Re: Need advice: want to enter the Embedded field


Isaac Bosompem wrote:

Do you guys actually take the students with the highest marks? Or is it
simply a myth that has been circulating amongst my peers?

Non-engineering managers may use GPAs to filter prospects. HR staff who
have been asked to select five top-tier candidates from a pool might do
the same. So it doesn't /hurt/ to have high marks. But you will not
automatically see doors opened on the basis of a few numbers.

These two quotes (related to, though not 100% on-topic for your
question) might be of interest:

#1:

"Note that there is a surprisingly wide variation in coursework offered
or required by BSEE degree programs at different colleges. In
particular, quite a few schools are much heavier on computer science
than the simulated curriculum I provided above. Degrees that mandate a
large amount of computer science (more than eight credits or
thereabouts) tend to be hybrid qualifications with names like
"Bachelor of Science in Computer and Electronic Engineering".
People who take these sorts of degrees might have a very slight head
start (versus holders of standard BSEEs) working on the firmware in
relatively high-end embedded systems. Regular BSEE holders might be
very slightly advantaged in dealing with fine-tuned systems that have
significant hardware issues to be solved, and perhaps a lot of
hand-massaged time-critical assembly language to tweak1.

This possible difference is, however, really only going to affect your
first job when you get out of school2. After a year or two in the
workforce, your useful and marketable skillset will be determined
almost exclusively by the field in which you work unless you make a
determined and objectively demonstrable effort at self-improvement (for
example by publishing technical articles) in some other field. There
are two major reasons for this. Firstly, and most importantly, once you
start working in a "real" field, your learning and experience will
obviously be focused into that field. You'll find that the skills you
exercise in the pursuit of your day job will improve exponentially over
the baseline competence level you learned in school. Skills that you
aren't using will inevitably atrophy. (This will to some degree be
offset by the fact that your general problem-solving abilities will
increase dramatically).

Secondly, while your attention is focused on your field of choice, not
only is your memory of those general college courses fading, but the
practical state of the art in those other topics is moving ahead
without you. For example, if you did any college-level computer science
in the 1990s, you probably learned Pascal. If you then went away and
took a ten-year sabbatical working on a farm, you'd have come back to
the engineering workforce to find Pascal almost dead and buried3, even
as a teaching language. This is perhaps a silly example, but it should
illustrate to you that if you spend any significant time - two or
three years at most - away from an engineering topic, you'll have to
put in an appreciable effort to re-climb the learning curve if you come
back to that topic."

1 - Note that I'm not considering here whether a prospective employer
will see a difference between the two qualifications.

2 - Of course, it can affect your postgraduate study path, but I'm
assuming you thought about that when you were selecting undergraduate
coursework.

3 - No hate mail, please. I'm well aware that Delphi still exists, for
example. However, Pascal's primary purpose was as a teaching language
- in which role it has been almost completely overthrown, mostly by
Java."


#2:

"One parenthetical note about postgraduate study: The utility of higher
education with respect to landing a good position is not merely
asymptotic; it actually has a turning point. It's a good thing to have
a bachelor's degree. It's a great thing to have a master's degree.
Technical certificates, industry-specific qualifications and other
addenda are fine (although not usually very valuable by themselves).
However, it can actually be slightly harder to get practical
engineering jobs if you have a Ph.D - even to the point where some
people intentionally leave them off their resume. The stated reasons
for this odd prejudice vary, but they include pay scale requirements
(Ph.Ds are expensive), perceptions about Ph.D holders being best suited
for pure research and development positions, and the belief that Ph.Ds
are "professional students"."

.

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