EETimes: Engaging EE Students
I ran across an interesting article in EETimes. Basically, it’s about a professor who is trying to create a better tool to stimulate their understanding of electrical engineering.
Why have American students been losing interest in electrical engineering? One theory is that dramatic technological advances in electronics have had the unintended consequence of making electronics less accessible to curious young minds.
The first line of the article definitely does its job for me. Having interviewed a lot of new college grads, I find myself being very disappointed a lot of the time.
Incoming college freshmen lack “the background intuition that kids used to get from just playing with stuff, tinkering with stuff,” said Don Millard, a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI, Troy, N.Y.). Today’s students may have cracked open a videogame console to solder a mod chip onto the motherboard that lets them play games for free. But more often, Millard said, inquisitive minds find components that are so small they can’t be tinkered with or gadgets that are so tightly packed they can’t be pulled apart.
Thus, Millard and others believe, students who might once have been attracted to electrical engineering because of the ability to observe cause-and-effect relationships in circuits and components are instead gravitating toward other fields.
I really appreciate this context. Hopefully, there will be more options for students to be more interested in EE going into programs around the country, rather than just thinking that it’s a good way to make a buck.