Re:Electrical engineering
by hga on Sunday February 07, 2010 @12:52PM
(#1107958)
You were correct; the idea was that no MIT EECS graduate should be completely at sea if he had to do some programming or had some weird electrical problem to deal with (as a nearly total CS type, I can tell you the latter is extremely valuable):
The early '80s curriculum had a core of 6.001-4, in a word or phrase they were SICP, Kirchhoff's law, Laplace transforms, and low level architecture (gates and circuits, microcode and assembler).
Those were hard courses, each 15 units compared to the normal 12 for a typical course (one unit equals one nominal hour of work a week). I and others can attest that even if you were an experienced Lisp hacker 6.001 made you sweat blood.
That system is no more, the department panicked when the dot.com bust resulted in an unprecedented and permanent crash in undergraduate enrollment, which had been steady for decades.
So they terminated 6.001 with extreme prejudice and replaced the mandatory core with two new "fun and exciting" (but still hard) courses, 6.01 and 6.02. The first is robots programed with Python and the second is communications inspired by cell phone networks the last time I checked (I haven't looked hard at it).
After that there are different paths that can be taken by majors focusing on EE, CS or both, but almost all of the current student body goes for the later.
So MIT grads starting about now are a "new thing", a different "product"; obviously they will still have a fair understanding of both, but the guarantee for one of them is much lower. And you are of course you aren't going to see many who are in it for the money alone.
The early '80s curriculum had a core of 6.001-4, in a word or phrase they were SICP, Kirchhoff's law, Laplace transforms, and low level architecture (gates and circuits, microcode and assembler).
Those were hard courses, each 15 units compared to the normal 12 for a typical course (one unit equals one nominal hour of work a week). I and others can attest that even if you were an experienced Lisp hacker 6.001 made you sweat blood.
That system is no more, the department panicked when the dot.com bust resulted in an unprecedented and permanent crash in undergraduate enrollment, which had been steady for decades.
So they terminated 6.001 with extreme prejudice and replaced the mandatory core with two new "fun and exciting" (but still hard) courses, 6.01 and 6.02. The first is robots programed with Python and the second is communications inspired by cell phone networks the last time I checked (I haven't looked hard at it).
After that there are different paths that can be taken by majors focusing on EE, CS or both, but almost all of the current student body goes for the later.
So MIT grads starting about now are a "new thing", a different "product"; obviously they will still have a fair understanding of both, but the guarantee for one of them is much lower. And you are of course you aren't going to see many who are in it for the money alone.