Electromagnetic Compliance will probably never get much attention in education. However, that isn’t necessarily due to a perceived lack of importance. A good program will provide classes based on the needs of the industries that will hire the graduates. The requirements of industry are extremely broad and there is only so much that can be crammed into most four year programs. Specialty fields, such as EMC and product safety will get little or no attention in most programs. The typical baccalaureate program (at least within the United States) is limited to four years and must cover significant breadth of material. Prospective engineers can learn the basics needed, such as electromagnetic field theory, but the details of EMC typically must be learned on the job. I have worked for companies that specialize in a number of areas not covered in a typical four year education. I found that my college education gave me a good basis on which to start my job, but there was still a lot to learn.
In my first job, I worked for a company that designed industrial electronics and I had to learn the finer points of analog circuit design. My education covered the basics of operational amplifiers, but I never had formal training on 4-20mA circuits, user interface design, worst case analysis or many other topics necessary for industrial electronic design. My first introduction into susceptibility testing came in this job where poorly designed analog circuits didn’t work in noisy industrial environments. In this case, regulation didn’t drive the need for good EMC design, market forced did. In a recent job, I had to learn a lot about power distribution methods and issues. I had one course in power distribution in college which taught me the basics of three-phase circuit analysis, but I still had a lot to learn. Knowledge of electrical codes became essential for me to do the job, and these were never mentioned in my basic education. Most aspects of my career, including but not limited to EMC and product safety, have required me to find experts and apprentice myself to them. Should we consider making graduate level education mandatory for engineers? Should engineers have to work in rotations in different specialties the way prospective doctors do? What percentage of engineers end up as EMC engineers? If it is less than 5%, would we even expect more than a few universities to offer specialized programs in the field? One final thought is that a lot of people go into engineering to design things. In general, EMC engineers are not designing new products. (Although we find that we must know good design in order to fix or redesign products that fail EMC testing.) I would not have chosen to go into the field of testing when I came out of high school and I doubt many prospective engineering students would enter a full program on EMC. Ted Eckert Compliance Engineer Microsoft Corporation [email protected] The opinions expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer. From: Price, Edward [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2008 7:49 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: EMC Eduction and Training ________________________________ From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Kunde, Brian Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2008 6:52 AM To: EMC-PSTC Subject: RE: EMC Eduction and Training Hey, lets think about this for a minute. Do we really want this “black magic” stuff we do for a living to be better taught in universities? Lets face it, we have a good thing going here and we don’t need some greenhorn engineer thinking he knows more about it than we do. As mentioned earlier, this job is more experience and technique than science. The best EMC engineers and technicians I know where not taught in school, but had been mentored by an older experienced EMC engineer. Like a magician passing on his secretes to his apprentice. This is how it has been done and the way it has to be done. The Other Brian The Other Brian touches on an interesting and salient feature of the happy EMC Engineer. EMC demands a more "hands on" approach than most of the other disciplines. Those students who are not already building their own circuits and frying their own power supplies will not do well in EMC, or at minimum, will try to stay toward the academic / computational edge of EMC. To the rigidly academic, it must be terrifying to discover that EMC problems have so many unknowns and (usually) more than one solution. I'm not so sure that a mentoring / apprentice system HAS to be the only way to assure continuity, but, from my observation, it has been an effective and efficient method. Certainly, we could get into an endless discussion of whether our educational system rationally assigns talent to appropriate needs (after all, they told me I could be anything I wanted; what they didn't tell me was that what I wanted also had to be needed). Remember Pachinko and Pinball machines? There's something fascinating about watching the life-arc of a ball, despite us knowing with 6-sigma certainty the origin and destination of every ball. Uhhh, what was the question? Ed Price [email protected] <blocked::mailto:[email protected]> WB6WSN NARTE Certified EMC Engineer Electromagnetic Compatibility Lab Cubic Defense Applications San Diego, CA USA 858-505-2780 Military & Avionics EMC Is Our Specialty - This message is from the IEEE Product Safety Engineering Society emc-pstc discussion list. To post a message to the list, send your e-mail to <[email protected]> All emc-pstc postings are archived and searchable on the web at http://www.ieeecommunities.org/emc-pstc Graphics (in well-used formats), large files, etc. can be posted to that URL. Website: http://www.ieee-pses.org/ Instructions: http://listserv.ieee.org/request/user-guide.html List rules: http://www.ieee-pses.org/listrules.html For help, send mail to the list administrators: Scott Douglas <[email protected]> Mike Cantwell <[email protected]> For policy questions, send mail to: Jim Bacher <[email protected]> David Heald <[email protected]> - This message is from the IEEE Product Safety Engineering Society emc-pstc discussion list. To post a message to the list, send your e-mail to <[email protected]> All emc-pstc postings are archived and searchable on the web at http://www.ieeecommunities.org/emc-pstc Graphics (in well-used formats), large files, etc. can be posted to that URL. Website: http://www.ieee-pses.org/ Instructions: http://listserv.ieee.org/request/user-guide.html List rules: http://www.ieee-pses.org/listrules.html For help, send mail to the list administrators: Scott Douglas <[email protected]> Mike Cantwell <[email protected]> For policy questions, send mail to: Jim Bacher <[email protected]> David Heald <[email protected]>
