Are Hams Better Electrical Engineering Students?
Q: Have any study been done on this? I'm surprised that the ARRL hasn't researched this. (Or have they?) I am willing to bet that electrical engineering majors who operate ham radio (or who participate in other EE-related hobbies) tend to do better than their nonham counterparts. I know I would have been a MUCH better student if I had been a ham radio operator when I entered college as an electrical engineering major. Without ham radio (or any other practical experience), SWR, Smith Charts, matching networks, and other concepts were just mumbo jumbo I had to plow through in order to get through classes. It took ham radio to enable me to truly grasp what I studied. I would expect to see that EE hams, as a group, earn better GPAs, are less likely to drop out or change majors, are more likely to be actively involved in EE-related extracurricular activities (like IEEE and various contests), get better jobs, and are more likely to earn graduate degrees in EE. I'm also willing to bet that even after one adjusts for differences in SAT scores, high school class rank, and other admission criteria, EE hams still earn better GPAs than their nonham counterparts. If I were the head of a college or university EE department, I would pull out all stops to recruit ham radio operators into the student body and faculty. I would also work with the school ham radio club to recruit new hams on campus and in the surrounding community.
A: -I don't think amateur radio qualifications are worth anything much in electrical engineering. I decided to enter the exam just for the hell of it. The night before the exam I read the licensing conditions and got a credit for that part and a destinction for theory. Quite frankly, it was piss-easy. I have no other qualifications in electronics, apart from attending an HND bridge course for nearly a year and having worked and played in electronics most of my life. I kept my AR license up for one solitary year before I realized what it was really like -Depends. If they are like that idiot DaveD that responded that he only did it for the fun of passing the exam, the license has all the worth of breasts on a bull. If they are like most of us who earned the damned thing in high school and experimented (and got zapped a few times) all the way through graduate school...I'd hire one of those persons in a second over a PhD that never smelled hot solder in their life. -You'd probably find that ham radio has nothing to do with it. Rather, the type of student who really is interested in the field, and probably does well in studies, is more inclined to operate ham radio. I personally have never seen the need to run a ham set, although I used to listen in on a multi-band radio when I was ten years old. I suppose if you narrowed it down a *lot* more, for example look at those engineers specializing in wireless technology, you'd find a better correlation. But I really don't think it was the ham set that did the trick; rather, those most likely to get involved in their studies may have had more desire to operate one. I always had more of an interest in computer interfacing and stuff. I suppose the parallel would be heavy use of the internet for communicating with others over large distances! -I'm probably an exception. I was a lousy EE student. I worked my way through engineering school doing circuit design (and with a little financial help from my former employer, the U.S. government), and was constantly frustrated by the huge gap between what I was learning and what I needed to know to solve the real-world problems I encountered daily in my job. The professors had almost no idea of what the real world was like. (Example: In frustration, I asked the head-in-the-clouds 20-something year old PhD math instructor trying to teach us differential equations to help us get connected by solving a simple mass-spring problem. "Masses? Springs?" he replied. "What do differential equations have to do with masses and springs?") A 2.0 GPA was required to graduate, and I felt (and still feel) that graduating with 2.01 was a waste of one half of one percent of my time. I did end up overshooting, but not by much. I had no trouble finding a job after graduating, since while I was going to school I had designed all or a major part of ten production instruments for the small company I worked for. And after the first job, no one cared less about a GPA, as it should be. About the happiest day of my life was when I finally got finished with the stupidity of that "education". Later on, from time to time I was called on to do screening interviews of college students for the large company I worked for. Ironically, I wouldn't have qualified for most of the interviews myself, not having the minimum GPA required of the students I interviewed. I've found that GPA has very little correlation to a person's ability as a design engineer. The GPA measures the ability to analyze prepared problems and repeat back what's expected, while design work requires synthesizing solutions, a very different process (which does, however, require analytical skills). What I find to be a much better indicator of engineering skill is curiosity, something not generally encouraged in engineering school. A good design engineer is simply bugged if something shows up that he can't understand or that doesn't work like he thought it did, and will stick at the problem until it's understood. In the interviews, I was much more interested in any kind of hobby activities they did on their own,