Career Choices in Electrical Engineering
What Will I Do as an Electrical Engineer?
Electrical engineers are in demand in nearly all major industrial sectors (construction, communications, consumer electronics, microelectronics, industrial controls, medical technology, etc.) and Brown electrical engineers are well positioned to compete for industrial positions. The unusually broad preparation of Brown engineering graduates due to the core curriculum and the required capstone design project also prepares our electrical engineers for further study in graduate and professional schools.
Electrical engineering is by far the largest engineering discipline today, underpinning the dominant information-based sector of the modern economy (information acquisition, processing, and communication) and playing a key role in nearly all other industries, from construction, to automotive, to biomedical. The future evolution of the profession is difficult to predict, with many EE specialties facing paradigm shifts: from the expected shifts in the semiconductor industry as mainstream silicon technology reaches the end of its roadmap in a decade, to the explosive growth of integrated biomedical sensors, to new power sources, etc. The broad education in other engineering disciplines and the experience of a final design project provides Brown EE graduates with the vision and flexibility to navigate the rapidly changing technological and societal landscape.
In recent years, about half of the graduating EE class went directly to work as electrical engineers, typically with well-known corporations (IBM, Texas Instruments, Analog Devices, Intel, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, etc.), but also in smaller and start-up companies (Spectra Science, Annapolis Microsystems, C-Cube, Pixelworks). The rest split roughly evenly between graduate school and other opportunities (from medical school to management consulting at companies such as Goldman Sachs and Accenture, to government service in the military or government research labs); those bound for graduate school typically go to research institutions like Princeton, MIT, Stanford and Berkeley with fellowship support (and some like Brown so much, they stay for a fifth-year M.Sc. program).
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