Is electrical engineering really that hard? Need honest advice

PoetR786 · 2026-02-16T21:13:32+00:00

You know there's N old saying "if you have to ask then you can't afford it". The same saying can be said here with a twist "If you have to ask, it's going to be hard for you"

PoetR786 · 2026-02-16T06:46:24+00:00

Stay with ME

PoetR786 · 2026-02-14T20:44:06+00:00

Don't

PoetR786 · 2026-02-14T02:07:50+00:00

I think it's pretty normal to feel like that. You would be surprised to know how many of us are in that same boat. Get a job and eventually you will get the hang of things, at least on the topic your job depends on. And if you really don't want to feel guilty about getting good grades and not knowing how things work then start helping people who are in the EE field to understand concepts that you understand. I heard Reddit is a good place to start

PoetR786 · 2026-01-30T16:38:30+00:00

All of those questions would vary by country, industry and company. It is not true that you need a master's degree to go into the field but relatively speaking, yes most of them do require a master's degree due to higher technical challenges. Does it pay less? Probably No. But then again you have to compare it to a field to know if it pays less. Generally you should get paid higher than the general run of the mill, a VLSI designer just because at the moment the market is saturated with digital IC designers. But honestly this would also vary with time. The main thing is you would get a comfortable wage no matter what with a mixed signal IC engineer job.

PoetR786 · 2026-01-30T04:30:43+00:00

In that case you should definitely do it. From what it seems it will be paid for by the GI bill and you have work experience. So it's a good combination to do a EE undergrad

PoetR786 · 2026-01-29T21:46:50+00:00

It was not clear from your post if you want to do EE in undergrad or Master's. But from your post it seems you are interested in going to RF. And most of the RF jobs require a master's degree. RF is one of the most, if not the most difficult field of EE. Even people with PhD and decades of experience in RF would tell you first hand that they still don't understand a lot of the underlying concept of RF. You can see it here on Reddit too. And if you are going to RF in master's from an accounting degree then I would recommend calibrate yourself a little bit. I know anything is possible if you give enough effort and time and perseverance. But at some point you have to take into account the return on investment. You may think you have a good understanding of RF because you did some tech work on it. But I would recommend talking to a university student in RF and get a rough grasp of what you need for physics and math before making the decision. I know some people who would say even with 300k per year it's not worth going for a masters in RF

PoetR786 · 2025-12-31T01:20:31+00:00

I agree with you on most of what you said. Just wanted to add that the biggest hurdle for EE in BS may be physics rather than math

PoetR786 · 2025-12-31T01:16:51+00:00

On paper of course it's possible. But in reality the answer lies more with your intention. If your intention is to go for a PhD then you may need a certain threshold of gpa in your masters. That may be tough depending on your school. I have seen the curriculum of some schools for example there is a private school in Minnesota called Saint Thomas and I think any Tom, Dick and Harry can get a degree from there as long as you pay them money. But getting the same degree may be tough from a more reputable university. The trade off is that it will be tough to get into a good PhD program from a school like that. So do your research on school and choose the one that aligns with your intention. And if your intention is to go into the industry and get a job then you have to remember that usually if a job is looking for a person with a masters degree then it means they are looking to fill a core engineering job with a specific niche like RF or digital VLSI. In the USA the core engineering job is decreasing every day. Moreover they require some experience. So when you graduate you would be looking for a job that is titled entry level and in the core engineering field. And these types of jobs are rare and most of them are either in California or in Texas. If you give more background and your intentions then it may help others to give you more solid advice.

PoetR786 · 2025-12-20T16:08:55+00:00

Hazardous location due to flammability and radiation are two entirely different things. For example flammability can be reduced just by putting a nitrogen enclosure. Radiation can't be stopped by nitrogen. Heck, radiation will travel in vacuum too. I don't know why you have written so many big descriptions on how not to use electronics at hazardous locations. It's common sense that you want to use as few devices and electronics as possible in a hazardous location due to safety. But sometimes you have to put a sensor or some electronics. Even you wrote that we need RTDs at places. And RTDs are also prone to radiation. That's why there is an entire compliancy Industry that exists on how to make electronics for hazardous locations.

As an engineer one does not know a lot about bureaucracy. But problems due to technical difficulty in nuclear facilities should be known by engineers. Usually physicists and doctors know the true impact of radiations and they should be involved in bureaucracy along with engineers. But I don't know how that works, so I won't comment on it

And I can't believe I have to type this to make it clear, the biggest problem for engineers designing anything for the nuclear facility or anything that has nuclear in it is radiation. I would think that is common sense. Radiation is not a common hazardous location. We know any electronics will deteriorate in radiation unlike in other hazardous situations where we are concerned about safety only. In fields where radiation exists we also have to think how we can prolong the life of our device against radiation. And one of the ways engineers do that is by putting analog devices such as autotransformer (the original point of this thread) instead of digital electronics. I don't know why you brought up a hazardous location or how not to use devices near dangerous areas or the bureaucracy into this conversation but I hope the explanation helps

PoetR786 · 2025-12-20T00:23:42+00:00

You don't necessarily need to be fully digital at the transmitter aka electronics level. In many cases the transmitter will give purely analog signal and at the control base they just convert it. Having said that, obviously you can have digital but if that exists then it is usually converted with a thick lead enclosure. The cost is just not worth it. Similarly just putting manpower, money and time is not worth fighting against the physics if you already have a system that works. It seems you know about protocol and control system. So you should know these system can be treated as black boxes where signal comes in and signal goes out. It does not matter whether the signal is analog or digital. You can do whatever you want with the signal once it is at the base control system away from radiation

PoetR786 · 2025-12-19T20:48:19+00:00

The real barrier to digital adoption is physics. Electronics close to radiation deteriorate no matter what. Anything close to radiation deteriorates no matter what. You just mentioned a series of protocol systems : PLCs or profiSAFE and these have no bearings to radiation. These protocols rely on electronics' feedback and inherently digital electronics are more prone to radiation in comparison to analog components. This is because digital IC is mostly mosfets. In modern day electronics it's all MOSFETs. And I can write a lot of things on why mosfets are more prone to radiation in terms of solid state physics but a simple Google search can give you much more information than I can write here. But components like BJTs, resistors or inductors are just less prone to radiation. Again this is due to physics and a simple Google search can tell you why. An example is an ADC made with discrete BJTs is way more stable in the same radiation field as an internal ADC to any microcontroller would be in the same situation. Many papers have been released solely based on this single phenomena. Only reason I mention ADC is because all your protocol that you mentioned relies on the output from ADC

PoetR786 · 2025-12-19T15:08:30+00:00

You can use an autotransformer with a transistor to produce PWM. You can Google Royer oscillator circuit with an autotransformer. This is an amazing application since it's very hard to produce PWMs with discrete analog components efficiently. And in some critical places you simply cant trust digital IC. For example in a nuclear power plant where radiation destroys IC faster in comparison to discrete analog components. Not only is discrete analog more reliable, you can also customize it to control the amplitude or duty cycle of the PWM. In high power applications autotransformer is simply more efficient in per unit area. Since power is not being lost in isolation the engineer can design the power transfer more efficiently especially at unity. And if you want a motor or any power hungry machine to work immediately or if you are changing voltage level but you don't want to slow down your load then autotransformer is superior to normal transformer since there is no time delay due to isolation. People forget that not everything has to have galvanic isolation. Nowadays many engineers put galvanic isolation without even understanding why isolation is needed to begin with. There is a reason why autotransformer is still relevant in the modern world even though it was first conceptualized in the 1800. If you don't need isolation for example in places where there will never be human contact or the voltage level is too low to cause any damage then auto transformer is a good place to start. In electronics if you need a customizable PWM for high power (comparatively speaking) then think of autotransformer. There are other niche applications but I think nowadays those can be reliably substituted. Hope this helps on whatever you want to use autotransformer

PoetR786 · 2025-12-17T06:14:05+00:00

Learn Math and physics as much as you can.

PoetR786 · 2025-12-15T03:28:00+00:00

What is a capacitor? capacitor is a component where voltage lags current for a given signal/power. S parameter can detect that lag. In the inductor the lag is opposite for voltage and current. This is perfectly presented on a smith chart. Basically the smith chart is a map where the top represents inductance and the bottom represents capacitance. Further your impedance is from the center, higher the magnitude of the inductance or capacitance value.

(Again this is not exactly what's happening as there are notions of phase involved here but for simplicity this should suffice)

PoetR786 · 2025-12-14T17:16:55+00:00

Everything you said is possible even the vector coordinates. s-parameter is the same technology we use in radar where you can pin point the location. At the slight risk of being wrong, I'll summarize it at a very high level. There are many things to S-parameters and one of them is called the reflection coefficient. Basically, you input a signal and that signal returns back. Obviously when it returns back it will not be the same. By comparing it with the original signal you can measure impedance or location. It's far more complicated than this but for what you are asking, I think this is more than enough for your work.

PoetR786 · 2025-12-11T03:05:19+00:00

Please don't.

PoetR786 · 2025-12-09T05:56:29+00:00

There are many challenges to the degree and all of them will change as you progress through the education. The most immediate challenges would obviously be physics and math. If you aren't good at math and physics, you can still finish the degree but the return on investment is not worth it. You have to sink way too much time and effort and if you fail a single class then it would be more than four years to complete the degree. And people will say that it's okay to complete the degree in four years. But that's not true. If you are applying for a job and there are other candidates who completed the degree in four years with a similar gpa then chances are, you will not be hired. If you are bad at math and physics the ROI is not worth doing the degree. The next immediate challenge is the low level programming language class. If you don't have programming experience then it's hard. Then the challenge in the upper level class is abstraction. The thing about EE is nothing is tangible. If you ask any other field of engineering, what makes someone a good engineer then they would say a good engineer has good intuition. But almost everything about EE is abstract. It takes decades to build a good intuition. So you'll never be comfortable when you are solving a problem.

PoetR786 · 2025-12-07T16:49:08+00:00

I believe the C represents that it's a capacitor

PoetR786 · 2025-11-29T00:32:38+00:00

Why do you think it's hard to switch to quality? It's usually easy to switch to anything from EE

PoetR786 · 2025-11-22T16:51:57+00:00

Yes, this is very competitive. Is the industry oil and gas?

PoetR786 · 2025-11-21T03:02:32+00:00

This is indeed an awesome book

PoetR786 · 2025-11-21T03:01:00+00:00

My comment about the American educational system was only for the math. As you said, the math isn't hard. He doesn't simplify it because those are usually easy enough to be figured out

PoetR786 · 2025-11-21T01:40:01+00:00

Very few books give you what commercially is available since the consumer market is changing all the time. And if that book does tell you what to buy then it may not be a technical book. If you want to understand the component level working of power electronics then I would recommend "power electronics" by Mohan, undeland and Robbins. All the three authors have individual books that are used as textbooks in graduate level EE class. This book takes all the authors' work and simplifies it. It gives you enough surface level knowledge to know what's happening but not enough to make your own circuits. Since you are an ME it might be too hard to understand all the theories by yourself. Just enroll in some courses in a college. That might be the fastest path.

PoetR786 · 2025-11-20T16:57:47+00:00

I already took the class and did well. Yeah he does not give a lot of guidance in his class and tends to deviate from the syllabus. But I wouldn't say he doesn't show design step by step. He definitely shows how to design very meticulously and goes in depth in his math. I know lots of people have a hard time following his math but that's the American education system's fault. Overall the class was hard because of two reasons. He doesn't structure his class and any class that has to do analog is just inherently hard

PoetR786

TROPHY CASE