The difficulty of each year is largely person to person, but first year is a big jump from high school. Third year is the first time general engineering fundamentals become major specific.

Calculus I/II/III, Differential Equations and Linear Algebra are core classes that come up (for the most part, in some way) in almost all other classes in all degrees. It’s important to know them well.

Algebra skills are foundational to the degree, operations on polynomials and the manipulation of algebraic expressions are the longest parts of questions and the easiest to mess up.

There is a lot of general engineering coursework in first year (Physics I, Mechanics, Chemistry) that will likely not have any future bearing on your degree but can appear to be indicative of your future success in the program while you take them. This is obviously not the case.

The advice of “don’t just memorize” is not as cut and dried as people make it seem. In many cases, all there is to do is just memorize. There is very little point learning the “why” of any of the Calculus courses. Not only will it be deeply out of grasp for the academic background you have, but it also will serve you very little value in your future courses. For engineering classes, this advice is less applicable since it could serve you in the future. Even if you take this to be the case, you will find that the “why” behind something you learn in class is in fact deeply intertwined with something also out of your grasp to learn, and will be taught later on in your program. Furthermore, you shouldn’t assume that learning the “why” will make doing the problems easier. Although it might make it more clear why you’re employing the steps you are, becoming good at problems is more a matter of practice and less a matter of understanding. Learning the “why” also happens, most of the time, through practice and not by passively reading the notes or listening to the lecture.

Circuits I is the most important class in the entire degree by a mile. There are no concepts taught in this course that will not appear in future classes. KCL and KVL are super important to know. You should invest a lot of time into learning the class, more than you think is needed.

You probably should know how to code in some language. Python is very useful, as well as VHDL or Verilog.

It’s worth spending a lot of time ensuring you know MATLAB and Simulink. The resources in the degree don’t teach it as well as online YouTube videos. It’s more important as a verification tool (in the context of labs) than it is a raw design tool.

Not knowing what “stream” of Electrical Engineering you want to do is very normal and is definitely not a cause for worry. This is what fourth year is for. Separately, your classes will not give you this indication unless you’ve built a strong enough foundation that you can understand the math behind it.

If you could think of the degree as a spectrum, with school on one side and your job on the other, in between would be labs. Labs are supposed to fill the practical gap that school doesn’t have, but your job will require. Unfortunately, this is not the case, as the labs are inherently intertwined with school, and focus less on the proficiency of lab skills and more on the verification of known results. This doesn’t render them invaluable, and for the sake of getting through them, learning how to use a multimeter and oscilloscope is valuable.

A lot of the degree relies on Calculus, but an even larger amount of the degree relies on being able to draw circuits well. This may seem like terrible advice, but it’s true. If your schematic is messy, it is extremely hard to make sense of what’s going on. In some classes, like Electronics, the correct drawing of the diagram is the majority of the marks, as it is impossible to reveal the “trick” without drawing the diagram right. There are a few tips for this. First, drawing them neatly helps. Secondly, I find the advice of “focus on understanding what’s happening” to be a bit misleading (see the final point in the engineering section). For all intents and purposes, you should see okay results by gaining a rough understanding and taking the rest to be fact.

Quality tends to be worth more than quantity when it comes to clubs, assuming that the quality is noticeably greater than the quantity. If you would deem the quality of your activities to be roughly equal to the potential quantity you could otherwise have, take the quantity (for the reason specified below). The only caveat to this is when the quantity would be something ridiculous, like 10 clubs, which is clearly a bad idea.

Clubs have diminishing returns. There are two types of things you can gain from clubs: soft skills and hard skills. Hard skills have diminishing returns in the sense that they can become obsolete after your first job, provided the club isn’t something extremely hands-on and technical. Soft skills don’t, in the sense that you don’t get the chance to demonstrate many of them (leadership, for example) on the job. However, the bar that needs to be met for you to be proficient at this skill is lower than many people think. To that end you’re probably better off not pooling all your time into one activity early on, so as to broaden your exposure to the range of soft and hard skills on offer before committing.

Leadership in clubs is where most of the learning is, and the leadership positions worth having usually go to people who’ve stuck around and dedicated a lot of time. If you can take up a leadership position in a club you should. Leadership in clubs is paradoxical, in that the more time you put into it the harder it seems to get. Because you’re all university students, normal leadership advice doesn’t really apply. You likely shouldn’t take it too seriously and should take most of what you hear with a grain of salt.

If you do choose to take on a leadership position in your club, really try your best. There are many reasons for this, but the biggest one is that you’re dragging 15-20 other people along on a journey they may stand to gain less out of. Done wrong, this can lead to a lot of frustration. Done right, and it should seem like the roles are an afterthought, and it’s more a group of friends doing something they all enjoy.