This is ECE advice on how to study and succeed in school. This is a long list (copied from my Reddit post on r/ece) of things I learned over 6 years as an ECE undergraduate and masters student. Some tips are pulled from other places on this sub and around Reddit. This list is not comprehensive, has typos, and is obviously biased by personal taste... so if you have something to add please do so!
I am currently an electrical engineer at a large aerospace company, and am finishing finished my master's in ECE. I am was a TA for an introductory circuits course and want to give the students some tips. These are things I wish I knew when I was at their stage.
I am on Twitter nowadays, hit me up if you are struggling and I'll try to help out!
If you do some of these, you'll be better off. It's not a laundry list of everything you should do, it's just a reference if you need some tips. Hope this helps some of you students out there!
Here's a link to a helpful collection of equations and concepts for an intro to ECE course
Tips on How To Succeed in an ECE Major (or any degree)
Do the homework. Even if it's not required to turn in. It's the only way to learn this ECE stuff. Don't cheat on the homework, because when the exam comes around the lack of actual practice will show and you will do poorly. This is how a lot of my friends failed ECE classes. They just copied solutions for the homeworks, got all A's on the homeworks, then failed the exams and the class. The solutions can be helpful if you use them to work through problems and learn, but they can be very hurtful if you use them wrong.
Work the hard problems. Once you get really good at a certain type of problem, start working on a different type of problem. It's easy to keep doing the problems you are good at and skip the hard ones. This is the opposite of what you should be doing! Work on the hard problems so you get practice.
Treat the school day like a work day. Regardless of when your classes are, get to school at 8:00 AM, and stay until 5:00 PM. If you have an exam or something the next day, then stay longer. Work hard during that time to finish all your homework, studying, office hours, emails, etc. That way your evenings could possibly be free to get rest or have some fun!
Go to the professor's office hours. They are different people in their office than in front of class. They will answer your questions in a direct way. You will need letters of recommendation at some point in your life (applying for grad school, scholarships, jobs) and it is part of the professor's job to write letters of rec for students. If you know them even a little bit, like by going to a few office hours, then they will gladly write you a great letter of rec later in life.
Go to the TA office hours. They are usually awesome and will help you work through problems, and sometimes give you the solutions. They are students, too, so they understand what you are dealing with and may be able to explain things in a different way than the professors.
Make the circuit on a breadboard or in a simulator. Nothing beats learning the concepts then actually putting them into practice. It is infinitely helpful to make the circuits from homework or the textbook examples with an actual breadboard. Remember to engineer hardware you have to understand the hardware, and the best way to do that is play with the actual hardware. Components are cheap on Amazon, or there are some free circuit simulators if you want. I personally used everycircuit even though it is paid, it is worth it for the visualizations. Another browser based one is PartSim. Here is a list of free simulators.
All-night cramming study sessions are hurtful. They will not help you in an engineering degree. Don't do them. You will need rest before an exam so you can think critically and your brain can have better recall. Sleep is key! To achieve no all-nighters, you have to start working on assignments early, and start studying early. Spreading out the studying over multiple days is helpful if you can do it early enough.
Use the campus tutoring resources. A lot of schools or departments offer free/cheap tutoring services. All of them will have some sort of resources. Ask your department counselor or admin person, they will point you in the right direction.
“Awesome with no effort” doesn’t happen in college. You will have to make a deliberate effort to learn the material. You will have to make time to study and do homework. You will work your ass off. In high school or other degrees it is possible to rely on your smarts and just cruise through. That is not possible anymore, you gotta put in work to do well. Just being smart doesn’t count anymore, you have to have discipline and a work ethic. Luckily, those can be learned!
Start working on assignments based on the assigned date, not the due date. Don't treat due dates like you did in high school, etc. Instead of planning assignments from the due date backwards, start doing work from the assigned date forwards. This is a big one! For example: If a homework is assigned on 11/5 but isn't due until 11/20, don't plan on doing the homework on 11/18. Instead, plan on doing the homework on 11/6. You could even trick yourself by writing down that the homework is due a few days before it actually is. That way you are done early and aren’t stressed out.
Start studying for exams a few (2-3) weeks before they come. If you start studying the week before you will be stressed, not cover enough material, and struggle. Help yourself out and start early. It feels amazing when the exam is a day or two away and you already are done studying for it. Now any more studying is just an easy review, which makes you feel more confident, which makes you do better on the exam.
Go to each lecture. If learning and excelling isn't enough motivation, then think of the cost. You are throwing hundreds of dollars into the trash every time you skip a class. Just go. Even if you are sleepy or don't want to. It's absolutely critical to get in this habit.
Take notes by hand on paper, sit in the front rows, and don't be afraid to ask questions. You are at school, asking questions is part of learning! If the professor thought you didn't have any questions, then what would be the purpose of school? Ask questions!
Take notes in your own words. Simply copying down what the professor says word for word is fine for reference, but is not that helpful for learning. The textbook can be your reference. It is better to take notes in your own words, it forces you to process the information and write it in a new way, which increases retention.
Do the reading before the lecture. I personally only did this a few times, but each time I did I felt like a freaking genius during the lecture. Even if I didn't really get what I was reading, just being exposed to the terms and concepts made the lecture so much more effective.
Try to review your notes after the lecture. What good are notes if you don't look at them again?
Find a good quiet place to study and make it your regular spot. I prefer top floors of libraries or basements. Headphones are great with some homework music on. Gotta find a zone that works for you and get into it. Sometimes music is distracting, and white noise would be better. I prefer brown noise. Here's a website that does both!
Find a good time of day to study. If you like studying at certain times of the day, then plan those times for studying.
Make the most of your study time. It’s easy to sit at a desk for 8 hours straight then say “I just studied for 8 hours.” In my experience, that’s not real studying. Most likely half or two thirds of that time was actually spent studying. Get the studying done with, then move on with your day, otherwise you will get burned out. Sometimes forcing small breaks and chunking your study time helps, like in the Pomodoro technique.
Study one class at a time. Context switching is an expensive mental operation. Meaning it wastes time to switch between classes. When studying or doing homework try to finish one thing first, then move on. It will feel good to get something off your plate as well.
Ditch the laptop and phone when studying if you can. Try to study with just a textbook, calculator, notebook, and pencil. It's easy to get overwhelmed with homework and just browse reddit/facebook/internet for hours instead. Or play computer games. The biggest thing that ever helped me was studying without internet enabled electronic devices. It also helps to put a timer on your internet usage, so it makes your quick Google searches more urgent and less prone to wandering.
Try to find a study group with 2-5 students. It really helps to have different people to study with, because everyone sees things slightly different. Plus it's harder to slack off and play computer games when you have people sitting next to you. Too many people in a study group means that it becomes a social event, and no work gets done. I was very shy and didn't get a study group until my last year of undergrad. It was just 2 people that I randomly asked "hey wanna study". They will help you and you will help them and you will all be smarter. And you will feel social. Win win!
Teach someone else the material. Saying the concepts out loud and forcing your brain to make sense of what you’re saying is a great way to learn the material. Yes, teaching helps you learn, it’s proven scientifically! You can do this with a classmate, friend, random person, or a rubber duck.
Learn the material from a different resource on your own. Watch YouTube videos, MIT OCW videos, read Wikipedia articles, look for animations, do anything to learn the material in a different way. I highly recommend visualizations of circuits, EM fields, computer architecture, etc. Any of the complex things that will be learned in an ECE degree can be much more readily understood with a good diagram or animation. Here’s some personal favorites: Falstad circuit examples and an amazing Electric Circuits YouTube playlist
Use tools to supplement learning, but don't abuse them. Chegg step-by-step solutions, Wolfram Mathematica, etc. are very useful tools that can help you understand how to work through problems. Just remember that they are tools you can use to increase your knowledge. Don't abuse them, or it will show on your exams and in your job interviews.
Have pride in what you are turning in. Make your circuits look nice, check your spelling, format things nicely. It makes you feel good and makes you put more effort into the whole assignment, which ultimately gives you a better grade.
Understanding the foundations is a key to success. This isn't simply a memorization degree. You must really understand what's going on at the basic physical level. You will excel in all the other things if you can get a handle on the basics (ie. Kirchhoff's laws, Ohm's laws, EM fields, basic C programming, calculus, statistics).
Do something non-engineering to keep yourself sane. Sketch, read sci-fi books, meditate, go on walks, practice piano, play Frisbee, something to balance out all the left brain activity.
The only way to learn is to do problems. Certain degrees can be got by rote memorization. Engineering degrees can only be got by critical thinking and actually doing. Do the problems. Do them multiple ways. Make the circuit on a breadboard or in a simulator. Use your hands, use your brain!
Find practice problems, homework from other schools/classes, textbook solutions, etc. These are excellent resources for doing problems and learning. Be careful with solutions though!! It is easy to feel confident about a problem when doing it with solutions. That same problem on an exam will feel impossible because you don't have solutions to look at. I like to use solutions to get me unstuck or to confirm I did the right step.
Google for previous classes to find old lectures, problems, etc. If you are taking ECE 165 at UCSB, just google "ece 165 ucsb" or "ece 165 ucsb 2015" to find previous quarter's class websites. They usually have old homeworks, lectures, solutions, etc.
When studying for exams, make equation cheat sheets. Distill all the complex equations, terms, conversions, etc. onto 1-2 pages. Do this even if your class does not allow them during the exam, just making them is a great study practice as it forces you to think about each important thing before an exam. Plus it's a great resource later.
Make a "roadmap" before studying. Usually this can be found in the syllabus. Basically you want to make a list of the topics you will learn so that you can quantify the amount of work you will be doing during the course. This makes your life much easier when studying.
Make a "toolbox" after/during studying. I like to take the key concepts from each chapter or topic and distill it to a single page of graphs, circuits, equations, terms, etc. This becomes a great reference and is a good exercise to parse the large amount of information you are learning into the important bits. Most courses are a bit like gold mining, you have to sift through and find the critical nuggets of information.
At some point you will do poorly on an exam, homework, class, etc. Don't worry! Just take it as a sign that you need to devote more time and effort to the material. You know what they call medical students who get C's? Doctor. You should try your best and take pride in your performance, but if you get hit with a bad grade don't get down, just study harder next time!
Use a planner or homework tracker to keep yourself on schedule. There are a lot of assignments and you would be crazy to try to memorize it all. Just get a nice planner, or use Google Calendar, whatever. Schedule your classes, homework, and (importantly) time for studying.
Get connected on LinkedIn. Connect with your peers and professor on LinkedIn! It's a very useful tool to stay connected in a professional environment and the people hiring at companies always look up applicants on LinkedIn.
Learn to teach yourself. A degree in ECE is partly about learning the specific material, but it is mostly about learning critical thinking and how to teach yourself. These are the two big things that you will use for the rest of your life. At your future job you will have tools that do a lot of the calculations and work for you, but you must know how to teach yourself to use them and to think critically about the applications.
Remember, this is a hard major. So you gotta work hard. It will be a stressful challenge, but you can make your life easier by being smart about how you do the work.
Remember, this is a rewarding major. ECE will pay off! Jobs are often exciting and interesting, and pay well. Here’s some statistics and information: Glassdoor salary estimates, Bureau of Labor Statistics employment stats and occupational outlook