I do recall discussing with my lecturer the absurdity of giving Gustav Kirchhoff the credit for something so blindingly obvious.
What annoys me most is homework problems with meaningless impossible schematics and then students and graduate engineers don’t recognize examples in real life.

 

I do recall discussing with my lecturer the absurdity of giving Gustav Kirchhoff the credit for something so blindingly obvious.
What annoys me most is homework problems with meaningless impossible schematics and then students and graduate engineers don’t recognize examples in real life.

True. By meaningless I suppose you mean this type of circuit:

Granted; Though I find it fun to solve simply for the intellectual pleasure of it, I can't honestly say I found to many practical uses for this type of circuit. Though it does help you learn the basics which are very important, it does little else.

 

Thank everyone with many feedbacks.
It's not uncommon to see misleading thinking like that and beginners may get confused.

 

Thank everyone with many feedbacks.
It's not uncommon to see misleading thinking like that and beginners may get confused.

On top of that truth, it is also true that those unwilling to learn tend to make excuses for their failures.
And who can know the extent of what they will be doing, and needing to know in an engineering career while still in school??

 

On top of that truth, it is also true that those unwilling to learn tend to make excuses for their failures.
And who can know the extent of what they will be doing, and needing to know in an engineering career while still in school??

This last point was one of the things that had me and most of my classmates shaking our heads back in the early '80s with course evaluation forms started being the norm (well, they probably were the norm at most schools years earlier because the school I went to tended to be a decade behind the lasted trends, for which I was ever grateful). Here we were being asked to evaluate the course on the relevance of what it was teaching and we were like, "Duh. The reason we're taking the course is because we don't know what's relevant!".

 

This last point was one of the things that had me and most of my classmates shaking our heads back in the early '80s with course evaluation forms started being the norm (well, they probably were the norm at most schools years earlier because the school I went to tended to be a decade behind the lasted trends, for which I was ever grateful). Here we were being asked to evaluate the course on the relevance of what it was teaching and we were like, "Duh. The reason we're taking the course is because we don't know what's relevant!".

Certainly true. How would I know that kinemetics would matter to an EE as much as they did, or that writing and speaking skills would be handy? That fundamental circuit analysis would be useful for fault analysis in digital circuits done by email? That is how I repaired a testing machine on the north side of Hudson Bay, in February, from my cube office in Troy Michigan. And feedback system insights to know why a hydraulic pressure control is unstable.( It was an overly elastic hose connected to a pressure transducer.) A steel tube solved the problem of the phase lag.

 

Certainly true. How would I know that kinemetics would matter to an EE as much as they did, or that writing and speaking skills would be handy? That fundamental circuit analysis would be useful for fault analysis in digital circuits done by email? That is how I repaired a testing machine on the north side of Hudson Bay, in February, from my cube office in Troy Michigan. And feedback system insights to know why a hydraulic pressure control is unstable.( It was an overly elastic hose connected to a pressure transducer.) A steel tube solved the problem of the phase lag.

The mechanical systems insight is something I find very hard to train people for. I get math and electronic wizards by the dozen but the ones that are also mechanically inclined are a treasure. You do need to ask the correct questions to make sure their hobby is not perpetual motion machines.

 

Before we can design anything, we need to understand the inter-relationships of the basic physical units. Without that understanding, we are limited to trial and error and a lot of failure. The general rules mentioned above are just extensions of the basics.

 

Example use in design:
Below is a simple op amp circuit with a non-inverting gain of 1.5 and an output offset of -0.75 volts for a specific signal conditioning requirement.
The required resistor values are trivial to calculate if you use the Thevenin equivalent voltage and resistance for R1 and R3 (if the calculations are done in the proper order).
Otherwise, the calculations likely would involve the solving of some messy simultaneous equations.

 

The mechanical systems insight is something I find very hard to train people for. I get math and electronic wizards by the dozen but the ones that are also mechanically inclined are a treasure. You do need to ask the correct questions to make sure their hobby is not perpetual motion machines.

I did have one job interview for an EE position where they did ask me to name some small carburetor brands. I said that I was familiar with Carter, Holley, and Weber, but they were not small. They explained that was to see if I had worked with small engines. I told them, only Briggs, Clinton, .Tecumseh, and REO. That was good enough for them. But it was several jobs after that before I got to do a lot of mechanical designs, as well as pneumatic and hydraulic designs. And I learned how to run the mill, lathe, and surface grinder. Very useful tools. I could have take the ME courses in college and had a double degree, but tuition kept rising and I ran out of money. But I did take statics, dynamics, materials, and all 4 physics segments.
After graduating I studied thermodynamics, kinematics, and organic chemistry on my own.
The one thing I never needed to use was matrix algebra.