Electrical Engineering is a very broad major that encompasses a lot of sub disciplines within the umbrella of Electrical Engineering
There are fields like RF which is basically wireless communications or you could work on satellite communications for defense purposes
So the signal cannot be jammed by an enemy
There's electronics where you could design the circuit boards within computers or phones
Or the control systems within autonomous vehicles or the circuitry and a prosthetic arm
There's power wheel you'd work with high voltage systems and delivering or generating
lots of electric power
That could include working at a power plant working with solar panels or something like electric motors and regenerative
Braking where like in certain electric vehicles when you take your foot off the accelerator
the motor turns into a
Generator due to changing speeds of certain components within the system and then the kinetic energy of the wheels is used to generate
electricity that can be stored for later use
There's controls where you work on things that have some sort of electrical feedback like propulsion systems in various
Aircrafts all the way to your cruise control where your speed is monitored then depending on what it receives the system turns the wheels faster
Or slower accordingly which then affects your speed which is then fed back into the system and this control loop continues
There's instrumentation which deals with designing sensors and equipment to measure physical quantities
Like pressure temperature motion position and so on you can design motion detection sensors for a security system
GPS for aircrafts or all the sensors in your car that to analyze fluid levels temperatures battery voltage anti-skid braking
system or more advanced systems for driverless cars
these types of electrical engineers often work with
Controls engineers because after all a controls engineer could design a great system to control the speed of an aircraft
Let's say but if all the sensors cannot accurately determine the speed air pressure and so on the control system is basically no good
There are many of these fields for the last one. I'll explain the signal processing
This is simply about the manipulation and analysis of signals signals being essentially functions that convey some sort of information
Maybe you have this sinusoidal voltage at some frequency and then a sensor in the system causes an increase in the frequency and that frequency
Change is related to the temperature that the sensor is picking up
Now that changing voltage or signal it contains information about the temperature in the room, though
We could convert to a text on a screen. Let's say but when it comes to signals in general
you might have to amplify them like for an earpiece or
Filter them where there's background noise and much more and this can apply to radio signals cell phone signals radar missile guidance
Systems speech image or video processing that all involve signals that need manipulation
There's GPS signals noise cancelling headphones. And of course way more
Okay. Now I've all right throw a lot at you to encompass a lot of what you can do as an electrical engineer and as
You can see it's very broad
It's not just one thing as in to people who majored in electrical engineering
as with many other engineering disciplines could be in two totally different fields or careers and have very little knowledge about each other's work and
This is also not about being an electrician by the way
Which is a common misconception
Electrical Engineering is not where you go in and install or repair electrical systems in people's houses or in offices and so on
but if you're debating picking this as a major all the fields
I discussed could seem like a lot and you may be thinking wait. What does an electrical engineering major look like?
And what can I expect and that's will go into now?
While all schools are a little different a typical electrical engineering curriculum consists of a few circuit analysis classes to just get you started
digital design a Power Engineering class
Continuous-time signals and discrete-time signals, which will get you started with analog and digital signal processing respectively
You'll think of controls class a communications class, which will learn the basics of FM and AM radio a basic electronics class
Which likely is followed by analog and digital electronics some electromagnetism courses which are basically physics classes and a microprocessor class
There are some others you'll take and this doesn't cover the math or physics
Classes that you'll see but these are the big major classes to expect an undergrad
Don't worry about what they are for now, but just know this is pretty typical
Now see how regardless of who you are. You'll take some classes on most of those sub disciplines
I mentioned earlier you got your power class
you got some signals classes wireless communications controls and so on as
An undergrad you get exposure to a lot of foundations of Electrical Engineering and you become well-rounded
But you don't become an expert in really any field
That's where masters and PhDs come in or just simply working in a field for many years
Of course, you will be taking electives in the subfields. You're most interested in though towards the end of college
So you will gain a little more mastery in those classes which diversify as you and your resume from others
But it's not the bulk of your curriculum
but now let's go through these a little the first one the circuit analysis classes now if you've taken physics classes in high school
Maybe you've seen the basics of resistors capacitors and inductors
And you're going to learn how to find the voltage and current in circuits that contain these three
components first starting off with just resistors though in
The real world circuits are normally extremely complicated and engineers usually use software and simulations to analyze the circuit
but in school
You gotta learn the basics of voltage and current in a circuit for those who may be unfamiliar if you imagine a network of pipes
You could use a pump that creates a pressure difference and causes water to flow around and through all the pipes
If the pipes are skinny, let's say it'd be harder for water to flow through them
And if they're thicker that of course would be easier
Well in a circuit the voltage
From maybe a battery is like the pressure difference from the pump
The current or electron flow is like the water and the resistors are like the pipes
High resistance is like a skinny pipe harder for water or the current to go through your electronics work for many reasons
But mainly it's because electrons are flowing through the device in school
We learned techniques to find the voltage difference across various resistors. Just like there'd be some pressure difference across each individual pipe
Circuits classes are a lot of systems of equations just like you learned in school before but more variables usually instead of X&Y
it's usually V and I for voltage and current and
To begin all the circuits have a constant voltage as an input like a 9-volt battery. That is not changing
Then in the second level circuit analysis class you get into capacitors and inductors
You'll use those same certain analysis techniques and the voltage source will still be constant like a battery
But current and voltage in the circuit across those components change in an exponential way like charging up a capacitor to a max voltage in
Order to find that max value or the time it takes to charge up to let's say half the max value
You will use circuit techniques to find the resistance in the circuit and so on
Then you'd quickly move on to AC circuits or alternating current where the input voltage is no longer constant, but sinusoidal and changing over time
for these circuits
There's some more complexity added where a capacitor or inductor in a circuit with a resistor causes the voltage to change its amplitude
But also shifts it the capacitor or inductor can change the phase of the voltage within the circuit
the math behind this actually involves imaginary numbers that square root of negative one you learned in high school actually has a ton of
Applications and this is one and it's not because current or voltage are imaginary
But using imaginary numbers just makes the math work when it comes to changing the phase or theta offset in a cosine or sine function
Don't worry about all that now, but it is something you will learn
There's of course plenty more in the basic circuits classes, but let's move on to the signals classes
These are essentially math classes and will be one of the most math intensive electrical engineering classes. You'll take
Before this you've dealt with constant voltages and then sinusoidal voltages
But what about well everything else you would have a triangle wave a square wave or some really complicated and messy voltage
Which is what real-world signals can be like so what happens if you put those into a circuit
Well in this first signals class
You'll learn something called the Fourier series and Fourier transform something very important in physics engineering and applied math
This says that any function can be made up of a bunch of cosine. And/or sine functions added up often an infinite amount here
We can see just a plain square wave
but if you have a sine wave and add it to another and
Then another and you keep going picking sine waves to the right amplitude and frequency
It will approach that square wave in this class
You will use some calculus and some new math concepts to find those frequencies and amplitudes
Of the sine functions that make up some other function
So now if we put a square wave into the circuit and want to know what the voltage and current will look like we can
Mathematically model it like putting in a bunch of sinusoidal waves of different amplitudes and frequencies
Which you will already have under your belt, you'll learn lots of mathematical techniques to simplify this for you
Now two specific types of signals. You see here that kind of like sinusoidal but not really are AM and FM radio signals
Which brings us to your wireless communications course?
This class is not about physics
But just more of the math behind specifically AM and FM signals
if you look at a simple AM signal
You'll notice the amplitude oscillates up and down and if look at an FM signal the frequency oscillator throughout the wave
By making the signals look like this. It causes the frequencies to move up to some specific unique center frequency like
94.1 megahertz that the radio station transmits at this is what the station
94.1 fm is just that station transmitting at that specific frequency
Yes, it's more complicated. But that's the general idea
Without that manipulation you could not wirelessly send those signals for people to listen to in their cars
You'll learn why this has to be done and all the math behind that in this class
Then when you take your electromagnetism courses it will be pretty much all physics and involve a good amount of calculus
You'll see how when you have a changing current
it creates a magnetic field around it which then in turn creates an electric field around that and this continues in this propagates as an
Electromagnetic wave because it's electric and magnetic fields are coupled together
You'll learn a lot about what those waves do when they interact with objects
Like what if they hit some metal barrier or they encounter water how far could they penetrate if there was a receiver at some depth?
You'll also learn about transmission lines, which aren't probably what you think of the ones you learn in
This class are cables that handle very high frequency signals that oscillate back and forth very quickly
You cannot just put a very high frequency signal into a normal circuit
Issues come up simply due to the laws of physics and you'll learn about all that as well
Many of your other classes tell you about how to analyze signals and manipulate them various purposes
But this class really teaches you about the physics of the waves
So you can understand things like how our wireless signal will be affected as it travels through Earth's atmosphere
When we have to communicate with a satellite, for example
Then moving on in your electronics classes. You'll finally learn about the transistor
There are billions of these in your laptop and millions in your phone to make them work
there are lots of kinds of
Transistors but to simplify in a circuit the current often flows down here and of little flows in here and they combine and flow out
Here you'll learn more certain analysis techniques to analyze voltage and current in these circuits as always
But the thing is by changing this voltage on the transistor
You can control how much current flows through the transistor meaning. The transistor can essentially act as a switch
It can allow current to flow which is basically like the transistor being on I think shut off curtain flow
Which is it being off, of course?
This can create a high voltage like five bolts and change it to a low voltage like zero bolts
This is the binary or ones and zeros that are really under the hood of your computer
You will learn about making circuits that can switch quickly and efficiently in your digital electronics class
Analog electronics is more about using transistors to amplify a voltage, which is their other main application
Where amplification would of course be needed for music or hearing aids as an example?
Now there of course a few more classes, I won't go into as much detail on like in digital design
You'll learn about logic gates which take ones and zeros as inputs and output ones and zeros as well
the different gates output different things based on the inputs
Zooming into these is what digital electronics is where you see the circuits that convert the high voltages to low voltages or vice-versa
but in this class it's zoomed out looking at the ones and zeros and making circuits with these logic gates in the
Power class you'll analyze electric motors and generators new circuit analysis with those
You'll do labs where you work with much higher voltages than normal like over a hundred volts
You'll see how much power is dissipated and the resistor networks and so on
And the controls classes do mainly with systems that involve some sort of feedback
You'll look at things like stability because if you're constantly feeding information back into your system and something goes wrong
It could continuously be maybe amplifying some output which will lead to issues
You'll also see a lot of these graphs where you have some target output signal and in some cases that are will be
Overshoot and then the signal will settle back to that target after certain amount of time versus just slowly charging up
You'll mathematically find that overshoot how to minimize it or avoid it and more
Hopefully that gives you a good overview of the major but due to time I'm gonna stop there. However, this was my major
So if you want information on specific labs
You'll do from freshman to senior year of college
more specifics on the
concentrations their
Applications and previous senior projects what math classes you'll take and how my first job or internship was and so on they're all on this
Channel and I'll link some below
So if you're looking for even more depth to give those a look otherwise, hopefully this was a good foundation
Some schools, especially outside the US it seems like offer majors in electronics engineering or telecommunications engineering or some combination
But that would be for another video
This was just on a lie chicle engineering which encompasses lots of sub disciplines that you saw every school will be different
of course, you can expect most of what you saw here and
Lastly as you can see Electrical Engineering can get you jobs in the aerospace field
biomedical field that tech companies defense companies in the energy sector and robotics and so much more
But so can plenty of other engineering disciplines that are also broad
So if you're considering this major make sure this is the type of engineering you want to do
specifically when it comes to whatever field or sector you may want to go into
Otherwise they'll end there and if you liked the video don't forget to comment like and subscribe and I'll see you all next time
