Yes, applications to US Universities are down in EE and CS, but you'll find the biggest drop was in international student applications. Recent restrictions on international students have made the US a painful choice for higher education. I think this facet of the enrollment drop has been glossed over for the most part in the media. I was unaware until I spoke with some people in my EE departement's graduate admissions office. Granted, exporting jobs causes some of this, but let's take a look at all the causes.
The University of Texas at Austin Electrical Engineering Department has some good opportunities to study network technology. They have a Network Engineering Laboratory class which lets you build all the components of an enterprise network in-lab using Linux boxes and Cisco gear. There are also general networking classes and some good network protocol implementation classes that you can take from the CS department. Plus an EE degree gives you the foundations you need to work in almost any part of the networking industry.
Beyond the classroom the local chapter of the IEEE Communications Society provides lots of opportunity to do real network engineering. They have a widely recognized Honeypot effort, a project which seeks to replace department land-lines with VOIP phones, and a running series of lectures on network security. UT itself also administrates an impressive enterprise-class network to support the institution, and one of the guys in charge of it is a professor in the EE department.
Cisco also has an office in Austin which employs students as interns and part-time workers. I have a friend who got paid to, among other things, get his Cisco certification and configure test networks in their labs all summer long. There are lots of opportunities to learn about networking at UT, and it's a US top-ten engineering school.
First year Electrical Engineering students at the University of Texas at Austin take an Introduction to Computing class that starts with the transistor and uses a book written by Yale Patt, a prof at UT that often teaches the class. The class then teaches how transistors can be combined to make memory circuits, how you store data when represented by bits (2's complement, floating point, ASCII text). You then learn to write basic programs for a simplified computer in actual binary machine code and actually run the code on a simulator developed by students in the advanced computer architecture class. By the time you get to programming in assembly you think it's a relatively high level language and are glad to have it.
The successor to this class picks up where this one leaves off and teaches C from assembly up with an emphasis on what actually happens when you compile, allocate memory, and other things that a lot of students overlook. C++ is introduced in a later class, as well as algorithms, etc.
I personally think that I am a much better programmer for having learned in this manner. I took a senior level class in the UT Computer Science Department (which teaches assembly much later in the game) and found that far too many students, including some that were about to graduate, still didn't understand the fundamental differences between handling text data and binary, non-text data in higher level languages. Most still seem to think code executes in a white fluffy cloud and wonder why on earth 119 + 133 = -4 in their program and think '133' == 133.
I helped to install network cabling in the very school this simulator used to reside in a few years back...
Although I never saw it running, it appeared to be a well crafted simulator. I've seen the one at space camp as well, and it was surprisingly close. I'm fairly certain most of the buttons and switches were wired to something, with several computers running the simulator. The room it was in had just about enough room to get in and out of the cockpit, the rest covered in equipment. My first reaction was disbelief that a school actually had something this cool. I can't believe the school ditched this... perhaps the local Children's Museum would be interested in it as a sort of local, mini-space camp. Either way, I think it was awesome that someone went to all this trouble to build something like this for his school. Regardless of how he's selling it off on e-bay, this guy is authentic about his description of the way he built it and the way it was used in the past.
I had two 45 GB 75GXP's in a RAID 1 (knew I did that for some reason...) in an Antec SX1040B complete with the dedicated intake fan for the HD's. Even with extra cooling they still failed, and have both been subsequently RMA'd. On the first round I received a new unit from Thailand which seems to be ok, and on the second HD (within a month of the first) I received a larger hard drive with a different model number. Too bad I'm running RAID 1 and can't use the extra space.
These drives are definitely "Fired" in my books.
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Yes, applications to US Universities are down in EE and CS, but you'll find the biggest drop was in international student applications. Recent restrictions on international students have made the US a painful choice for higher education. I think this facet of the enrollment drop has been glossed over for the most part in the media. I was unaware until I spoke with some people in my EE departement's graduate admissions office. Granted, exporting jobs causes some of this, but let's take a look at all the causes.
The University of Texas at Austin Electrical Engineering Department has some good opportunities to study network technology. They have a Network Engineering Laboratory class which lets you build all the components of an enterprise network in-lab using Linux boxes and Cisco gear. There are also general networking classes and some good network protocol implementation classes that you can take from the CS department. Plus an EE degree gives you the foundations you need to work in almost any part of the networking industry.
Beyond the classroom the local chapter of the IEEE Communications Society provides lots of opportunity to do real network engineering. They have a widely recognized Honeypot effort, a project which seeks to replace department land-lines with VOIP phones, and a running series of lectures on network security. UT itself also administrates an impressive enterprise-class network to support the institution, and one of the guys in charge of it is a professor in the EE department.
Cisco also has an office in Austin which employs students as interns and part-time workers. I have a friend who got paid to, among other things, get his Cisco certification and configure test networks in their labs all summer long. There are lots of opportunities to learn about networking at UT, and it's a US top-ten engineering school.
First year Electrical Engineering students at the University of Texas at Austin take an Introduction to Computing class that starts with the transistor and uses a book written by Yale Patt, a prof at UT that often teaches the class. The class then teaches how transistors can be combined to make memory circuits, how you store data when represented by bits (2's complement, floating point, ASCII text). You then learn to write basic programs for a simplified computer in actual binary machine code and actually run the code on a simulator developed by students in the advanced computer architecture class. By the time you get to programming in assembly you think it's a relatively high level language and are glad to have it.
The successor to this class picks up where this one leaves off and teaches C from assembly up with an emphasis on what actually happens when you compile, allocate memory, and other things that a lot of students overlook. C++ is introduced in a later class, as well as algorithms, etc.
I personally think that I am a much better programmer for having learned in this manner. I took a senior level class in the UT Computer Science Department (which teaches assembly much later in the game) and found that far too many students, including some that were about to graduate, still didn't understand the fundamental differences between handling text data and binary, non-text data in higher level languages. Most still seem to think code executes in a white fluffy cloud and wonder why on earth 119 + 133 = -4 in their program and think '133' == 133.
I helped to install network cabling in the very school this simulator used to reside in a few years back... Although I never saw it running, it appeared to be a well crafted simulator. I've seen the one at space camp as well, and it was surprisingly close. I'm fairly certain most of the buttons and switches were wired to something, with several computers running the simulator. The room it was in had just about enough room to get in and out of the cockpit, the rest covered in equipment. My first reaction was disbelief that a school actually had something this cool. I can't believe the school ditched this... perhaps the local Children's Museum would be interested in it as a sort of local, mini-space camp. Either way, I think it was awesome that someone went to all this trouble to build something like this for his school. Regardless of how he's selling it off on e-bay, this guy is authentic about his description of the way he built it and the way it was used in the past.
I had two 45 GB 75GXP's in a RAID 1 (knew I did that for some reason...) in an Antec SX1040B complete with the dedicated intake fan for the HD's. Even with extra cooling they still failed, and have both been subsequently RMA'd. On the first round I received a new unit from Thailand which seems to be ok, and on the second HD (within a month of the first) I received a larger hard drive with a different model number. Too bad I'm running RAID 1 and can't use the extra space. These drives are definitely "Fired" in my books.