experience and hopeful future so that you can have a better understanding.
Although I understand where you are coming from about keeping your hobby and work as two separate things, you could argue that my hobby is Picaxe, and my job would be a wider range of electronics.

One course that has taken my interest is at Reading: Electronic Engineering and Cybernetics (MEng), but with so many different courses and universities out there, choosing one is a very difficult task, and this is why I appreciate your opinions and experience.

 

[manuka]

Great reading! I assume JCB is the excavator crowd begun by Joseph Cyril Bamford? Sponsorship may indeed occur, but usually firms prefer to first see how you've performed.

Several boring further factors may be relevant- where do you live in UK? Budgeted for years of study? Parental,sibling & PEER influence? Significant real world electronic "contacts" ? Fancy back room R&D or upfront? Thought: Rev.Ed in Bath may look kindly at a personal visit request!

Stan. in NZ (awoken pre dawn by an o'night winter storm = hot coffee & a PICAXE Forum browse )

 

[slurp]

I have not done much research yet, and do not know how much JCB pay post-graduate engineers, but their under-graduate paint sprayers get £40,000 per year! Of course I realise that this will not be a starting sallery.

I turned down the JCB placement... I couldn't afford to live on what they paid at the time (equivalent to the government subsidy) others took it - they certainly had some great experience.

I worked at GKN, assisted on the JCB Fastrac proto-type cab and chassis and got paid a reasonable sum during the placement

It's worth looking at the options, there are lots of potential sponsors. Check what's in the contract and what the prospects might be. Do you want to be tied to JCB for a period of time and vehicle systems or do you have aspirations for other electronic systems? Your interests might guide your choice of sponsor but also limit your placement options.

Good luck!

best regards,
colin

 

[ingeer]

Hey, Cosmic Software - stay in there!!

In the past thirty years I have progressed from amateur electronics, to ham radio, and on to automatic controls (which is becomming the next frontier).

Consider - robotics, BMS (building management systems) and process controls. As labour becomes more costly the push for person-less process is increasing.

The basis of my work - 'if you can measure it, you can control it'. You may even get to love programming PLCs.

I have designed water & waste water treatment plants, coal, gas and hydro power stations, uranium, gold, sugar, iron ore, etc. processing plants - design, construct, test, commission and all the paperwork that goes with the projects, all around Australia, and overseas. All on the basis that in the early days I could follow a schematic, and understand how to program simple controllers .

After the electrical stuff you'll find that hydraulics, pneumatics and mechanical movements are a breeze.

Good luck!!

 

[manuka]

Ingeer Ah- hope that's not meant to be ENGINEER ?). I guess this goes to show that with ENTHUSIASM & DRIVE you can take an interest almost anywhere- & certainly often well beyond a level that formal qualifications may imply. Bill Gates of course is a classic example of this-he dropped out of Harvard in the '70s to run with a software notion he'd dreamed up, making his first $million out of BASIC. Lesser mortals would have retired on that alone, rather than slogging away for another 30 years on that other half baked scheme of his ...

It's worth pointing out that globally many tertiary electronics courses may lag far behind, often by 5-10 years, the state of the art. SMDs are typical at present- few tertiary projects use them yet at undergrad. level. In my own student days from the 1960s, almost ALL training was still valve based, even though it was blatantly obvious that solid state was the future. I did far more semiconductor work in my own time, both theoretical & hands on, than tertiary courses here in NZ delivered. And this was when parts were costly too- a single NPN cost ~2 hours earnings (~£10 now) for a teen.

I remain influenced about this in fact, as the rationale was/is "Ah yes- but we're doing it an involved way and thus teaching you to think !" I don't want to be unprofessional, but I've had Ph.D workmates spouting such hogwash, yet struggling themselves to follow colour codes & IC pin numbering - perhaps because age has left them long sighted. Of course they can waffle for hours about algorithms...

EXTRA: If you've not read it, perhaps grab THE best popular electrotech. book ever written.This is the WW2 "Most Secret War" by R.V. Jones => http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reginald_Victor_Jones. IMHO a real electronic bodice ripper! What comes over repeatedly is his "feel" for the technology, & how his wider hands on experiences (& sense of humour) often gave solutions & insights when so called experts were loosing their heads. Aside from solving the 1940 "Battle of the Beams", he was the "window" inventor & also nailed the V1 & V2 problem. Yet he became cynical about the system he worked under (ahem-like me & apparently Hippy!). Warning - it's SO compulsive that you'll immediately read it cover to cover (at least twice),so schedule for a wet day! Stan

 

[Tom2000]

I did far more semiconductor work in my own time, both theoretical & hands on, than tertiary courses here in NZ delivered. And this was when parts were costly too- a single NPN cost ~2 hours earnings ( ~£10 now) for a teen.

Wow, that takes me back.

I still remember disposing of so much of my savings to buy my first transistor -- a germanium point-contact PNP CK-722 -- as a kid. I used that one transistor for, probably, a year or better in all my experiments, until a lead broke off the case. I was heartbroken. (But my spirits rose when I found that, by then, I could afford a replacement for much less than the CK722 ate from my savings. Matter of fact, I gained capability. I could afford both a PNP and an NPN transistor!)

Tom