Jon Elson via cctalk wrote:
On 08/10/2019 01:29 PM, Dave Wade via cctalk wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: cctech <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Mark J. Blair
What term is used there for an engineer
who works in fields of general electronics?
An electronics engineer...
This war was settled in 1963 when the American Institute of Electrical
Engineers merged with the Institute of Radio Engineers, realizing
their battle was just silly and counterproductive.
It was time, as serious electronics was moving into telecommunications
and computers, numerically controlled machine tools, aviation, and
more. If they had a separate institute for each area of
specialization, it would just dilute the resources. Every one of them
used Ohms law and its derivatives.
Jon
I very much agree with the U.S. philosophy with regards to school
organization (i.e., a department or school with general electrical
engineering faculty, directly hosting a degree program in electrical
engineering, with majors in either communications, power systems,
computer engineering, and so on. In the last few decades some
departments in the U.S. have transitioned to names such as
"Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering" (see e.g.
http://www.ece.wisc.edu/ and https://www.ece.cornell.edu/ece,
precisely the two universities where I studied in the U.S.).
In Latin America, with some exceptions, it is common that each very
specific program is hosted by one very specific department,
thus there is one electronics engineering program linked to a department
of electronics engineering and a different electrical engineering
program with a department of electrical engineering. This is especially
true in older, public universities. The reason for this is petty:
resource management (i.e., handling of tuition, human resources and so
on) was often done at the program level, so people preferred to have
"their own turf" in the organization and this led to this kind of
granularization.
I do belong to a "Department of Electrical, Electronics and Computer
Engineering" and I like it this way. We do, however, host two
differently-named undergraduate programs, called, you guessed it,
Electrical Engineering and Electronics Engineering. Nowadays many
students are choosing to stay one or two more semesters and obtain the
two degrees; this is possible because of the curricular design that we
have in place.
In the U.S., some of the first Electrical Engineering programs were
created inside Physics departments and only later were the corresponding
departments created.
carlos.
