I went into college wanting to be an engineer because I wanted to build things. Finally in my sophomore year I had taken enough prerequisites to be able to take introductory engineering courses. I wasn’t interested in chemistry or building structures that would fall on people so at my school that left a choice between mechanical engineering and electrical engineering (EE). I had always assumed I would be a mechanical engineer but I signed up for the EE intro course so as not to put all my eggs into one basket.
It turns out the introductory mechanical engineering course at my school was one of the most lackluster courses I experienced in my four years of college. The teacher was always understandable and clear, but the material was dull and it seems like he sucked the excitement out of the room when he taught. I remember that on parent’s weekend, my mother, much to her chagrin, actually fell asleep in this class; an otherwise unthinkable act by my mother but totally understandable in this context. The first month of the class covered statics and I think I learned almost nothing in that first month that I didn’t learn in high school physics. To summarize: if an object doesn’t have a net force acting on it in any of the x, y, or z directions and it doesn’t have a force acting on it in a way to cause it to rotate, then it is standing still. If I recall correctly, the remainder of the course was focused on utilizing different frames of reference (what happens if the observer is moving in various ways). To this day, I can merely guess that the analysis techniques taught in this class were somehow integral to every other class that I would have taken as a mechanical engineer. But I’m not really sure.
On the other hand, the introductory electrical engineering sequence had been recently revamped and was fantastic and very interesting. It covered a wide array of topics but in particular gave us time to learn to think of the world in terms of frequency, like an electrical engineer, instead of time. I remember understanding how multiple signals could be transmitted at the same time and still be understood by the receiver. I remember the explanation of how computers using old school Ethernet, which was a shared medium, avoided repeated packet collisions. And also why old coax based Ethernet required you to plug a physical device into unused sockets; the device at the end ensured there was “impedance matching” so that the wire would appear infinite and the signal wouldn’t reflect back off the end of the line. The ideas behind those examples came up again in later courses and made those later courses seem more relevant. And while we didn’t learn everything about those topics deeply, we started along the path of thinking about problems like an electrical engineer and we understood why they were important.
Needless to say, I became an electrical engineer instead of a mechanical engineer. I don’t remember the mechanical engineering class as one of the great frustrating or hard classes of my academic career; it was just boring and pointless and I walked away from mechanical engineering without even thinking about it. This seems strange for someone who is very visual and likes to touch and feel the things she makes.
At the time, I remember thinking that the mechanical engineering class was the worst stereotype of what engineering could be: just a meaningless morass of equations. But thinking back, there was just zero effort put into explaining why anything we were studying mattered. The EE class could have turned out the same. We could have talked about sine and cosine and i vs j and a lot of about Euler’s formula all without context and it would have looked identical to the mechanical engineering class. But we didn’t. The point of the class was to get us to start thinking like electrical engineers and to act as the motivation for the rest of our undergraduate EE careers.