Ten Essential Skills for Electrical Engineers

PREFACE

This book and the companion website* will do two things for you: First, it will help you excel in your technical interviews so you can secure a great first job. Second, it will help you succeed in that job by showing you how to solve real-world problems using what you already know from your engineering courses.

There is often a disconnect between what you learned in school and the expectations of those interviewing you. On one hand, the engineering curriculum has taught you a tremendous amount of theoretical and practical material, but it is simply not possible to remember it all in an interview. On the other hand, the interviewing team will likely consist of your potential supervisor and coworkers, and they will be looking for someone with the skills to be an immediate contributor in their department. The interview will typically focus on what you can do instead of how much you know. This book bridges the gap by reviewing how to apply what you learned in school to practical engineering tasks.

Each chapter reviews design skills by relating them to fundamental concepts. Consider the skill of designing an averaging FIR digital filter. This is a valuable skill, but the best designers understand the basics of digital filters—they understand the practical use of z-transforms and how to work with any discrete-time structure. As a result, they can work with a wide variety of digital filters thereby enabling them to design the best filter for a given requirement. This text reviews ...