Every day I learn more of my own incompetence.

So do we....!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(Oh, c'mon! You didn't think someone would pick that thing up?)

 

That may be why I'm a college dropout. I was taking classes to learn more about the circuits I was designing and working on in my job as an R&D Technician. The department chairman at the school I was attending didn't think that was wise and mandated that I follow their prescribed path (he had to approve my course selections). I was there to learn and didn't give a rip about the degree; hence, I'm a dropout because of some academic's opinion and narrow mind...

Did it occur to you that maybe exposure to the entire field of electrical engineering that a "traditional curriculum" forces upon students might be useful? In fact, so useful that it is the product of 100 years of tuning to be the most efficient way of instilling an understanding of the basics that will serve any endeavor, rather than a few specifics in a narrow field?

Everyone knows really smart people without college degrees; drilling down into that is a waste of time. The original point was about two different information paths, not about the physical details of the paths. Jim Williams may not have graduated, but he school he attended and then worked at for years was MIT. Just drinking the water there constitutes a traditional theory-first learning experience. Inside or outside a classroom? Don't care.

ak

 

So do we....!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(Oh, c'mon! You didn't think someone would pick that thing up?)

 

Did it occur to you that maybe exposure to the entire field of electrical engineering that a "traditional curriculum" forces upon students might be useful?

Without wanting to come across as being overly sarcastic; yes, it did occur to me. Just as it occurred to me that not everyone will benefit from it simply because it worked for many others...

I think trying to discourage someone from taking a non-traditional path when they state that the traditional path doesn't work for them is a greater waste of time. The OP may find that traditional is better than non-traditional; he won't know unless he tries. I'm encouraging him to try...

 

I think trying to discourage someone from taking a non-traditional path when they state that the traditional path doesn't work for them is a greater waste of time.

I depends on the reasons it doesn't work. If they can't handle the subject because it's too advanced then maybe it's just something they shouldn't do until they have a better handle on the fundamentals. If it's lack of motivation then it's their problem. Motivation can be a hard nut to crack if you make excuses like 'this is not working for ME'.

 

I depends on the reasons it doesn't work. If they can't handle the subject because it's too advanced then maybe it's just something they shouldn't do until they have a better handle on the fundamentals. If it's lack of motivation then it's their problem.

I agree. Electronics or Electrical engineering aren't for everyone; regardless of what they want to do, they might not have the proper combination of motivation, intellect, and means to be successful. The bottom line is that you won't know until you give it your best effort.

The OP hasn't weighed back in on this topic, but he says he tried the traditional method and it didn't work. Further, he thinks a non-traditional method might be more appropriate for him.

We could encourage him to try the traditional method longer, try a non-traditional method, or walk away. I choose to encourage him to follow a path he thinks might work better for him. He might find that it works for him or he might find that it doesn't. In either case, it's an experience to learn from.

 

I was already an old dog when I went back to school. I both witnessed in my classmates and experienced the same as OP. The biggest difference was that being an old dog I knew through experience that if you want to be good at something you must master the fundamentals and at least be aware of where the finger is on the pulse.

One of my teachers would occasionally rant about people on their last semester and because of the math they had been going through the 2 years before, they had forgotten about Ohm's law and tried to use all kinds of complex math to solve the problems when it could simply be broken down into fundamentals.

It was his kind of saying that what we learn on our first semester does not become invalid later on.

 

Wow, thanks all for the responses. I guess how I shall continue learning has been decided for me. I am not able to take formal classes at this time. And the resources I was originally looking for do not seem to be common enough. Fortunately, the standard presentation of electronics does contain it in snippets. The Internet makes it easy to read about a topic from 10 different perspectives and that helps as much as anything else could. Also, I am trying to learn by doing. (I have a breadboarded Tillman preamp next to me.) The trouble I have bridging the top level concepts with the low levels ones could probably be handled by spending some time with a tutor.

 

Wow, thanks all for the responses. I guess how I shall continue learning has been decided for me. I am not able to take formal classes at this time. And the resources I was originally looking for do not seem to be common enough. Fortunately, the standard presentation of electronics does contain it in snippets. The Internet makes it easy to read about a topic from 10 different perspectives and that helps as much as anything else could. Also, I am trying to learn by doing. (I have a breadboarded Tillman preamp next to me.) The trouble I have bridging the top level concepts with the low levels ones could probably be handled by spending some time with a tutor.

I don't think anyone here decided it for you, we just gave our personal experiences on how to get from point A to B. How much it was worth to you has a direct relationship on what you paid for it. The exact course is yours to travel in a exciting field of study. The main thing is don't give up on your dreams and when you have several problems always work on the hardest one first because the seemingly easy ones can kick your butt in the end.

 

Learn electronics by designing circuits from scratch or by modifying existing ones.Building kits is useless unless you want to practice soldering.Start with Ohm's Law and Kirchhoff's Law. Get yourself a circuit simulator like LTspiceIV which should help you figure out what is going on in the circuit.Buy a multimeter a cheap one will be fine or even better build yourself one.

 

The trouble I have bridging the top level concepts with the low levels ones could probably be handled by spending some time with a tutor.

If you have specific questions you can ask them here on the forum. There are many knowledgeable "tutors" that can help you learn either top down or bottom up.

By the way, yours is a common problem... You need to know what can be done (top down) before you can understand how to do it... But you need to understand the tools to understand what you can do (bottom up). This problem is made more difficult by modern day devices that look simple but are very hard to understand -- at almost any level.

 

Wow, thanks all for the responses. I guess how I shall continue learning has been decided for me. I am not able to take formal classes at this time. And the resources I was originally looking for do not seem to be common enough. Fortunately, the standard presentation of electronics does contain it in snippets. The Internet makes it easy to read about a topic from 10 different perspectives and that helps as much as anything else could. Also, I am trying to learn by doing. (I have a breadboarded Tillman preamp next to me.) The trouble I have bridging the top level concepts with the low levels ones could probably be handled by spending some time with a tutor.

Here is a link to an EE curriculum in Saudi Arabia.

http://opencourseware.kfupm.edu.sa/colleges/ces/ee/ee.asp

ak

 

It's not so much far from learning to play an instrument.

You want to be able to play the solo from ride the lightning by metallica. (example)
But like many people starting out playing an instrument. It is hard even to play simple songs to begin with.(many people quit in less than a month trying to be able to play an instrument).
But by being a stubborn person victory shall be ours! Going through all kinds of songs that you did not set out to learn and being able to play them flawlessly while every now and then visiting the song you wanted to play to begin with. Slowly but surly the day becomes that you'll shred that axe like a damned man on fire.

Short version. Good practice will get you closer to perfect if you let it.

 

I wish I had the chance to learn electronics and related disciplines in an organized way.

That much praised "learn by doing" (I had no other options because of my job, anyway) made for wasting the hell of time by guessing/wondering/trying to find small bits of very basic info here and there and, even more, asking me continuously, "why this is not working as expected?". And please, do not tell me I like to be spoon fed. No, that is not the idea.

A too incomplete background is not good and works like a badly paved road full of potholes that you cannot see in advance. Tiring and frustrating.

Nowadays, finding the basics, seems (is it really?) easier because of the Web but even then, the quality of the info is more than often, dubious. You spend more time looking for or trying to collect a consistent mass of knowledge than really learning. If that suggests books and classes, well, you are in my line of thought.

I hate scattered information that never comes to make the point about things. The new trend, as in this site and so many blogs, where some illuminated author writes some 40 lines of text throws 10 formulas 3 schematics and it is considered good information. Consistent basic knowledge is good so you rarely have to look back and revisit basics.

To a certain point I consider this as climbing a long ladder. But that, to me, means going up.

Just a note: for abstract disciplines, students always complain about how boring and useless they are. Usually they are the laziest in the group. There you have it! There are options like growing water lilies instead...

 

A too incomplete background is not good and works like a badly paved road full of potholes that you cannot see in advance. Tiring and frustrating.

If you have a choice, bottom up will usually be better. But, as you said, you don't often have a choice. Most of my learning has been top down because I worked in fields where most of what we were doing wasn't in text books. Sometimes I had a good foundation, sometimes I didn't... Whenever I found that there were holes in my understanding, I tried to fill those holes.

An alternative to top down learning is the type of training you get taking vendor classes. That's the way I learned most of the programming languages I needed to use in my work. I learned a couple while I was in high school, but C, Pascal, Mainsail, LISP, and a handful of specialized languages either weren't taught or hadn't been invented yet. A one week class and you're fairly competent; I'd never go back to the bottom up approach for a language. If you already have a firm grasp on programming principles, a term to learn a language would be painfully slow.