“I’m a Watt?”
If you clicked only for the Electrical pun and nothing else, welcome to the first of many! Personally, I’m not a Watt like Harry is, though; I’m Lanna, a second year in EEE, here to bring a little bit more light to the more dark aspects of Electrical Engineering that I know many future students may dread for.
Most of my predecessors may have already walked you all by the hand through some of the challenging things to understand when it comes to undertaking this Specialization (on the subject of Internships check One Thousand and One Applications (by Fraser McDowell), and on the subject of why we should care about EEE, check out anything from Sasha, the 2023 blogger for EEE! There are so many more I will link too), so the main take-away that you will see from these posts are more personal touches of my impressions and understanding for this Semester as the time goes on. There will be informative posts but take them with a grain of salt; I’m never the greatest at conveying information.
I’ll be honest… EEE was the path of least Resistance
When it came to choosing my specialisation, the first thing I checked was the GPA requirements; they tell you a lot about how high in demand the specialisation will be among the previous years. My entire thought process came to me in the holy grail that is Ohm’s Law (or a poor rendition of it): Resistance as the GPA, Current as my Motivation, and Voltage as my anxiety among Peers who wanted it; the last one is a mix of being terrified of competitive ideas and a people pleaser to let others take what they wanted.
The lower the resistance, the more current flows and the voltage decreases, practically leaving an ideal wire! That was initially how my decision was made…But the main reason I took EEE was because of he-who-you-all-know (have to keep the Harry Potter theme going somehow). I need not explain any further how.
And also a little Nepotism because my father graduated in Electronics Engineering… This one is my excuse. I actually did enjoy ELECTENG101 out of everything they offered in the first year and I wanted to know more beyond the simple, ideal world! I’m happy that the first Semester blew away my expectations (both good and bad, in a way).
“Curiosity Killed the Cat…
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that EEE was the one I would grow to appreciate the deeper I dove into the second year.
First semester rolled around for 2024 and my curiosity for the semester has driven me deeper into a rabbit hole:
- The projects that were introduced to all in SOFTENG 281 was something unexpected; Java was a hard language for sure, and I already knew that there were a lot of different ways to get the same result for a given purpose (shoutout to ENGGEN 131 for getting me here!). But the vast number of paths you can take to get those results were practically endless thanks to the wonderful and passionate lecturers!
- ELECTENG 291, the one I was looking forward to the most, had me going like a sinusoidal wave; a never-ending wave of high euphoria for solving a hard problem and low trough of running into the hard concepts. It was only by the saving grace in the form of he-who-I-will-not-name and the presence of the labs sprinkled throughout the semester that I not only know some of the most intricate and bizarrely fascinating formulas in the Electrical world, but I also now understand some of the fascinating secrets they hide to understanding the Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering (roll the credits!).
- COMPSYS 201 took me back a little bit to ELECTENG 101 when we learned about numbering systems and Boolean Algebra… I discovered that the similarities never ended there. Though it leaned to more of the programming side (never my strong suit), it was immensely fascinating how computers were all designed in this course; from simple logic gates (if you remember ELECTENG 101 wink wink), to the microcontrollers which on their own can be their own computers!
- ENGGEN 211 is definitely the most mind-bending out of the courses I have taken so far… That may be because I already forgot which topics were the most interesting to navigate through while also fighting off my little miscalculation habits (triple check your working, folks!)! Though I am the more casual for the math topics, I was nevertheless fascinated by how these concepts basically shaped the way physics can be observed and, subsequently, how Electrical is seen!
… but satisfaction brought it back”
If you told me that EEE would become my favourite subject… actually, I would believe you; ELECTENG101 sparked it through that-one’s enthusiasm for it and my immense curiosity for it. The first semester this year only gave me a taste for what was to come for the rest of my years here.
There isn’t much to say in terms of advice, but I think the biggest one is that you can ask for help! It’s something that a lot of people may advise but I swear that even the dumbest questions can be taken as a lesson for any Electrical student! There are plenty of lecturers and TAs who are happy to answer questions; they also had to go through some of the learning curves when it came to the subjects you will take on this journey. Doing it with friends will make it all the more bearable too!
To end this first post off, here’s a quick little animation I made of my brain throughout Semester 1… even though I labelled it as 291… ignore that… Point is doing it made me realise that this is only the beginning of my journey. I am going to have to push harder than ever if it meant fully understanding what I want to do with this wealth of knowledge. Join me and my crazy mind about to go through the same thing as this sinusoidal wave!