EE SFC 2017 Final Report This year, the Electrical Engineering (EE) SFC focused on the following topics: Financial assistance for project spending; encouraging hands-on experience; providing freshmen with more representative exposure to the major; “OutEEach”; and a general discussion of the EE curriculum. We will briefly discuss each of these topics sequentially. Financial assistance for project spending Students pay for project classes out of their own pockets. It was brought to the attention of the EE Student-Faculty Committee that some low-income students may need financial assistance to pay for parts. Ultimately, the committee’s recommendation is the following: If a student has demonstrated financial need, then she should seek out the instructor of the project course privately, and she will get financial assistance. The EE Executive Officer, Prof. Hajimiri, has explicitly endorsed this solution and has made it clear that the department will ensure that students in genuine need will receive financial support. Encouraging hands-on experience Students entering the EE major have less and less hands-on experience. This lack of experience steepens the learning curve for many EE subjects, including canonically theoretical ones such as signals, communications, and control. Thus, the committee sought to find ways to encourage early hands-on experience, and hence accelerate learning. In particular, the committee endorses the following proposed solutions: (1) EE “Starter Kits” and (2) a dedicated “maker’s space.” The starter kits would include basic parts that would allow students to “tinker” and develop their own hobby projects. Example starter kit components include an ATMEGA328, resistor/capacitor boxes, photodiodes, buzzers, switches, BJTs, op amps, LEDs, jumper wires, a breadboard and protoboard, multimeter, tweezers, pliers, basic optical components, and a few circuit diagrams to get students started with building. The maker’s space would be a dedicated set of shared benches, allocated from an existing lab, such as the EE90/91 lab. The maker’s space would include the basic set of tools that already exist on most benches in the EE90/91 lab, such as a soldering iron, power supply, multimeter, oscilloscope, and function generator. Naturally, lab etiquette would need to be enforced. Representative exposure to the EE option Many undeclared freshmen interested in EE as their possible major take APh/EE 9a during the Fall Term. APh/EE 9a is an attractive choice since it satisfies both the Core freshmen lab requirement and an EE option requirement. However, APh/EE 9a is receives poor reviews, and the committee believes that APh/EE 9a is not a representative introduction to the EE option. Thus, the committee recommends the following solutions. First, we encourage EEs to take APh 109 instead of APh/EE 9a. APh 109 is already an accepted alternative to APh/EE 9a, and it receives positive reviews. We also recommend APh/EE 9a be removed as an option requirement. We also encourage incoming freshmen considering the EE option take EE/ME 7. We believe EE/ME 7 would be a more representative introduction to the EE option, and it would also contribute early hands-on experience, as previously discussed. EE/ME 7 ought to be moved from the Winter Term to the Fall Term to facilitate this recommendation.

OutrEEach During our meetings, the committee discussed many more issues than discussed during the EE SFC. We realized that many issues that surface every SFC are merely ​perceived​ issues, such as lack of research opportunities, lack of industry opportunities, or curricular shortcomings. We realized that many perceived issues did not actually exist, and that their perceived existence circulated due to lack of awareness about already-existing solutions and a lack of communication between students and faculty. Thus, the committee encourages students to go to department-wide events such as the Moore Social Hours, EE/MedE/CMS/APh seminars, or other events with the opportunity for networking with faculty members. The committee would also like to assemble an informal committee of students whose primary objective is to distribute resources and organize events that facilitate communication between students and faculty and raise awareness of academic and professional opportunities available to EE students. General discussion A variety of additional subjects were also brought forward in the general discussion portion of the EE SFC that the committee would like to highlight. (1) Students would like greater flexibility in using courses to satisfy the EE option project requirements. Many classes have a substantial project components, but are not considered to satisfy the EE project requirement. For now, faculty members are open to petitions from students in this regard. (2) The 2017 EE SFC focused on issues with the physical side of EE, i.e., issues related to building and implementing hardware. All faculty members present would like to stress the importance of theoretical knowledge in addition to hands-on experience, as theoretical knowledge is a researcher’s limiting factor in doing fundamental work. Furthermore, in addition to the physical world, a substantial portion of the field of EE is dedicated to the information world. Thus, the faculty would like to stress the importance of becoming involved in fields such as signal processing, communication, control, networks, and information theory, to name a few.