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Going a step further from my previous question regarding how EE's skirt around doing a lot of basic calculations, I wanted to know beyond ohm's law and calculating voltage dividers (just using those as examples because they seem so common) what are the weekly or daily calculations that engineers are using when you can't do it in your head or draw from intuition/experience?

Planning on starting an EE in the fall and i want to prep as much as possible. Took Calc 12 years ago so I'm rusty but still have a decent grasp of integration, derivation, limits, min/max etc. But I'm not hearing folks talk a ton about using calc routinely in their designs/analysis.

inbinder
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    Are you starting an academic EE program in the fall, or an EE job, or an EE project? – Nick Alexeev Apr 10 '16 at 00:55
  • @NickAlexeev--EE program, undergrad. – inbinder Apr 10 '16 at 01:10
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    Consider looking up the classes that you will be taking (want to take, have to take). Get the syllabi. Contacting the professors would not be a bad idea. Then get your hands on the books (or class notes, or recorded class videos, better yet), and they will reveal the required level of math. Some universities have seminars specifically for people with rusty math. These seminars usually run in the summer before the regular classes start. Take comparable courses on Coursera or some such, that will exercise and test you math skills. – Nick Alexeev Apr 10 '16 at 01:28
  • Possible duplicate of [Design Calculations for the Seasoned EE](http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/226593/design-calculations-for-the-seasoned-ee) – tcrosley Apr 10 '16 at 01:50
  • Converting between hourly and yearly rates :-) – Oleg Mazurov Apr 10 '16 at 02:21
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    Most EE programs will start you over on Calculus, so your previous experience with it should be a boost. You need to be comfortable dealing with clunky algebraic systems of equations so that you don't get lost while solving nodes and loops by hand. – Daniel Apr 10 '16 at 03:15

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It mostly depends on what you're doing. If you're designing a circuit from scratch and need certain voltage out or current out, you're probably going to do Kirchhoff's Voltage Law or Current Law (KVL - KCL). While not too difficult to do (a lot of the time), easy to complicate with larger circuits which require Thevenin / Norton Equivalents. A lot of students find this part of circuit analysis difficult, might be good to look into it a little bit. Otherwise, a large majority of the challenging aspects come in when doing RF and dealing with fields. Gauss's Law and related equations / formulas / theorems are important to understand for such antenna design or other design involving fields.

Edit: Calc and differential equations are used routinely in later EcE courses.

Spoofy McGee
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