Calling All Engineering Gurus: Share Your Advice

My first piece of advice is, keep learning!

I'm often asked by graduates how much of what I learnt at university do I use in my everyday job?  As an undergraduate, I learnt how to solve Schrödinger equation in 3 dimensions and used complex numbers, integrals, etc.  In my previous day job as a Field Applications Engineer, I only used Ohm's Law (V=IR), the potential divider equation (Vout = R1/(R1+R2)) and the exponential equation for charging a capacitor.  Now in product marketing I use Excel, but that's another story.  So what was the use of all that learning?

The point is that at university you are learning how to learn and many of these first principles you learn can be useful in other situations.

One of my favorite interview questions was to show a non-inverting op amp and ask what the voltage gain was.  It's fairly trivial but you would be surprised how many candidates were thrown by this.  Some remembered it is (1+R1/R2) - that's great you have a good memory.  Some just gave up, saying it was too long ago.  The candidates that interested me were those that said to themselves, I have a terrible memory of what I learnt in my first year undergraduate circuit theory course, but let me go back to first principles.  That node is a virtual earth, so I can write Vin as an expression of Vout; and gain is just Vout/Vin so with a bit of manipulation, I can get to the answer.

So, don't be afraid to break a difficult problem down into smaller more manageable chunks and then go back to first principles if you need to in order to arrive at a solution to a more complex problem, and, keep learning!

Thank you Martin!  Great advice to never stop learning!

I thought engineering was all about math, solving for x and y, and that you just had to be good with numbers. That wasn't the case for me. I thought I was good with numbers during my middle school years, so I assumed I would breeze through engineering. However, you need grit, resourcefulness, innovation, and the ability to apply concepts to actual engineering work. I remember our exams taking 4-5 hours for circuit analysis, but the main point of those exams was to show that very complex circuits could be simplified into their simplest forms. Your patience will be tested. I always remind myself of the quote 'Don't stop when you're tired, stop when you're done'.

Thanks for sharing Jules!  I'm making note of the quote, I love it!