Signal Integrity (SI) Education in North America

Last year I went to a career fair at a well known university in Southern California to help my company scout out some possible new grads to join the team. I must have talked to many students, and though many were very bright and certainly worth hiring them, I was surprised that only one was familiar with SI. Specially surprising since that university has a great engineering department.

Russ Dill, licensed under CC

The following month, very surprisingly, the story was repeated at another, prestigious university. I was a bit shocked.What is just a coincidence? Maybe the students I talked to missed that class because they were busy trying to cure the hangover after a frat party (no, the stereotype of the engineer as a nerd who does not party is not completely accurate).

I thought, why SI wouldn't be by now a better known area of electrical engineering? Why wouldn't it be a subject introduced in Universities?  After all, learning SI is just like a recipe. All seniors have the basic ingredients to learn it, but it is just a matter of combining all those concepts, and just like a recipe, some proper guidance makes a great chef.

In all fairness, I still need to do proper research. I've found some good SI-related topics on UCLA's page. Maybe universities have some formal SI programs or directed studies, but maybe at the grad level. Besides, SI is a relatively young discipline, and I think universities are naturally slow to keep up with technological advances.

It is important more students know about it as early as possible, since good SI engineers are hard to find, and demand for them should be strong for several years. To the student, that also means job security. Though this is not necessarily everywhere, as I'm finding it here in Vancouver (this deserves it's own post).

I know there were, are and will be more graduates like me, who would prefer knowing early on of as many career paths the electrical engineering profession offers as possible, so they can hopefully figure out which one they'll like to pursue.

GD

With all this in mind however, when I look back, for me not knowing at the moment what I wanted to do with my degree is what got me to learn about SI and discover my career. Like Steve Jobs said in his very famous Standford commencement speech, for me, now I'm just connecting the dots..