The first time I sat down in my high school physics class and was handed a box with a breadboard, a few resistors, a battery, and an LED, I thought to myself, “I want to be an electrical engineer because I love building circuits.” At the time, my concept of what an electrical engineer does included the generic “building phones” and also making LEDs light up using a battery and a 50 ohm resistor. Little did I know how wrong I was about what being an electrical engineer meant.
High school me had no idea the vast possibilities that come along with an engineering degree. I knew electrical engineers designed circuits, which I learned at a deeper level while taking EE 202 Linear Circuits, but I had no idea about so many other topics.
I have learned about signal and image processing through classes such as EE 301 Linear Systems and EE 141 Linear Algebra. I have learned how to use MATLAB to detect edges in an image or process an audio signal and break it into its frequency components. An example of this is a lab in which we identified the edges in an image of an adorable fox.
An entirely different side of electrical engineering that I have learned about, and that high school me had no idea existed, is electromagnetism and radio frequency (RF) engineering. In EE 370 Electromagnetism for Engineering Systems, I have performed labs using a device called a VNA, or a vector network analyzer. This device allows us to analyze circuits, transmission lines, or antennas at high frequencies. These labs have been some of my favorite hands-on labs! The VNA measuring a pulse traveling through a transmission line is shown in the photo below. We can use this to determine characteristics of the component connected to the device at high frequencies.
High school me would’ve been shocked at just how many applications of electrical engineering there are and how many incredible things existed that I had no idea about until I started my degree.
