Electrical Engineering
Photo: Warren Rieutort-Louis
Electrical Engineering (EE) offers a flexible program that enables students to prepare for a wide range of careers. The curriculum provides a broad exposure to fundamental areas including electronic devices and circuits, signal processing and communications, and computer hardware; students select an area of concentration and pursue advanced courses in diverse fields such as lasers and optics, solid state physics, computer design, image processing, wireless communications, and others. Certificate programs may complement the EE major; the certificates in finance, in engineering biology, in engineering physics, and in engineering and management systems are particularly popular among EE majors. Juniors take a design project course unique to Princeton, and each student completes an independent work project carried out under the supervision of a faculty researcher, usually in senior year. EE graduates are in high demand in major technology companies and in consulting firms. A significant fraction of the graduating class goes on to graduate or professional schools in engineering or related areas, medicine, law, and business.
What Students Say
• What is electrical engineering?
• What can you learn from it?
• What is it like being an electrical engineering major?
• What are common misconceptions about electrical engineering majors?
• What kind of internships and international experiences have majors had?
• How will electrical engineering majors save the world?
• Why would anyone want to date an electrical engineering major?
• What can you learn from it?
• What is it like being an electrical engineering major?
• What are common misconceptions about electrical engineering majors?
• What kind of internships and international experiences have majors had?
• How will electrical engineering majors save the world?
• Why would anyone want to date an electrical engineering major?
Electrical engineering is an incredibly broad field, encompassing everything from logic design to mathematical systems theory. The main categories and sub-categories of electrical engineering research at Princeton are listed here.
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What can you learn from it?Electrical engineering prepares undergrads for essentially any technical job or graduate school. The core classes include some specific coursework in circuit and system design, but much of the material is theoretical and generally applicable. Recent graduates have gone on to become consultants, programmers, or Ph.D. students (in majors ranging from computer science to evolutionary biology).
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What is it like being an electrical engineering major?
The small size of the department (~20-25 students per year) leads to a strong sense of community among the students and between the students and professors. Everyone in the same year knows each other, and professors have come to our parties and invited us over their houses.
Electrical engineering is one of the most flexible departments, with only 6 mandatory courses (one of which is a project lab). There are no JPs (though the junior project is well-known as being challenging and time-consuming) and no required thesis. Only a single semester of independent work is required (taken junior or senior year) though the vast majority of undergrads do one or two semesters of independent work senior year.
Electrical engineering has very little to do with electricity — although some students do work on circuitry or processor design, there are many other areas to electrical engineering: lasers/optics, machine learning, control theory, quantum computing, etc. Very few of us get excited about resistors.
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Electrical engineers tend to get high-profile summer internships at research labs (e.g. NSF "Research for Undergraduates" programs) or leading companies such as Microsoft.
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Let's count the ways:
- Creating cheap, efficient solar cells will solve the energy crisis, stop global warming, and win the War on Terror by devaluing Middle Eastern oil.
- Designing autonomous vehicles or advanced automotive safety systems will greatly reduce car accidents, which are currently the leading cause of death for US teenagers.
- Signal analysis and antenna research will allow us to receive and understand messages from advanced alien civilizations, who will instruct us in how to create such wonders as wormhole transportation and non-melting ice cream.
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We're one of the best-paid majors in terms of jobs after graduation. Why live in a box with a comparative literature major when you could be with an electrical engineer?
No JP or thesis = plenty of free time to bake you cookies, write you poetry, etc.
We can make you this.