Re: Engineering and math

At 18, I was diagnosted with severe dyscalcula, and dyslexia runs in my
familiy. My dad was a technician for a major defense contractor, and
the engineers ther did every thing they could starting when I was 12 or
so to make sure I would become a EE. Except check my math grades,
which were horrible. Well college comes along and NO way are you gonna
tell me I'm not gonna be a EE. Ruined my grades to the point they
wanted to kick me out. Was transfered to Education, have equvalent to a
masters in Social Studies.

Not that I hated teaching inner city kids, but...Guess what, when
the ed job fell out, I suddenly found myself back doing engineering.
Got promoted to Research Associate from Technician. I have 19 grad
students that depend on me for hardware and systems operation, and
keys to a 33 million dollar building including parts of it where the
sun dont shine. I have personal responsibility for more hardware then
I ever dreamed of, and while I need it from time to time, math is a
very small part of my day, except when I'm in the machine shop. 90% of
the circuit design gets done in my head with ohms law, the rest can be
modeled on paper, and the nasty 1% I set down with the boss or a
postdoc who love math. We make some pretty state of the art stuff, but
undertsnading how a RC charges or differntiates on a scope pretty much
does it, as well as assuming that life and just about everything in it
is a transmission line. I go home and play with waveguide at 10 ghz for
fun.

hang in there and learn the math, one of the things that clobbered me,
is I learned work arounds for what I needed to do when teh math hits
the fan. Oh, and if I'm debugging a filter design, I can usually
outguess the design software when I'm doing the curve fitting. Funny
thing, as you get older, the math starts to come to you as you need it.
I probably could go back and get my EE, but why, when the local IEEE
meets, I've been greeted as a near equal, once they find out I spent
years as a self employed field engineer.

Oh, and I do asics and asm on a daily basis. Fourier is a good friend.

hang in there,


Steve Roberts, BSED

.

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