What Is Your Favorite Class?– Matt Chang (senior, Electrical Engineering)

I’ve been in college for over three years but I can’t really put my finger on one course and say, “that’s my absolute favorite course”! Thinking back, the courses that have most perked my interest are also the courses that have had lab components. It’s an odd thought because let’s be serious: no one’s excited to be in any one place doing work for more than two hours (unless there’s free food). In retrospect, however, these are the courses where we’ve done the coolest things; these are the courses where we get to actually apply the theory we’ve learned in the classroom and make it come to life.

Let me give you a few examples. In my basic circuitry class, we created our own sound cards. We did all the math, determined all the necessary parts, and actually soldered the parts onto the board. The sound card actually works: it has volume control, base/treble control, even an LED volume display. We took the board home and could hook it up to iPods and computers to play through the speaker. It was actually a handy portable speaker system. In digital signal processing, we used digital filters and algorithms to simulate a concert environment with echoes and reverberations. We even programmed the basics of autotune and tried it out on our own voices. Do things work perfectly (Can I rap?)? Uh, no, but that’s a (big) part of engineering. Neat connections exist between the theory we’re taught in the classroom and what that theory can do in practical systems. These are connections that we probably never knew about, but when that Eureka moment hits, it leaves us in awe at the scientists and engineers before us. Lab gives us one way to bridge that gap between theory and application, between the classroom and the real world.

-Matt Chang