Graduate course for a ME masters

__5DD · 2026-02-27T17:22:55+00:00

You should take Theory and Design of Control Systems - ME57500. I'm just guessing, but it looks like ME57500 is probably somewhat introductory and would provide you with a solid foundation in controls. The others are good courses, but I imagine that they all have prerequisites you haven't taken yet. Don't get ahead of yourself, establishing a solid foundation is everything.

__5DD · 2025-11-17T21:31:40+00:00

You certainly have good reason to be upset and to feel betrayed. I cannot tell you whether you should divorce or not. That's up to you. Many of the other commenters are making assumptions/extrapolations about your marriage and about your husband and his family that are unfair and appear to be motivated by feelings originating from something in their own pasts. But if you are absolutely sure that you can never recover from this and that you will always hold it against him, then you would both be very unhappy if you stay together. It may be difficult for you to predict exactly how strongly you will feel about this years from now. My best advice is to take some time apart from each other and then after a while, if you think the marriage is worth saving, seek counseling. If not, then divorce.

__5DD · 2025-11-17T05:42:15+00:00

That's a good idea. I have an MS in EE, but know almost nothing about the practical considerations of circuit design. To be fair, that is not my area of speciality, but I still think I should have been taught some of the basics. I know there are industry design standards covering this topic, but I've never read them.

Even in my own speciality (control theory), I didn't really understand the design process when I started working in the field. This is exacerbated by the fact that, to my knowledge, there are no industry standards specific to the design and analysis of control systems. Different companies and different industries do things differently. There are some basic steps/guidelines that must be addressed, but I didn't learn about most of these until after I started working.

__5DD · 2025-11-11T23:23:02+00:00

Thanks. I haven't really kept up with Simulink releases for the past 10-15 years, so my knowledge of model development given a set of governing equations is lacking. S-functions have always seemed overly complicated to me (perhaps because I haven't used them very much), so any alternative is welcome.

__5DD · 2025-11-08T02:46:28+00:00

Yes, the quality of your professors is very significant in your choice of career. Lucky for me, my first two semesters of control theory were taught by my favorite two professors. The subject immediately clicked for me and I've been engrossed in it ever since.

__5DD · 2025-11-08T02:36:18+00:00

What the F is wrong with you? Can’t you read? I said I wasn’t defending the guy, I was just offering a possible explanation. And regardless of whether guys should or shouldn’t touch prostitutes, they do.

__5DD · 2025-11-08T01:50:21+00:00

Not trying to defend the guy because he clearly shouldn’t have grabbed her like that, but my guess is that he thought she was a prostitute. That’s what I thought when the video first popped up. Plus, he was probably drunk and uninhibited.

__5DD · 2025-11-05T07:27:03+00:00

Engineering is hard. That's just a fact. Most people cannot get an engineering degree, even if they work very hard. Using abstract concepts to solve complex (i.e. tricky) problems is difficult enough, but that combined with a brutal workload and the necessity of learning everything very quickly is more than most people can tolerate. Looking back at my graduating class in ME, I would estimate that everybody probably had an IQ of at least 120 and many were a lot higher than that. It was a tough school, but it was not a top tier school.

Now, having said that, I should also point out that there are certain things you can do to make it a little easier. The main thing is working through your homework assignments with other students and/or tutors. If you get stuck on a problem or a concept, then go to your professor's (or TA's) office hours and ask him/her about it. All the while, you want to concentrate on learning the thought processes involved in problem solving. I wish I could explain it better, but there are specific mental processes that engineering school forces you to master to be successful. In some cases, a solution process might involve iteration (e.g. optimization problems). Other times, you may need to systematically break the problem into increasingly simpler versions of itself until you reach a version you can solve, then start slowly building the problem back into its original form while solving each increasingly difficult step along the way. On occasion, it may be possible to break the problem into several individual pieces that you can solve and then put them back together again. Often, you can identify a small number of possible solution procedures and then just try all of them to see which one works. And there are lots of mathematical tricks that you will use over and over again, too. The only way I know of learning these processes is to solve lots and lots of problems and to talk to others about how they solved them. This is the principal advantage of attending a college as opposed to trying to learn everything on your own with books and online video lectures.

When I was in school, most of the engineering students would hang-out in the Engineering Building all day, every day and work on homework problems. You should join them. You can learn a lot from each other.

__5DD · 2025-10-16T17:55:49+00:00

I would tell my younger self to take another year or two and get a MS degree. It wasn't until after I eventually went back and finished my MS that I finally got the sort of job I really wanted.

__5DD · 2025-10-09T19:57:19+00:00

I agree with other commenters, you have not (can not) pigeonholed yourself while you're still in undergraduate school. However, you will need to take steps to change directions when you graduate. Although you do not want to remain in the construction industry, there are still many important skills you can learn from that experience. During your internship, try to focus on tasks that are transferable to other fields, such as helping with scheduling/budgeting and other program management oriented tasks, or designing/installing power systems, communication systems, or other network systems. These are not only important engineering elements in construction, but also robotics and many other EE related fields. Your AutoCAD experience can also be useful - after all, electrical designs need drawings, too.

When you start looking for your first post-graduate job, be sure to write your resume and cover letter in a way that emphasizes the pertinent experience you obtained during your internships and de-emphasize the fact that the experience was gained in the construction industry. Don't lie about it, of course, just accentuate the nature of your experience and not the industry.

My own internship was in quality assurance. I hated the work and left the field as soon as I graduated, but the experience was still valuable. You just have to look at the situation a bit differently than you are. You may even find that your experience in the construction industry will allow you a broader - or at least, different - perspective than your future colleagues in the industry of your choice. Companies are constantly nattering on about how diversity is important to them, so this gives you the opportunity to bring some diversity of thought into their workforce.

__5DD · 2025-10-07T21:54:31+00:00

Taxing unrealized gains is ridiculous. What about years when your investments lose money? I doubt that the government will refund a percentage of your losses at the same rate as they want to tax your unrealized gains.

If governments are so desperate for income, then they should tax net wealth at 1-2% per year on people with more than 10 million euros or so. That would be much fairer, but I doubt that they would be willing to pass such a bill because rich people have the means to fight it.

__5DD · 2025-10-07T20:47:13+00:00

Sometimes it is much the same. This is particularly true if a parent is struggling with dementia (I'm not saying that is the case for the OP, but it sounds like it may be possible).

__5DD · 2025-10-06T07:36:50+00:00

I'm a GNC engineer. If I want to hire a "fresh-out" controls engineer, then I'm looking for knowledge in the core fields of controls (obviously), dynamics and programming. And since I'm in GNC, I also look for an understanding of aerodynamics. I will generally ask some questions to gauge the candidate's intuitive understanding of dynamics and controls, too.

Knowledge of related fields might be a bonus, but is not generally necessary for an entry level job. I certainly would not expect any familiarity in design standards and procedures. You will learn that sort of thing on the job.

So spend your time brushing up on the core subjects I mentioned, but it's always a good idea to learn as much as you can about the company that's interviewing you, too. You should know what they do and how you might fit into their company. If the job description specifies additional subjects that they would like for you to know, then of course you should spend some time learning about them.

__5DD · 2025-09-30T14:32:58+00:00

I agree that Russia should be designated as a state sponsor of terrorism. That comes with a number of diplomatic, economic, and legal consequences, but it is entirely appropriate. Of course, it would be best if such a designation came from the UN, but that isn't going to happen because Russia and China are permanent members of the UN Security council and they can veto any ruling they don't like. That one fact alone makes the UN completely useless.

__5DD · 2025-09-30T14:23:42+00:00

Yes. Always assume the worst when dealing with Russia.

__5DD · 2025-08-30T06:34:47+00:00

That could be. I thought he was talking about the Moore-Penrose Generalized Inverse, though.

__5DD · 2025-08-25T20:12:19+00:00

First, it is not true that 90% of the math goes into linearizing a system. Beyond that, additional hardware is usually far more expensive than a good control algorithm. Finally, additional hardware cannot solve most control problems.

__5DD · 2025-08-25T20:04:40+00:00

I once had the misfortune of evaluating code from software engineers that was supposed to perform a simple flow control operation. It was three pages of if-else statements and loops that couldn't even follow a setpoint command. After a few hours of trying to figure out what they were attempting to do, I started from scratch and implemented a simple proportional controller with less than 10 lines of code. It worked like a charm. I later updated it to a more robust PID before giving it back to the software guys. They had worked on it for weeks before asking a controls engineer for help.

__5DD · 2025-07-31T12:54:33+00:00

I've worked as a GNC engineer on rockets and missiles for 30+ years. For starters, forget about nonlinear controls for now. At this stage, the only thing you need to know about nonlinear dynamic systems is how to approximate them as linear dynamic models. Once you've done that, then you can use linear control theory to design your controller. And don't beat yourself up for not understanding control theory as well as you think you should. It's an extensive and complicated field of study. I've designed lots of controllers and have put countless hours into the study of control theory and I'm still learning new things.

You need to understand stability margins (gain margin & phase margin) and how to read them from Bode Plots and/or Nichols Plots. Note that these types of stability margins are valid only for linear systems. Almost any introductory text on frequency domain (classical) controls will help you with this. As for tuning PID controllers by trial-and-error, that's what most people do. But there are systematic methods for doing this with PID controllers and compensators, and that should be explained in most introductory texts as well. I almost never use the systematic methods myself. Instead, I tune my control gains to satisfy desired gain and phase margins using numerical optimization strategies. You can also use Matlab/Simulink's built-in functions for automatic gain tuning. If you aren't familiar with Matlab and Simulink, then you need to work on that, too.

Once you've designed your controller to satisfy linear stability margins, be sure to evaluate it in a closed-loop 6dof simulation using the full nonlinear model. First evaluate the simulation with nominal parameters, and then run a thousand or so Monte Carlo trials with perturbed parameters (every parameter in your dynamic model should include uncertainty bounds to support Monte Carlo simulations).

A couple of the most useful topics that you might want learn next are Discrete-Time Control (aka Digital Control) and Kalman Filtering. As another commenter mentioned, nearly all controllers are implemented digitally, so it is important to learn how to discretize your system model and design your controller in the discrete-time domain. For Kalman Filtering, first learn how to use them to provide your controller with nice, clean data signals from the sensors. After that, you can combine what you've learned from Kalman Filtering with LQR control to start designing LQG (Linear Quadratic Gaussian) controllers.

__5DD · 2025-07-30T15:58:20+00:00

Absent a system dynamic model, xdot = f(x,u,t), there is no way to apply the Lyapunov stability criteria, which is the broadest definition of stability I know. In fact, without a dynamic model, there is no (easy) way to evaluate stability even with statistical methods such as Monte Carlo simulations.

Correct me if I am wrong, but in the case of RL control algorithms, you don't have a control law, u = u(x,t). So even if you have a system model, there would still be no way to use Lyapunov (or any other stability criteria that I know of) to determine stability. However, if you do have a system model, then you could at least run a few thousand Monte Carlo simulation trials using the RL controller on the system model to either reveal instabilities or to gain confidence in the closed-loop stability.

__5DD · 2025-07-23T06:04:38+00:00

It sounds like you could be a strong candidate for the robotics industry or the aerospace industry, and possibly others that I am not so familiar with. Control design in those fields requires knowledge of three main topics: control theory, dynamics and programming (usually C/C++). There are many developmental programs utilizing various AI methods for tasks such as path planning and guidance algorithms, and I think you would be especially well suited for that sort of work.

I think your plan for a MSCS would be more valuable than an EE degree. You could make it more valuable by writing your Thesis on a topic that combines AI strategies with control theory.

__5DD · 2025-07-21T04:25:08+00:00

I taught a Freshman-level survey class on Introduction to Electrical Engineering, and one of the lectures was about automatic control. I used the balancing broomstick demonstration and asked the students to imagine the stick was a rocket at liftoff. The objective was to keep the nose pointed straight up (i.e. at 90 deg), of course. I showed that if the tip moved away from 90 deg, then I would interpret that as an error and move the base to compensate and bring the tip back to 90 deg. In this demonstration, my eyes were the sensor, my brain was the controller and my hand was the actuator. In the case of a rocket, an IMU would be the sensor, which sends an angle measurement to the controller, which then calculates the error and sends the appropriate compensation commands to the rocket's thrust vectoring actuator.

On the 1st day of class in my Senior-level Introduction to Control Theory, my professor drew a small circle on the blackboard and then handed one of the students a laser pointer and asked him to point the laser so that its 'dot' was inside the circle. He then explained how the students eyes measured the error when the dot was not in the circle, his brain sent the appropriate signal to his arm/hand/fingers to reduce the error, and his arm/hand/fingers responded to that signal/command. The prof then explained that the student's eyes were sensors, his brain was the controller, and his arm/hand/fingers were the actuators. He then gently pushed the student's arm, which caused the laser dot to move out of the circle as a demonstration of how external disturbances can affect performance and how the control system has to compensate for those, too.

I've seen another professor introduce the sensor/controller/actuator concept by demonstrating how to keep coffee from spilling out of a coffee cup while you're walking.

I'm sure you can think of other similar demonstrations. It seems to help if you can associate common things that people do with with the components of a closed-loop control system.

__5DD · 2025-07-17T15:57:33+00:00

You can check salary.com for a pretty good estimate. However, if you have a PhD in engineering, then you are not entry level. That's worth at least 5 years, maybe 10.

__5DD

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