The University of California - Irvine

Date: Feb 12 2005
Major: Electrical Engineering (This Major's Salary over time)
Similar to the previous post about the school's EE program, I agree with the student's comments.

In the EE/CE (now EECS) dept, almost all faculty and TAs are foreigners. I had 2 teachers that spoke understandable english. Some of the labs and projects you will be ill-prepared for. Many of the students do not pay attention or strive to work hard. There is constant cheating and study groups are more like midterm question anticipation sessions.

The EE curriculum (that I went through) had only 1 programming class. The school did not teach us VHDL/Verilog, nor did we extensively use Matlab or Cadence. What really helped me was doing extra projects on my own (all classes have online websites, so if you browse through the previous year's courses you can get a feel of projects you should be able to do).

My sociology and urban planning professors were 10x more friendly and approachable than the EE professors.

Career placement is extremely difficult, and the companies attracted to the school were minimal since it isn't a very reputable school in the tech industry. Sad how even Broadcom doesn't have a booth and their HQ is in Irvine. Of course I was attending during the tech recession, but to have a "career fair" where almost no companies are accepting resumes and merely have booths just to tell you to apply online is not very encouraging.