Electrical Engineering - Do you need a College Degree?
Yes, you need a college degree, but no you don’t. Let me make sense of this here.
Almost any electrical or computer engineering job will require at least a 4-year degree from an accredited schooling or university. Some companies have a minimum GPA requirement if you are applying straight out of college. Most are 3.0 / 4.0 depending on the job or internship. A higher GPA is always better to get your foot in the door, but most important to have is what can you actually do? Internships can help, so be sure to show up at the career fair with a resume + portfolio in hand trying to get that summer internship or co-op at the end of your sophomore year or end of junior year. Take non-paid or paid internships, whatever chance you can get at hands-on experience. This experience on a resume is extremely valuable to the employer because it qualifies as work experience, but it also speaks wave lengths at some type of work you have had in an electrical engineering type setting. Don’t lie on your resume and/or your experience or put something down that you don’t know.
“Worked at XYZ company over the summer, worked on antenna engineering….”
You can expect your interview at the next company your applying for to be…
“So I see you worked at XYZ in their Antenna’s group. So here is a smith chart...” (be ready for the surprise technical interview!)
So I have spoken a little about getting an internship. Internships can be great work experience for a resume, but if you want to be set apart from your electrical engineering peers, consider creating projects of your own that will be fun to learn about and that you will enjoy.
Consider the maker portfolio acceptance videos below from MIT applicants. From my viewpoint, these soon to be students are not going to have a problem getting a job. One because they got accepted into MIT. Two, and most importantly, they can apply the theory and have fun with it.
You can’t tell me that Space X isn’t sending full-time offers to these seniors in high-school. Kidding, they peeps are going to graduate from MIT with a 4 year degree first because it seems every company needs to see your 4-year paper. Also, its nice to have that you graduated from somewhere for any job.
You can have a 4.0 / 4.0 GPA…
You can have a master’s degree in electronics...
You can have 3 internships…
But if you can weld and create your own car, pfff, you’re hired. (Probably should start your own company).
The point that I am trying to drive home is that you should totally work hard in college and try to get that summer internship. If getting a job is difficult, just know that you can learn and create just about anything if you put time into it. You have Google at your fingertips and today ChatGPT in order to learn almost anything there is about electrical engineering. Consider some well-known Youtubers that could teach you a thing or two (and have taught me).
There is a lot of theory in electrical engineering with sines and cosines, 3-D electromagnetic vectors, and convolution mathematical equations, but the game of electrical engineering is not what you know from a theoretical perspective, but what can you apply to the real world.
You can do all the math on a whiteboard proving your power supply design. I urge you, take it to the lab, put your project on the oscilloscope! Figure out why your board is catching on fire or why your capacitor blew up (please check the polarity next time). Life in the lab makes a solid engineer. Take it from me, and engineer myself who at first, couldn’t understand what a “trigger” was on an oscilloscope.
