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If you had enrolled in electrical engineering then by half way through second semester of first year you probably would have been having lots and lots of light
by jwhite 15y ago
If you had enrolled in electrical engineering then by half way through second semester of first year you probably would have been having lots and lots of light bulb moments. Complex numbers and fourier series and transforms rapidly become like oxygen for EEs. Essential but consumed almost without noticing.
You suffered from the university's lack of bandwidth -- only so many lecturers, only so many lecture theatres, many other competing classes. They try to find efficiencies where they can -- e.g. by giving all of the engineering departments a common mathematics curriculum.
That curriculum is almost certainly driven by the needs of the EEs and ME/CivE's much more than chem and software, and I'd guess software engineering is looked at is if there's really no maths required. After all, software engineers just program and write documents, don't they? The truth is of course that there is just as much scope for maths, if not more, in a software engineering or computer science course, it's just a whole other type of maths that's needed.
- luke_s 15y agoHmmm ... It is entirely possible that the EE's went straight out of that maths tutorial and into an electronics class that used complex numbers for a practical application. To be honest all us software engineers understood that we didn't make up the majority of maths students. I would have been perfectly happy to hear about how I could have used complex numbers to design circuits or build bridges. But I guess the maths classes were designed to provide the pure theoretical foundations upon which other, more subject specific classes would build. It just so happens that for software engineering there were no subject specific classes which made use of the maths.