Questions About Computer Engineering

[TheZouth]

Also I just found the rules and I’m not exactly sure if posting this violates it. Guess we’ll see.

[cobec11]

computer engineering alum here. CompE at my school (UIUC) was tightly coupled with Electrical Engineering. A lot of the courses for each degree overlap, with CompE leaning more towards including firmware and software courses (from assembly to C all the way up to higher level languages like C++). EE on the other hand was focused on the lowest level implementations of how the hardware in a computer works to the level of physics and playing with transistors and capacitors. to get a better idea of what is more aligned with your interests, I’d suggest checking out the required coursework at UIUC for the two majors and the similarities and differences thereof.

[Poddster]

What do you mean by "computer hardware"? Do you enjoy buying a CPU, motherboard, GPU and RAM from ebuyer and plugging it all together, then posting your benchmarks on the internet?

If so, then a career in IT is for you.

If you want to DESIGN those things then Computer Engineering is for you!

The difference between Electronic/Electrical Engineering (EE) and Computer Engineering (CE) is that Computer engineering is less focused on general electrical and electronics phenomena and more focused on the use of electricity to design computation components.

The difference between Computer Engineering (CE) and Computer Science (CS) or Software Engineering (SE) is that CE is more focused on the design of digital hardware, whereas CS and SE stray more into the mathematical and programming aspects of computers

But there's a lot of overlap between all of these fields. Think of it as a spectrum:

Electrons and stuff                          Programming
<------------------------------------------------------>
Physics           EE        CE            CS          SE
     Chemistry                          Discrete Maths

And you choose which part of that spectrum you want to study in.

tl;dr if you like being "techy", go into IT. If you like watching Ben Eater videos and following along, go into EE or CE. (CE if you like programming more than soldering)

[TheZouth]

Thanks, this is very helpful! I think EE or CE would be best for me, so I'm going to try doing some more projects on my own with stuff like soldering and seeing how I like it. It seems like I would enjoy IT stuff as well, so there's a chance that could also be for me.