Re: Which university produces good analog EEs?

"RST Engineering (jw)" <jim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:13fl1h7nsr6uu93@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Odds are you will get silence or "Oh, that club folded years ago" as the
answer. If you actually find a working club, talk to the faculty advisor
and ask how many students are in the club. If there are a dozen or more,
you've at least found yourself a prospective school.

That would rule out Oregon State... the typical number of people in the club
varied between 0 and 10, always dwindling as the year progressed. Part of it
might have been a lack of "advertising," though -- the first time I found
their web page and contacted one of the professors involved, the number had
been near-zero for a couple of years. We eventually started to get a little
more proactive in letting people know we existed; see, e.g.,
http://media.barometer.orst.edu/media/storage/paper854/news/2005/02/01/News/Amateur.Radio.Club.Members.ham.It.Up-2301516.shtml.
It's started to dwindle again though -- all the guys mentioned in that article
have since graduated. One bright spot is that one of the newer (younger)
professors that OSU recruited from Intel (yeah, a digital guy, but oh well
:-) ) has become interested and mentions the club in his beginning EE classes.

I think Oregon State turns out some decent chip designers (while I was there I
knew one guy who it was already clear was going to go far), but like most
universities they don't really have much emphasis on board-level analog design
specifically.

TekBots (http://www.tekbots.org/) have been quite popular, although they were
struggling with how to move them out of being heavy on the
microcontroller/programmable logic emphasis and into somewhat more challenging
areas, such as control systems and wireless links/communication systems (where
you're designing, e.g., the radio and the error-correction protocols yourself,
not just using someone's off-the-shelf wireless module, which is already quite
common).

---Joel


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