Originally posted by: AndRewPearson
Would it be better to go over just pre - calculus and trigonometry or to go over real calculus? I took A.P. B.C. Calculus this year, so should I just go over Calculus? If so, what kind of Calculus? Is there any specific concentration? Thank you.
You need to be familiar with real calculus if you are going to a real university. One of the most important parts of being an EE, or any kind of engineer, is developing models that describe the physical world. Once you have a model, you can make predictions about how something would behave in the real world without actually building and observing it. To develop, or even to learn, a model that involves rates of change, you need calculus.
The progression of learning calculus in most engineering universities is structured like this:
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Calculus I: Introduction to limits, derivatives, integrals, techniques for finding minimum/maximum, optimizations, etc.
Calculus II: Taylor Polynomials, Inifinite Series, Convergence tests, L'hopitals Rule, Integration by partial fractions, Integration by Trignometric Identities.
Linear Algebra: Matrix Operations, Guassian Elimination, Eigen Value tests.
CalculusIII: Integrals and Derviatives in Multiple Dimensions, Guass's Law, Line Integrals, Surface Integrals, Gradients, Optimization in multidimension.
Differential Equations: Seperation of Variables, Integrating Factors, Approximation Methods,First Second and Third Order Differential Equations, Using Eigen Vectors to solve systems of differential equations.
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Most real engineering courses will not be available until after you have completed all of these.
My advice would be to forget about jumping into real EE material for now and concentrate on getting through your prerequisite classes. It will take you about 40 hours (about a year to a year and a half) before you are able to learn any substantial amount of EE material.
Between now and then you can decide what kind of EE you want to focus on. EE can be divided into the following categories.
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Computer Engineering
Digital Signal Processing
Electrical Power
Electromagnetics
Electronic Device Design
Microsystems
Optics and Photonics
Systems and Controls
Telecommunications
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Electrical Power, Electromagnetics, and Systems and Controls are the traditional EE fields. They deal mainly with the classical physics view of Electricity and Magnetism.
-If you are interested in this field, pay attention in your multidimensional calc class and
take a lot of E&M physics courses.
Computer Engineering deals with computer archetitecture and digital logic.
- If you are interested in this field, take an intro to digital logic course and make sure
you know at least the basics of programming.
Electronic Device Design and Microsystems deal with the actual devices (transistors) that are used in modern digital and analog systems. Microsystems describes digital logic at the transistor level. Electronic Device Design is concerned with using transistors to design filters, amplifiers, current sources, diodes, etc...
-If you are inetersted in either of these fields, you need a strong background in solid
state physics.
Digital Signal Processing is concerned with sampling analog signals, processing them with digital systems, and creating new analog signals.
-Because this field deals with signal conversions between the time and frequency domain
you need to be familiar with the Fourier and Z Transforms as well as be comfortable
working with the complex exponential representation of periodic functions.
I am not familiar with the exact details of the other areas but you can probably find information on them with a simple google search if you are interested.