My Major and Real Life

When I applied to U of I's Electrical Engineering department, I honestly didn't really know what I was getting myself into. All I knew was that when I grew up, I wanted to be a professor doing R&D in the more theoretical materials side of nanotechnology, and according to the post-doc I worked for at Portland State University, the way to obtain a job in said field is to get a PhD in electrical engineering. That said, if taking ECE 110 (the introductory course to electrical and computer engineering) has taught me anything, it has been that electrical engineering is an incredibly broad field. That really isn't a bad thing, but I've approached the end of my freshman year knowing very little more about nanotechnology that when I started.

Granted, I didn't expect to learn a lot about nanotechnolgy in my freshman year. Judging from what I know about the field, it seems that the foundation for understanding nanotechnology isn't really laid until sophomore year when I'll be taking Physics 213 (Thermodynamics) and Physics 214 (Modern Physics). Even then, I probably will only have a minimal understanding of the field and will need to take further Quantum Mechanics and Materials Science courses before I start to actually get anywhere.

That brings me to my next point, which is that if you read a paper from Nanoletters (an academic journal dedicated to nanotechnology), you'll find that nanotechnology is more than anything a hybrid of Electrical Engineering and Material Science. Since I'm in the not in the Material Science & Engineering (MatSE) department, I had no idea how I was going to end up taking courses in the department until one of my professors started talking about the requirements for James Scholars, a campus honors program.

For James Scholars, juniors and seniors are expected to complete either a separate minor, another major, or a capstone project. The capstone project was of special interest to me, because apparently the idea is that you can outline a list of courses to take such that you specialize in a specific field, which in my case, would be nanotechnology. In fact, you can even count research in the specific field towards your capstone project, something which I'm really pumped about. I doubt that it's impossible to do what I need to do without the guiding hand of the capstone project, but it does give me an organized way to complete all this. At the very least, it has got me thinking about my four year plan and planning out what courses I want to take, rather than my previous strategy of just semi-randomly picking out courses.

Maybe I'm still talking out my butt about all this, but I feel better than ever about how my schooling will play itself out. Even though my courses right now are just building up the to real deal, at least I know that in four years, I'll be able to read Nanoletters and have a basic understanding of what's going on.