Electrical Vs Computer Engineering Vs Computer Science | A Side by Side Comparison

on this channel I compared various majors before however I've never walked through an entire undergrad curriculum with you guys and showing the similarities differences and what you will not see if you take one major over the other in this video I'm gonna do that for electrical engineering Computer Engineering and computer science to clear up exactly how they differ in terms of college courses before I start what you're gonna notice is how much these two majors have in common as well as these two but you'll also see that Electrical Engineering and computer science have very little in common when it comes to undergrad the curricula I will go through would be from my college Cal Poly San Luis Obispo some very familiar with those classes but no every University is a little bit different lastly I've talked about so many these classes and other videos if you want more specific detail but here I'm just going to go into brief explanations to save time so let's just get into it here we're gonna start with the electrical engineering curriculum if you cannot tune the college curriculum before don't feel overwhelmed or trying to look ahead I'm gonna walk us through all of this as you can see it's broken up into freshman year sophomore year then junior than senior you also note that I was on a quarter system as I had a fall quarter then switched to a totally new set of classes for winter quarter and then did the same for Spring Quarter the fourth quarter by the way was summer which was optional for people looking to get ahead but many schools are on a semester schedule so they take more classes in a given semester but those last longer on the bottom and green here are the general ed courses like English psychology history and so on which I will not be talking about in the orange looking color here you got your support classes like math physics chemistry and the yellow ones are your actual major classes so for the support classes you start with calculus 1 then 2 then 3 then for some reason you have calculus 4 down here as well as linear analysis but the order of these two did not matter and linear analysis was the name for our linear algebra and differential equations class it involved a little of both but was called linear analysis most schools just have calculus 1 through 3 but my school being on a quarter system had for information was no different though then we had to take one chemistry class you can see right here which I really did not use that much so if you don't like chem you should still be fine in this major then there were three physics classes covering all the basics from high school physics but in a little more detail plus they involve calculus then we also have to take a modern physics course which was mostly quantum physics or the study of particles atoms photons and things like that the only majors at our school that had to take this for physics majors electrical engineers and computer engineers the reason we had to is because of our first electronics class right here in our third year in that class we learned about the transistor that circuit component that allows our phones and computers to work but before analyzing circuits with them we had to learn how they work like how the electrons would behave in the semiconductor which involves quantum physics this was also probably the only time I did a good amount of chemistry in an EE class but that only lasted a few weeks then you'll also notice we had to take a fundamentals of computer science course which was learning how to program from the beginning I literally had no idea how to program before that and by the end we had a program a Sudoku solver which took several weeks to complete now that class right there at least from my school was the one major class that electrical engineers and computer science majors had in common that's it not counting math or physics classes of course there was a little more overlap in terms of material you learn in each major but in terms of classes that's it mostly everything else you're going to see here is not taken by computer scientists now on to the major classes it really started here with circuit analysis one which was just about resistor circuits then circuit analysis to added capacitors and inductors then circuit analysis three was all AC circuits where we had to use imaginary numbers to analyze phase offsets and things like that that third quarter was also the first one ride never seen any of the material beforehand I learned a little about resistors capacitors and inductors before those other two though then also to begin my sophomore year we had digital design this is where I first learned binary like how to count in binary what truth tables were making circuits that simply flipped ones and zeros and more computer scientists do learn lots of this as well that's what I meant when I said there is some overlap but they did not take this class then that computer design class was just a continuation and it's where I learned something called assembly language and actually designed a CPU then there was continuous-time signals aka the signals class and this was a very math intensive course learning things like Fourier analysis and how to represent functions as a sum of sine and cosine functions this basically us to think of and model signals in a different way which was needed for let's say filtering techniques when you want to remove noise from a messy signal and then I'm gonna go a little out of order real quick but we had our first electronics class learning about how a transistor works and how current flows into and out of the terminals next came digital electronics where we focus solely on transistor circuits that turn high voltages into low ones or vice-versa aka turn once into zeros and zeros into ones which is really what is happening within your computer and then at the end of our third year we took this programmable logic course which is where programming circuits and electronics came together we used an Arduino and had to do lots of projects with it examples were like making an LCD say something all the way to calibrating a sensor for a real-world project one for my class was someone used a weight sensor to tell when more dog food should be added to a bowl and then a latch was open that released just the right amount of food now so far I've discussed the three circuit analysis classes digital and then computer design continuous-time signals electronics and digital electronics and that programmable logic course these are the nine major classes at my school that electrical engineers and computer engineers shared the remaining eight major classes that I'm going to go through real quick for EE you would not see if you went into computer engineering versus this energy conversion class which is really power engineering this is about high voltage circuits electric motors generators and more of that if you want to work for an electric company on solar panels and generating lots of electric power this would be something you'd be interested in then discrete-time signals is just more signal analysis but where the signals are discrete and sampled in time rather than continuous again it's very math intensive but a different kind of math and it's very important for things like digital signal processing and using techniques to enhance digital images as an example control systems was about analyzing systems with feedback whether it be a simple cruise control all the way to control systems for a spacecraft to stay on course although we didn't see many applications in this classes we are just doing math and analyzing graphs in terms of communications was all about learning AM and FM radio waves how to represent them mathematically why radio stations are spaced as far apart as they are and so on then analog electronics is about circuits that can amplify an alternating voltage using transistors an electronic design was really fun but tough to explain it was mainly about circuits involving something called an op-amp or operational amplifier that lab was a 10-week project where he made a Lux meter or something that measures light in a room this combined a lot of information from many of our previous courses now before moving on you see that we require to take at least three technical electives here this is where you can pick from a long list of electives that are in a specific area of electrical engineering you want to focus on which I'll pull up here so if you like communications and those signals classes you can take fiber-optic communications or digital signal processing or maybe antenna design and so on if you like electronics you got options here then for everyone saying they don't want to miss out on computer engineering classes you have options here you need computer vision real-time operating systems and more that are listed in that department then going back you see how the curriculum has these required engineering support classes these are a little different where you can pick from a wide range of disciplines outside your major you can take some extra math classes or maybe some mechanical engineering classes or even more computer science and engineering options you could even take a mixture of a few things and I'm saying this to everyone who's thinking I don't want to miss out on whatever classes if I pick this major instead of that one because you have flexibility and can honestly almost get a double major if you do everything right plus some schools offer Electrical and Computer Engineering dual degrees because of how similar they are now with that said let's move on to computer science first they take these three programming courses the first one is what electrical engineers take as well in the second one at my school at least they learn Java and then in the following they apply their programming knowledge to lots of projects as an example my friend made a boggle word checker and a game similar to solitaire but more simple that I'm not going to explain the real quick these classes that are elongated across multiple corners are not actually that long they're only one corner but I recommend to be taken at some point where they're placed so then they jump into discrete structures which is their discrete math course going over proofs graph theory logic and more which is huge for algorithm design for computer scientists mit has great lectures for this class on YouTube and all you need is calc as a prereq systems programming is the class everyone at our school dreaded taken because of how much work it was you learn a lot more about C as a programming language and become a much more skilled programmer one project my friend did was program a compression algorithm that would reduce the number of bits or ones and zeros that made up a word or string of words computer architecture is more in-depth study of the hardware design of a central processing unit it's really more of a computer engineering topic because it is Hardware oriented and then they have operating systems which they take some time in their third or fourth year again I went out of order because these eight classes I just went over are the ones that computer scientists and computer engineers share the other six classes not including electives you will not see or at least not be required to take as a computer engineer of those one big class for computer scientists is this design and analysis of algorithms where they use that discrete math to proven model algorithms for various purposes examples would be like the traveling salesperson finding the shortest route if you had to go to multiple cities or the convex hole telling us the smallest polygon that can enclose a set of points which has applications and pattern recognition image processing and more these courses on programming languages are quite technical but the information about them can be read here and my friend said in that class for a lab he basically made a programming language from scratch and then theory of computation is more about how efficiently problems in computer science can be solved one famous example in the class is the halting problem and how a computer cannot detect whether is in an infinite loop or not it cannot know that it will never stop running but this class becomes very involved and goes into a lot of depth then of course they have technical electives as well but due to time I'm going to end there with computer science now I would say let's move on to computer engineering which I'll put up here but the cool thing is we're basically done these classes are ones that electrical engineers take as well that I explained earlier and these ones are taken by computer scientists that I already explained this leaves seriously only one class that computer engineers take which no other major is required to not counting electives it's very true that computer engineering is just a combination of a lie Engineering and computer science but again with all the electives out there you can tailor your education much more to your liking than you may think but with that said I'm going to end that video here I provided links to everything you saw in the description down below if you want to support the channel links are down there as well don't forget to follow major prep on social media and I'll see you all in the next video

Channel: Zach Star

Views: 157,648

Keywords: majorprep, major prep, electrical engineering, computer engineering, computer science, electrical vs computer engineering, electrical engineering vs computer engineering vs computer science, computer science vs computer engineering, computer science vs electrical engineering, college courses, engineering courses, ee vs cpe vs cs, ee vs cpe, ee vs ce, ee vs cs, cs vs ee, university, college majors, engineering majors, best engineering major

Id: xDNB8BoV0KU

Length: 11min 34sec (694 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 24 2018