What Second Year Electrical Engineering Students at Umass Amherst can Expect Academically

This is a continuation of my 'What to Expect Academically as a First Year Electrical Engineering Student at Umass Amherst' Article. After completing freshman year, a student should have a very good idea of what is coming next. They should be familiar with digital logic as well with Java or C++. Sophomore year is much more difficult than the year before.

Sophomore Year

As a sophomore, EE students have much less choice in what classes they take than during their freshman year. This is mostly because there is not much room for general education courses during this year. Sophomores have to take as many as three more math classes (Calculus III, Linear Algebra, and Ordinary Differential Equations), before they are allowed to continue onto junior level courses. Students in their second year will also begin to focus on a 'thematic elective'. This is a direction the student chooses to take along with engineering classes. The choices for a thematic elective are business, biology, chemistry, math, physics, and a general science thematic, which combines chemistry, math, and physics.

Circuit Analysis

Remember learning about circuits in Physics II for about one or two weeks? Circuit Analysis is a two-semester course that deals solely with the analyzing of analog circuits. The first half of the fall semester course deals with learning all of the circuit analysis techniques such as nodal, mesh, thevenin equivalence, etc. as well as the most basic principles such as Kirchoff's current and voltage laws. In this course we learn that Ohm's law (V = IR) is one of the most important laws in engineering and physics and we use it over and over again. During the second half of the semester, capacitors and inductors are introduced which give a wild spin on things.

During the spring semester, Circuit Analysis becomes a bit more complicated. The circuits are now all in alternating current (AC) as opposed to direct current (DC), so we have to analyze them in different ways while using the same techniques we learned in the fall. Complex numbers and logarithms become very important at this time.

Programming

In the fall, there is a follow-up to the introductory programming course taken the previous spring. This is called Data Structures and Algorithms. Basically, the student learns how to create data structures using their programming language and how to analyze them to find out how fast the program will run, and how to make it faster. The style of teaching is the same as the year before; there will be several programming projects to be done out of class and there will be evening exams on paper.

Hardware Organization and Design The final engineering course taken during the sophomore year is known as Hardware. This course is a follow-up to the introductory digital logic course taken during the student's freshman year. In this course we learn about basic computer architecture and how everything works. Topics include memory, input/output, power consumption, assembly language, etc. Many students consider this to be the most difficult engineering course up to the point.