How to become an “Electrical Engineer” without going to university?!!

Nowadays, by vast development in internet use and internet speed worldwide, online platforms are growing exponentially. E-learning is part of this growth which makes learning, very easy and efficient. I remember when I was student 15 years ago, there was no famous e-learning platform among students and there were just some video tutorials in some special topics in DVDs or CDs and we could buy them and learn a topic. For other topics, we had to just read books or e-books, but as today, you can find lots of video tutorials in almost any topic in online platforms like Coursera, Udemy, Lynda and etc. In my native language (Farsi), there also are some powerful online platform which provide e-learning services and I am pretty sure that in other languages, online platforms do exist.

By this brief introduction, I want to tell that the path of learning for science lovers is unbelievably easier than the past. You can easily earn a degree in any major in online universities or if you don’t care about a degree, you can just see the prepared video tutorials and become an expert in a specified major. For example, I have BSc in mechanical engineering and MSc in control/robotic engineering from best universities in IRAN and I was Phd student for a while in WPI University in USA. So, I really don’t care to achieve another degree in other major, but I really care about science and engineering and I do care to enhance my knowledge till I am alive in this world.

Let’s get back to the topic of this article. “How to become an Electrical Engineer without going to university?!!”. If you are an engineer in other field than electrical engineering, this way is a little easier for you, because you already passed some courses like “General Mathematics 1”, “General Mathematics 2”, “General Physics 1”, “General Physics 2” and its laboratories. You also passed “Differential Equations”, “Engineering Mathematics”, “Numerical Calculations” and “Advance Programming” courses in your major. To become an electrical engineer, you need to earn knowledge in below course with the orders mentioned below:

• Basic Circuit Theory 1
• Basic Circuit Theory 2
• Logical Circuits
• Engineering Statics and Probability
• Signal and System Analysis
• Engineering Electromagnetism
• Linear Control Systems
• Electronic 1
• Electrical Machine 1
• Communication System 1
• Microprocessors

Above courses are mandatory for any electrical engineer and you need to know all of them. But you should take some other courses according to your interest and the major that you want to study in graduate degree of electrical engineering. For example if you want to pursue power systems, you can take “Electrical Machines 2”, “Electrical Machine 3”, “Power System Analysis 1”, “Power System Analysis 2”, “Power Electronic 1”, “Power Electronic 2” and etc. If you want to learn more about electronic, you can take courses like “Electronic 2”, “Electronic 3”, “Embedded Systems”, “Micro Controllers”, “Applied FPGA”, “VHDL programming” and etc. If you want to choose Communication Systems in graduate studies, you can take courses like “Digital Communication Systems”, “Antenna Design 1”, “Antenna Design 2”, “Advanced Electromagnetism” and etc. If you want to become control engineer in master degree, you can take courses like, “Nonlinear Control”, “Dynamic Systems Modelling”, “Adaptive Control”, “Fuzzy Systems and Fuzzy Control”, “Machine Learning” and etc. You should note that, if you have an engineering degree like mechanical engineering, you can achieve your master degree in electrical engineering and obviously learning the bachelor courses of electrical engineering is on you and you can use online learning platforms for this purpose. I studied all of mandatory courses of electrical engineering and some extra courses in different fields of electrical engineering. If you want to know about the courses I learned and also the reference of each course, you can check the “MY COURSES” page of my website.