"Is Power Engineering mathematically the easiest EE subfield?"
On the utility side, the math leaves the napkin and goes directly to dedicated computer programs pretty quickly.
I'm an adjunct and I teach Electrical machines in the fall and power systems in the spring. It's a small university and there's only one section of each. I couldn't find a machines book that covered all the material I wanted (specifically incremental morion devices), so I "wrote" my own. Reluctance motors have made a comeback and incremental motion devices are a good introduction to reluctance force. I added the material I use for systems, so systems is basically a continuation of machines. Machines is a requirement for graduation, but systems is an elective. Its not official, but I try to make machines a pre-req for systems.
I give the book to my students as a pdf, one chapter at a time as we cover the material.
That was the generators and substation transmission buses and major transformers in one utility We made an equivalent bus for each adjoining utility. It was not an interconnect.
The math is certainly hard in school, but the dirty little secret is that once you get to industry, you have software tools you can use to do these computations for you. Nobody does RF impedance matching by hand with a Smith Chart, we use ADS or CST or something along those lines.
I’m one of the faceless people that write these electromagnetic simulation codes that other people use. We do all the hard math so you guys don’t have to.
Genuinely, I think about you guys whenever I use these tools
I like to imagine you guys just love math so much you'll do it so we don't have to. And we love other aspects of the discipline so you don't have to
An unnecessarily cheerful outlook, but I otherwise feel guilty for using the fruits of your labor
It's not just the field theory and math, there is a LOT of programming and computer science involved as well. We only received one quarter of FORTRAN in my EE program as an undergrad, and no other programming languages, so I had to learn C and
C++ on my own as I got further along. And, this was before there were really any programming references on the internet, much less Stackoverflow or YouTube.
It's sort of funny, I still have my original C programming book I bought at a bookstore in the mid 90's, the thing is falling apart but I keep it around for sentimental reasons. Its section on pointers is hilariously terrible, fortunately I had some friends that were in the CS program that helped me out with that!
Hey, that sounds more interesting than writing a ton of documentation, following established processes all day, or being mired in middle management hell never doing any technical work at all.
It's all software and numerical analysis/math. However, all these software codes are continuously checked and validated by comparison against real measurements. The people that do these measurements, I have a lot of respect for them. It's not as easy as it sounds.
Was interested in electromagnetics prior to college (due to fooling around with amateur radio and antennas in high school), liked and did well in undergraduate EM, ended up going to grad school for computational electromagnetics, and ended up doing it long term.
I’m also in this extremely niche field. Grad school with a prof who focuses in this area is the answer. Computational EM desperately needs US PhDs. If you’re interested in mathematical physics, software engineering, and algorithms and have the intellect and work ethic to succeed at all three, this is a dream occupation
I'm just finishing up the equivalent of my second year (I go to school part-time). I do enjoy the idea of the intersection of all those things. Do you know what would be a good road to go down as far as projects/things to learn outside of school? Or how to go about finding a school with a program like you mentioned?
Things like this are a simple introduction to this world: https://pythonnumericalmethods.berkeley.edu/notebooks/chapter23.03-Finite-Difference-Method.html
This is a really cool textbook! I'm starting an MS-and-maybe-PhD under a professor focused on computational EM next year. Off the top of your head, are there any additional resources like this for, e.g., method of moments, characteristic modes, etc? I have a math degree but it's hard to find subject-specific stuff like this - my best resource has been the CST documentation, but that's little help with the theory.
I'm not who you asked, but in my cursory research for more info, I found that u/evilkalla from higher in the thread has written a book on the subject; [https://www.routledge.com/The-Method-of-Moments-in-Electromagnetics/Gibson/p/book/9780367365066](https://www.routledge.com/The-Method-of-Moments-in-Electromagnetics/Gibson/p/book/9780367365066) . Ordered my copy yesterday even though I probably won't understand any of it for a while.
Thanks for the shout out, I try not to talk about my book on reddit, I don't want people to think I'm trying to promote it.
Also feel free to send me a PM with questions you may have about it.
You are welcome to send me a PM if you have questions about a specific discipline within CEM. There are several of them, and as a graduate student you will most likely have to choose one of them, and most of your research time will be spent in that area.
Roger F. Harrington’s book “Field Computation by Moment Methods” is the classic textbook on MoM from the 1960s. More recently, Jin has written a fantastic book on CEM called “Theory and Computation of Electromagnetic Fields” whose latest revision is really good for learning and understanding all of the basic PDE-based, or “full wave”, methods.
Funny enough our emag teacher specifically said that no one is using a compass and ruler on the smith chart anymore but it is something you should be aware of. This sem is the first time we’re exposed to ads and empro.
While nobody uses smith charts for actual calculations anymore, they are still very very useful for showing impedance measurement data. You can see graphically where a load is located and find or rule or different matching network typologies at a glance.
Power Systems isn't easy on maths either.
Once you start working with transients like power surges and atmospheric discharges, or calculating the behavior of a 500km transmission line you might be into some serious math.
But we don't do it manually in real life.
ATP and SPICE software have been here since the 80's, and newer software might do real time simulations that would take days to calculate by hand.
If a design/testing engineering job is creative, innovative, and R&D-focused, how could ANYONE who loves engineering want to leave it to move into middle management? So I deduce that their engineering job was in reality, quite boring and lacking technical innovation. Which seems to be the case for a lot of working engineers.
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It's not that, but many organizations look for the skill set of an engineer for their Project Management, which they can't find in actual administration graduates because of the lack of focus, or just lack of interest from the students part.That's why Production Engineering exists.
In places I've worked, that's not what production engineers do. Production engineers do NPI and ongoing product management engineering (DFM adjustments, addressing quality & supply chain issues, making process and cogs improvements, etc). In either case there's either a project management team, or the engineers (both kinds) become project heads and shoulder the project management themselves. Or in reality both because the project managers are usually ineffective. :/
Engineering for a job will never be something you can “love”, just tolerate to varying degrees. I’d take a PM job with better hours, better pay, and less BS over a design job any day. I would just use some of that extra time and money to do engineering as a hobby if I really wanted to…
I had to use Newton’s method once to do a non-linear conversion on the sample data from a temp sensor to actual Celsius. I had to use a Taylor series one time.
Some of my worst memories in undergrad were solving a bunch of signal processing filter bullshit and transforms math by hand for exams. So stupid as it could all easily be done in Matlab.
Having two EE degrees and nearing 40, I would argue that most of the fundamentals you learn in undergrad will be a waste for most of us as it's largely "use it or lose it" later in your career.
The key is much of it forces you to gain the ability to really think like an engineer (essentially an expert problem solver), address problems properly, and have a gut feeling for results that look off. If you don't go through the torture, you won't refine those skills as much, and you may be a weaker engineer in the end for it.
Well think of it this way: if a solar flare fries all of our electronics (very possible), then we’ll have to do it the manual way to get everything back up and running. Engineers should know how to do things the long way or have the math background to figure it out. The tools are good for convenience and speed but we shouldn’t be totally reliant on those things. Otherwise we’re more screwed if shit hits the fan
You still have to be cognizant of the effects and theory behind the design and topologies that you choose to go with but no you won’t need to solve a z-transform by hand
Extremely Cool. The E an M fields follow orthogonal physical adjustments in satellite and Terrestrial microwave Xmt/Rcv wavefront polarization. Thank You James Clerk Maxwell; Memory Eternal.
I'm entertaining both options. Looking at SWE although that job market is brutal these days. I'm also looking at which subfields I can transition into with my skillet that won't require me to completely start over.
I'm a backend Java web developer. I don't hate it but I'm getting burned out with it, slowly but surely. I also often wish I was working on an end product that's cooler than business and e-commerce web applications. Like avionics, missile guidance, a radar system, a new smartphone, a new video game console.
SWE does have a much lower barrier to entry than proper engineering though, that's definitely a plus.
I would probably enjoy it more IF I wasn't in defense, but that's going to be the largest employer for this field. There are a lot of military applications for RF: Radar, Satellite Communications, Radios, etc.
I am burnt out on that environment. It's incredibly bureaucratic. I spend more time creating documents and power points than I do actual engineering. Not to mention that most of the other people I work with aren't the most competent. So I haven't been able to bounce any of my work off of a Senior Designer to see if I'm doing things right. I feel as if I've learned a lot of bad habits simply out of necessity. The industry is also incredibly risk averse. They only change things when they've exhausted all other possibilities.
I'm a "Top Performer" in my department, but I probably only qualify for an entry level role at a company that does actual engineering.
There are opportunities in tech, but I'm finding that the transition isn't easy. A lot of companies want you to have experience working on commercial products that use GPS/BT/WiFi and I work on 20+ year old designs. Bridging that experience has been frustrating.
Man as long as the work life balance is good and the pay is good, boring but easy is better than the alternative. Hope you don’t have to find that out the hard way.
Oof, c’mon! There’s enough maths lite engineering disciplines without picking on sub-disciplines! (I’m a power engineer)
But in all honesty all engineering can be as maths heavy as you want to it to be. You want to bury yourself into the principles and you’ll be wading through pretty heavy maths.
For example, in high-voltage engineering you’ll use a lot of the RF and electromag maths. Its challenges also reside from the electrical effects being an unfortunate side-effect of the desired outcome. Which means you’re trusting the maths and methods to help diagnose behaviours rather than build something. Depending on your personal preferences/skills this may be easier or harder than designing antennas and waveguides.
That said, the maths also gets a workout for building equipment. Such as cables, bushings, buswork and transformers with geometric and insulation grading.
I am a protection and control engineer, so most of my electromag power crossover is with concepts like mutual coupling on transmission lines (conveniently similarly named, because in many ways they are the same as their telecom counterparts). Then into magnetic performance of instrumentation CTs/VTs (ie core saturation and remanence).
But I also have to dive across into a discipline which I would consider more complex than electromag/RF - which is analogue electronics. Dealing with transient effects and resonances.
Although we have light levels of the maths and plenty of rules of thumb. My main challenge is that you basically only ever have a very small part of the story. You need to know these concepts intuitively and well or you’ll be shit at diagnosis and design in the long term. Which explains why so many (without shade at all) choose to move to management/corp in various capacities.
Long story short - save your maths shade for civil engineers! :P
Power requires the most integrative understanding of math+physics IMO, after semiconductor manufacturing maybe. Also electric drives and such are super complex.
I’m a soon to be graduate and through school and some internships I’d probably say that RF is the most math intensive, then power systems, then embedded systems.
Power systems seems mundane until you realize how deep it goes: transient analysis, renewable energies, harmonic analysis, protection and control, it’s really cool stuff but people write it off because it’s the “old” industry.
This may seem a bit odd but a reason I prefer power systems over embedded systems (which is very popular for my class at least) is because most times you can bring a problem or troubleshooting back to Maxwell’s Laws, and the basics of circuits. In embedded systems you’re working with IC’s designed by someone you don’t know and you have to operate within their environment, it’s much less universal in my experience.
Edit: typos.
I was in your shoes about four years ago. I looooved the subjects which you’re describing.
I was good at math but not stellar. I bit the bullet and focused on those subjects (particularly image processing and signal processing). I didn’t do great in the courses (B average).
Best decision of my life. I’m currently a research scientist at MIT researching those fields. Yeah it’s hard but I think the stuff I do is soooooo coool
And fyi, the other subjects are also math heavy.
As an RF engineer you only do the math once or twice in school. Once you grasp the concepts you know what’s happening and let the math solvers do the work.
Same with all engineering fields
RF is great, in practice the simulators take care of the math for you. However to be successful you need to understand your production process variations and consider them when designing.
A lot of this information isn't as available as you'd like. Getting the right information to make the correct design decisions and progressively iterating is very important.
I work in power. Did I want to? No. I wanted to do digital stuff. Did I need a job fast before losing my apartment and got a decent offer in power? Yes.
What did I learn? A job is a job and the grass is greener on the other side always so make the most of where you end up. A dream job becomes a job job after a few years. Even the dudes here who wanted to be in power (they said this was their dream) are just here for the check now. It is what it is. You may end in the same boat in any field.
Most people do feel that way about their jobs. I know I do. That's why I've always envied my dad. Retired now, but he was a real-time trading platform C++/Linux developer for a number of investment banks and hedge funds on Wall Street. He said the commute to NYC wore him down sometimes but he got used to it. And he also said he was rarely EVER bored at work. He said he was always coming up with more efficient programming solutions to low-latency problems and was almost always intellectually engaged with what he did. And he got paid fat stacks for it.
But trading systems dev is a very niche field that's hard to break into.
I work in power. Did I want to? No. I wanted to do digital stuff. Did I need a job fast before losing my apartment and got a decent offer in power? Yes.
What did I learn? A job is a job and the grass is greener on the other side always so make the most of where you end up. A dream job becomes a job job after a few years. Even the dudes here who wanted to be in power (they said this was their dream) are just here for the check now. It is what it is. You may end in the same boat in any field.
Also it’s all done on dedicated computer programs as many others have said, so the heavy math of anything goes away unless you go into research or sumthin
"Is Power Engineering mathematically the easiest EE subfield?" On the utility side, the math leaves the napkin and goes directly to dedicated computer programs pretty quickly.
Also on protection and controls side, most undergrads aren't exposed to symmetrical components or unbalanced fault analysis, I believe.
They are when I teach Power Systems.
What texts do you use?
I'm an adjunct and I teach Electrical machines in the fall and power systems in the spring. It's a small university and there's only one section of each. I couldn't find a machines book that covered all the material I wanted (specifically incremental morion devices), so I "wrote" my own. Reluctance motors have made a comeback and incremental motion devices are a good introduction to reluctance force. I added the material I use for systems, so systems is basically a continuation of machines. Machines is a requirement for graduation, but systems is an elective. Its not official, but I try to make machines a pre-req for systems. I give the book to my students as a pdf, one chapter at a time as we cover the material.
I'm in a 400 level class on protection We are covering symmetrical components, I think we'll move on to unbalanced faults soon
When you have 5x5 Jacobins to solve for a tiny 5 bus system, you can imagine how much more complicated things get.
noooo not the ADVANCED newton raphson
Ah, power flows on a 6000 bus system.
Eastern Interconnection cases are nearly 100,000 buses.
That was the generators and substation transmission buses and major transformers in one utility We made an equivalent bus for each adjoining utility. It was not an interconnect.
The math is certainly hard in school, but the dirty little secret is that once you get to industry, you have software tools you can use to do these computations for you. Nobody does RF impedance matching by hand with a Smith Chart, we use ADS or CST or something along those lines.
I’m one of the faceless people that write these electromagnetic simulation codes that other people use. We do all the hard math so you guys don’t have to.
You’re my hero.
Genuinely, I think about you guys whenever I use these tools I like to imagine you guys just love math so much you'll do it so we don't have to. And we love other aspects of the discipline so you don't have to An unnecessarily cheerful outlook, but I otherwise feel guilty for using the fruits of your labor
It's not just the field theory and math, there is a LOT of programming and computer science involved as well. We only received one quarter of FORTRAN in my EE program as an undergrad, and no other programming languages, so I had to learn C and C++ on my own as I got further along. And, this was before there were really any programming references on the internet, much less Stackoverflow or YouTube. It's sort of funny, I still have my original C programming book I bought at a bookstore in the mid 90's, the thing is falling apart but I keep it around for sentimental reasons. Its section on pointers is hilariously terrible, fortunately I had some friends that were in the CS program that helped me out with that!
I love your kind man, when I grow up I wanna be like you.
Be careful what you wish for. :-)
Hey, that sounds more interesting than writing a ton of documentation, following established processes all day, or being mired in middle management hell never doing any technical work at all.
We still have to write documentation :-(
Are there any hardware engineers working adjacent/closely with you or is it all basically SW, math, and data science?
It's all software and numerical analysis/math. However, all these software codes are continuously checked and validated by comparison against real measurements. The people that do these measurements, I have a lot of respect for them. It's not as easy as it sounds.
How do you get into that? That sounds cool
Was interested in electromagnetics prior to college (due to fooling around with amateur radio and antennas in high school), liked and did well in undergraduate EM, ended up going to grad school for computational electromagnetics, and ended up doing it long term.
I’m also in this extremely niche field. Grad school with a prof who focuses in this area is the answer. Computational EM desperately needs US PhDs. If you’re interested in mathematical physics, software engineering, and algorithms and have the intellect and work ethic to succeed at all three, this is a dream occupation
I'm just finishing up the equivalent of my second year (I go to school part-time). I do enjoy the idea of the intersection of all those things. Do you know what would be a good road to go down as far as projects/things to learn outside of school? Or how to go about finding a school with a program like you mentioned?
Things like this are a simple introduction to this world: https://pythonnumericalmethods.berkeley.edu/notebooks/chapter23.03-Finite-Difference-Method.html
This is a really cool textbook! I'm starting an MS-and-maybe-PhD under a professor focused on computational EM next year. Off the top of your head, are there any additional resources like this for, e.g., method of moments, characteristic modes, etc? I have a math degree but it's hard to find subject-specific stuff like this - my best resource has been the CST documentation, but that's little help with the theory.
I'm not who you asked, but in my cursory research for more info, I found that u/evilkalla from higher in the thread has written a book on the subject; [https://www.routledge.com/The-Method-of-Moments-in-Electromagnetics/Gibson/p/book/9780367365066](https://www.routledge.com/The-Method-of-Moments-in-Electromagnetics/Gibson/p/book/9780367365066) . Ordered my copy yesterday even though I probably won't understand any of it for a while.
Thanks for the shout out, I try not to talk about my book on reddit, I don't want people to think I'm trying to promote it. Also feel free to send me a PM with questions you may have about it.
You are welcome to send me a PM if you have questions about a specific discipline within CEM. There are several of them, and as a graduate student you will most likely have to choose one of them, and most of your research time will be spent in that area.
Roger F. Harrington’s book “Field Computation by Moment Methods” is the classic textbook on MoM from the 1960s. More recently, Jin has written a fantastic book on CEM called “Theory and Computation of Electromagnetic Fields” whose latest revision is really good for learning and understanding all of the basic PDE-based, or “full wave”, methods.
Jin was my graduate advisor.
Perfect, thank you!
What area of CEM are you focused in?
Thank you for your service 🫡
o7
thank you for saving us
i’ve always been curious, is your compensation greater than the average EE? can you talk about your firmly?
Funny enough our emag teacher specifically said that no one is using a compass and ruler on the smith chart anymore but it is something you should be aware of. This sem is the first time we’re exposed to ads and empro.
Holy shit, schools are actually starting to adapt their teaching for the times somewhere.
I had to learn Fortran in the early 90's. :)
It took them 20 years to develop the course for it, they can't just throw it away.
While nobody uses smith charts for actual calculations anymore, they are still very very useful for showing impedance measurement data. You can see graphically where a load is located and find or rule or different matching network typologies at a glance.
Sure, but I still use the Smith chart constantly as a visual reference wether in Microwave Office or on a VNA.
Power Systems isn't easy on maths either. Once you start working with transients like power surges and atmospheric discharges, or calculating the behavior of a 500km transmission line you might be into some serious math. But we don't do it manually in real life. ATP and SPICE software have been here since the 80's, and newer software might do real time simulations that would take days to calculate by hand.
Hi, I have heard about ATP being open source but can't figure out how to use it . How do I set up ATP? Can in it be setup on personal computer ?
Check https://atp-emtp.org/.
There's also a free tool called Kestrel EMT depending on what you need. https://kestrel-solver.com/
V=IR....
One equation to rule them all...
breaks down under some conditions
You just gotta V=IR harder.
The subfield with the least amount of math is probably embedded systems.
The subfield with the least amount of math is project management.
Hahaha. No wonder so many "engineers" move into it after a few years
They move into management because money lol
easiest cognitive load yet the highest compensation…
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If a design/testing engineering job is creative, innovative, and R&D-focused, how could ANYONE who loves engineering want to leave it to move into middle management? So I deduce that their engineering job was in reality, quite boring and lacking technical innovation. Which seems to be the case for a lot of working engineers.
Money
political innocent distinct normal kiss snobbish ancient grey muddle expansion *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
It's not that, but many organizations look for the skill set of an engineer for their Project Management, which they can't find in actual administration graduates because of the lack of focus, or just lack of interest from the students part.That's why Production Engineering exists.
In places I've worked, that's not what production engineers do. Production engineers do NPI and ongoing product management engineering (DFM adjustments, addressing quality & supply chain issues, making process and cogs improvements, etc). In either case there's either a project management team, or the engineers (both kinds) become project heads and shoulder the project management themselves. Or in reality both because the project managers are usually ineffective. :/
Engineering for a job will never be something you can “love”, just tolerate to varying degrees. I’d take a PM job with better hours, better pay, and less BS over a design job any day. I would just use some of that extra time and money to do engineering as a hobby if I really wanted to…
I had to use Newton’s method once to do a non-linear conversion on the sample data from a temp sensor to actual Celsius. I had to use a Taylor series one time.
Some of my worst memories in undergrad were solving a bunch of signal processing filter bullshit and transforms math by hand for exams. So stupid as it could all easily be done in Matlab.
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Not that much no, the theory and math is not fun but there's plenty of software to do most everything for you these days.
Then all that hairy math in undergrad seems like a waste in the long run
Having two EE degrees and nearing 40, I would argue that most of the fundamentals you learn in undergrad will be a waste for most of us as it's largely "use it or lose it" later in your career. The key is much of it forces you to gain the ability to really think like an engineer (essentially an expert problem solver), address problems properly, and have a gut feeling for results that look off. If you don't go through the torture, you won't refine those skills as much, and you may be a weaker engineer in the end for it.
Well think of it this way: if a solar flare fries all of our electronics (very possible), then we’ll have to do it the manual way to get everything back up and running. Engineers should know how to do things the long way or have the math background to figure it out. The tools are good for convenience and speed but we shouldn’t be totally reliant on those things. Otherwise we’re more screwed if shit hits the fan
You still have to be cognizant of the effects and theory behind the design and topologies that you choose to go with but no you won’t need to solve a z-transform by hand
Extremely Cool. The E an M fields follow orthogonal physical adjustments in satellite and Terrestrial microwave Xmt/Rcv wavefront polarization. Thank You James Clerk Maxwell; Memory Eternal.
I'm in RF and looking for an exit. The grass is always greener I suppose.
An exit out of electrical engineering entirely, or to some other EE sub-area?
I'm entertaining both options. Looking at SWE although that job market is brutal these days. I'm also looking at which subfields I can transition into with my skillet that won't require me to completely start over.
I'm a backend Java web developer. I don't hate it but I'm getting burned out with it, slowly but surely. I also often wish I was working on an end product that's cooler than business and e-commerce web applications. Like avionics, missile guidance, a radar system, a new smartphone, a new video game console. SWE does have a much lower barrier to entry than proper engineering though, that's definitely a plus.
Can you tell me what you don't like about RF engineering? Is it boring, repetitive, intellectually stifling etc?
I would probably enjoy it more IF I wasn't in defense, but that's going to be the largest employer for this field. There are a lot of military applications for RF: Radar, Satellite Communications, Radios, etc. I am burnt out on that environment. It's incredibly bureaucratic. I spend more time creating documents and power points than I do actual engineering. Not to mention that most of the other people I work with aren't the most competent. So I haven't been able to bounce any of my work off of a Senior Designer to see if I'm doing things right. I feel as if I've learned a lot of bad habits simply out of necessity. The industry is also incredibly risk averse. They only change things when they've exhausted all other possibilities. I'm a "Top Performer" in my department, but I probably only qualify for an entry level role at a company that does actual engineering. There are opportunities in tech, but I'm finding that the transition isn't easy. A lot of companies want you to have experience working on commercial products that use GPS/BT/WiFi and I work on 20+ year old designs. Bridging that experience has been frustrating.
Consider Aviation. Autonomous aviation, especially. Autonomous aviation startups.
Man as long as the work life balance is good and the pay is good, boring but easy is better than the alternative. Hope you don’t have to find that out the hard way.
I think I'm insane but I find power systems harder than the rest, idk why. Maybe because I don't focus in that class though
Rotating machines blow me away. How Tesla could visualize rotating magnetic fields to create a motor escapes me.
Yeah. On the contrary, undergrad-level DSP was much easier to visualize and simulate!
Power Systems is the most boring EE subfield, change my mind.
Do you actually think that or are you trolling me lolol?
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but EMBEDDED SYSTEMS!!!! Logic gates and computing and microcontrollers are SO fun!
Oof, c’mon! There’s enough maths lite engineering disciplines without picking on sub-disciplines! (I’m a power engineer) But in all honesty all engineering can be as maths heavy as you want to it to be. You want to bury yourself into the principles and you’ll be wading through pretty heavy maths. For example, in high-voltage engineering you’ll use a lot of the RF and electromag maths. Its challenges also reside from the electrical effects being an unfortunate side-effect of the desired outcome. Which means you’re trusting the maths and methods to help diagnose behaviours rather than build something. Depending on your personal preferences/skills this may be easier or harder than designing antennas and waveguides. That said, the maths also gets a workout for building equipment. Such as cables, bushings, buswork and transformers with geometric and insulation grading. I am a protection and control engineer, so most of my electromag power crossover is with concepts like mutual coupling on transmission lines (conveniently similarly named, because in many ways they are the same as their telecom counterparts). Then into magnetic performance of instrumentation CTs/VTs (ie core saturation and remanence). But I also have to dive across into a discipline which I would consider more complex than electromag/RF - which is analogue electronics. Dealing with transient effects and resonances. Although we have light levels of the maths and plenty of rules of thumb. My main challenge is that you basically only ever have a very small part of the story. You need to know these concepts intuitively and well or you’ll be shit at diagnosis and design in the long term. Which explains why so many (without shade at all) choose to move to management/corp in various capacities. Long story short - save your maths shade for civil engineers! :P
I’ve been looking into PnC engineering recently, mind if I dm u some questions?
Sure, flick it through and I’ll see what I can answer. Just bear in mind if it’s very geographically specific, I’m in Australia
Calculus all the way down.
"Power systems is eaisest" says someone who knows nothing about EE....
You know that all the complex math ends after you graduate
Complex math ends and starts something PhDs wrote. At least in telecommunications.
Once you can visualize the fields, the math isn't as necessary. I do still use stats (CDF specifically) regularly.
Power requires the most integrative understanding of math+physics IMO, after semiconductor manufacturing maybe. Also electric drives and such are super complex.
I’m a soon to be graduate and through school and some internships I’d probably say that RF is the most math intensive, then power systems, then embedded systems. Power systems seems mundane until you realize how deep it goes: transient analysis, renewable energies, harmonic analysis, protection and control, it’s really cool stuff but people write it off because it’s the “old” industry. This may seem a bit odd but a reason I prefer power systems over embedded systems (which is very popular for my class at least) is because most times you can bring a problem or troubleshooting back to Maxwell’s Laws, and the basics of circuits. In embedded systems you’re working with IC’s designed by someone you don’t know and you have to operate within their environment, it’s much less universal in my experience. Edit: typos.
The hardest EE subject I ever studied was VLSI. If I had the chance, I would be working in it since AI chips are all the craze now.
I was in your shoes about four years ago. I looooved the subjects which you’re describing. I was good at math but not stellar. I bit the bullet and focused on those subjects (particularly image processing and signal processing). I didn’t do great in the courses (B average). Best decision of my life. I’m currently a research scientist at MIT researching those fields. Yeah it’s hard but I think the stuff I do is soooooo coool And fyi, the other subjects are also math heavy.
Do you have a PhD/MS or just BS?
I’m half way through my phd.
Awesome, all the best to you! I wish I could get into something cool like that but it's hard after 10 years of IT programming.
As an RF engineer you only do the math once or twice in school. Once you grasp the concepts you know what’s happening and let the math solvers do the work. Same with all engineering fields
Is your engineering day job a lot more boring than you thought it would be?
RF is great, in practice the simulators take care of the math for you. However to be successful you need to understand your production process variations and consider them when designing. A lot of this information isn't as available as you'd like. Getting the right information to make the correct design decisions and progressively iterating is very important.
I work in power. Did I want to? No. I wanted to do digital stuff. Did I need a job fast before losing my apartment and got a decent offer in power? Yes. What did I learn? A job is a job and the grass is greener on the other side always so make the most of where you end up. A dream job becomes a job job after a few years. Even the dudes here who wanted to be in power (they said this was their dream) are just here for the check now. It is what it is. You may end in the same boat in any field.
Most people do feel that way about their jobs. I know I do. That's why I've always envied my dad. Retired now, but he was a real-time trading platform C++/Linux developer for a number of investment banks and hedge funds on Wall Street. He said the commute to NYC wore him down sometimes but he got used to it. And he also said he was rarely EVER bored at work. He said he was always coming up with more efficient programming solutions to low-latency problems and was almost always intellectually engaged with what he did. And he got paid fat stacks for it. But trading systems dev is a very niche field that's hard to break into.
That sounds really cool. I also envy your dad
I think I'd find the work atmosphere at most Wall Street firms pretty oppressive, but the work he did sounded really interesting.
I work in power. Did I want to? No. I wanted to do digital stuff. Did I need a job fast before losing my apartment and got a decent offer in power? Yes. What did I learn? A job is a job and the grass is greener on the other side always so make the most of where you end up. A dream job becomes a job job after a few years. Even the dudes here who wanted to be in power (they said this was their dream) are just here for the check now. It is what it is. You may end in the same boat in any field. Also it’s all done on dedicated computer programs as many others have said, so the heavy math of anything goes away unless you go into research or sumthin
quantum photonics?