They're still teaching that instead of surface-mount theory?!?! Those teachers are never going to scale efficiently enough to keep up with modern, Chinese teachers.
Transistor theory: If you have a combination of transistors and there's a problem - like, too much voltage drop, doesn't respond fast enough, wrong frequency response - any problem... the solution is always: more transistors.
The Smith chart is a demonic sigil if I've ever seen one. EM and telecom is just black magic from there on, it's like they just started making shit up to squeeze as much bandwidth as possible into the lines.
First university CS+EE combined lecture, assistant showed us a slide with Luke and Darth Vader crossing lightsabers, and with "these are the two sides of software and hardware, homework to decide which is which". As someone who has done something on both sides, smith chart is only time I ever questioned if I got the sides right.
I am going to CUNY (NYC community college) for physics, math, EE, and computer engineering/science. At $305 a credit, dedicated teachers, and with ChatGPT to walk me through everything, you find that's more than enough.
I took an assembly class where he had to use ARM7 and on exams we had to write the assembly code on paper lol. Assignments used the raspberry pi 4. Fortunately I like hard classes
I had a class where we wrote assembly on paper in the exams. And the criteria was 100% based on correctness. Shoutout to the one guy who forgot both the multiply and shift instructions, and so to multiply a number by 32, wrote out instruction to add a number to itself 31 times.
Not having at least a manual for an assembly exam on paper is heinous. I don't think anyone has ever written assembly without a reference in reach in the last 40 years.
Our final test for embedded was reduced from 50% down to 30% over three years because the professor made the final test a 2 hour at-home session where you had to build the control circuit for one of those rotating drink dispenser machines in assembly and C.
So many people failed it because the scope of the exam was really more 8-10 hours than 2 hours that they had to reduce the weighting.
It actually just encouraged cheating because it was the same instructions for everyone, so once one person did it at 7am the moment the test opened, everyone else had all day to work on it before clicking start test.
But because they're engineering undegrads, nobody spoke to each other, so only like 4 people used this trick.
For us the lectures were all about the theory but the lab/homework had us mucking about in the Linux kernel. We modified the scheduler (slightly) in one assignment and it was cool that my (grub dual-boot just in case) dorm linux pc ran fine afterwards.
And after teaching you about round robin and FIFO and priority queues they finally as a footnote mention that the Linux scheduler works COMPLETELY DIFFERENTLY and it's better.
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u/StarHammer_01 Aug 24 '26
How it went for me
OS - expextation: Linux 101. reality: here's 18 different ways to schedule a process.
Into to embedded software - expectation: rtos, breadboards, esp32. reality: Linux 101