Engineering your electrical engineering education

Electrical and computer engineering (ECE) courses are usually structured in such a way to provide the student with the basics to solve problems in the field and then challenge the student with increasingly more difficult problems to effectively stretch those basic problem-solving approaches into more advanced techniques. While most of this problem-solving focus is placed on the technical arena, this is only one part of the educational experience for an ECE student. There are many nontechnical facets to one problem-solving repertoire that require development to become a successful practicing engineer in industry or academia after graduation. This article serves to provide some of these facets in a career-direction informational guide to junior- and senior-level undergraduate students and graduate students early in their ECE career. It also serves as a guide to outline some useful strategies not found in an engineering text to maximize one's educational experience at the undergraduate and graduate levels as well as the transition between them