My name's Robert McLeod. I'm the chair of
Electrical and Computer Engineering.
I ended up in electrical engineering after,
like, 15 minutes of thought because
electrical engineering is the field
where you can go anywhere and do anything.
Every single discipline in the world
these days has brains in it; has
electrical engineering, often is the
fundamental device which carries out the
function. If you work in a medical
field you need a doctor to tell you what
the device has to do, and you twenty
electrical engineers to make the device.
First experience I had as a lot to
engineer was a summer job as a freshman
where I was working on circuits that go
in the front of airplanes to tell the
pilot they're about to be smashed by a
missile, and I thought that was pretty
cool as a freshman to be able to work on
something like that. One of the most
exciting things about electrical
engineering is the incredible power of
the tool set that you will learn while
here. If you come into electrical
engineering, in your first freshman class -
I teach the first freshman class - you
will learn, day one, what's an electron;
what's a volt; what's current;
these itty-bitty little tools. On the last day of
the class - first class, freshman class -  you
will be demonstrating the circuit board
that you have built with the logic that
you have worked through and implemented,
that you have completely designed
yourself, you've built yourself, because all
of these tools are so powerful that in
one class you can conceive of what you
want to do, you can design it, you can
capture it in software, and you will have
taught inert matter to think. By the end of
your degree you will be doing your
capstone project, and capstone is the
pinnacle; it's the crown of the degree.
Everybody looks forward to it. It will
also kill you, but that's one of the
reasons they look forward to it. In there
you'll be doing things like a drone, uh, and
the whole control system for the drone so
it knows how to fly around, and maybe an
infrared camera that recognizes the
particular thermal pattern of your face;
incredible amounts of information
processing and vision, and
artificial intelligence, and control
systems, and embedded systems, and all
these things that maybe don't make sense
yet, but what if you finish the degree. So
electrical engineering is really, I think,
the ideal place to be if you get jazzed,
if you get excited about an idea and you
want to be able to bring it to reality; you
want to be able to make cool stuff. So to me
electrical engineering is exciting because
of this incredible breadth, uh, that you're
able to work in medicine, or space, or
aerospace, or lasers, my own field, uh, and
bring all of this technology that you
learn in the field and apply it
absolutely anything to change the world.
