Advice from recent grads and professors to 1st and 2nd year Australian EE students as relayed through a 2nd year Australian EE/CS student (yours truly).

General

  • Debug your motivation; find your ‘why’. You’re in this degree for a reason, right? A good reason?
    • Motivation tends to crater around 2nd/3rd year. Just hang on tight – it gets better. Career satisfaction ends up (allegedly) being quite high if you picked the degree for the right reasons (which seem to be, as a general rule: good at physics/math, find electrical devices and their operation inherently fascinating and like problem solving and building practical stuff and Making The World A Better Place)
    • Have a solid friend group (or you die)
  • Don’t try to make everything perfect. Figure out your priorities; submit things that aren’t perfect rather than get zero for missing the deadline.
    • Engineering is the art of compromise – get used to it!
  • Stay up to date with developments in EE. Read IEEE Spectrum for news on exciting new fields of research/frontiers of technology; read Engineers Australia’s ‘create’ magazine for stuff like news on new startups, general developments in engineering in Australia, etc.
  • The school has a bunch of interesting resources: fibre optics draw tower (???), high voltage lab, semiconductor fab (where???)

Internships and Career

  • There are a hell of a lot of different career paths to go down. You have a lot of freedom as an EE. Try to get a taste for the cross-section when doing internships etc.
  • You will like some parts of EE and not others. Focus on your strengths; recognise that other people might have different strengths
  • Internships – you will get rejected a LOT. Important thing is to get your foot in the door – consider applying ahead of graduation/penultimate year so you can get application and interview experience
  • Protip: Small companies are less likely to have a HR department. A HR department is effectively a firewall for people trying to get into the company. If you email a small company, there is a very real chance that you will be talking directly to an actual engineer, which is great, because they have been in your position before and know what it’s like and may look kindly upon thee.
    • Just apply to both small AND large companies. Apply !!!!!
  • Your internship may suck. Awesome – now you know to look for places that AREN’T like it
  • Cold-email companies. Attend networking events. GO TO THE INDUSTRY NIGHTS. Make a plan, make a plan B, make plans C-Z. This part sucks, but this is pretty much the only time in your career it will suck this much in this specific way because once you have a job, you’re home and hosed
  • Follow stuff on LinkedIn – what looks interesting?
  • Julien – “it is enough to get through the program”; “I have an incredible amount of respect to people whose marks dropped off but still made it through the program”; “I know people who have led very successful and fulfilling careers with a WAM of 47”

Thesis

  • Look at thesis topics and talk to potential supervisors in advance of doing the actual thesis course. Protip: you can enrol in the thesis course (4951) and see the thesis topics without actually being in your honours year
    • There is some kind of thesis open day?

Electives

  • Go along to the lectures of a bunch of elective courses in the first week of term to see what looks good

Postgrad Research

  • Aim for first-class honours
  • People go into research for different reasons
  • Talk to professors
  • Industry and research can cross over quite a bit; industry can sponsor PhDs and masters; the way this usually works is that an engineer will want to upskill but the company wants to keep them on (presumably this means you have to be a pretty dang good engineer)
    • “Industry PhD” – company very involved in the thesis topic? Not new, but increasingly common (and more likely to be named what it is)

Hardware Startups

  • Skilled professionals are in high demand in hardware startups
    • Skillset is pretty much stuff you only pick up in industry, but if you have experience with PCB design and the like it helps a little when you’re starting out
  • The factors at play: hardware startups need a different strategy than software because hardware is more expensive than software – much higher upfront investment, so investment avenues look pretty different. Hardware is generally going to be a little more rough-and-tumble than software; compare Canva’s catering to panellist’s experience picking through recycling bins for materials at his internship startup (!!)
  • Apparently our uni’s entrepreneur course for EEs (4445) is really good – check it out. Consider talking to François and Torsten too
  • Keep an eye out for the ‘Semiconductor Sector Service Bureau’ (??)