In Fall 2025, I took 4 courses as a part of my second year of Electrical Engineering at the University of Ottawa. If you’re curious what the course sequence is like, you can check that out here. Here are my thoughts on each course, as well as some tips for success.
MAT 2322: Calculus III for Engineers
Derivatives as linear maps, the chain rule. The Clairaut-Schwarz theorem. Taylor’s theorem. Implicit function theorem. Extrema, critical points. Lagrange multipliers. Double and triple integrals, Fubini’s theorem, polar, spherical and cylindrical coordinates. Change of variables. Line integrals, Green’s theorem. Parametric surfaces and surface integrals. Curl and Stokes’s theorem, existence of potentials. Divergence and Gauss’s theorem. Applications.
This course wasn’t too bad. It relies a lot more on Calculus I and then it does on Calculus II, and can best be summarized as the application of the concepts learned in Calculus I to the 3D coordinate system. The main point of confusion for this course is figuring out the bounds of integration for iterated integrals (double, triple). Fortunately, not only are there many practice problems available in the textbook (Stewart) - but the setup and bounds become trivial after some amount of problems, since many tend to take the same form. The last bit of the course, dedicated to curl, divergence and surface integrals are quite important for future courses in Electrical Engineering, such as PHY 2323 (Electricity and Magnetism) - so I’d recommend trying to gain a good understand of those concepts.
ELG 2318: Circuit Theory I
DC and sinusoidal steady state (AC) analysis of circuits. Basic passive circuit elements (resistors, capacitors, inductors). Voltage and current sources. Kirchoff laws. Loop and nodal analysis. Circuit theorems: Superposition, Maximum power transfer, Thevenin, Norton. Forced and natural responses of RL and RC circuits using the differential equation approach. Sinusoidal signals, complex numbers, phasors and impedance concepts. Average and RMS quantities. Steady state time-domain behaviour of inductors and capacitors. Complex, average and apparent power. Introduction to the use of electrical measurement equipment and Computer-Aided Design tools to support circuit analysis.
This course covers a lot of content, in a lot of detail - which is very hard to perceive as important when you are learning it. However, the content for this course is extremely important. Mastering the techniques detailed in the course inside out is really the best (and only) way you can set yourself up for success in future ELG courses. To hammer this point home, for the exception of Norton’s Theorem - there is not a single thing in the course description that isn’t fundamental to the courses you take in second semester of second year. Onto some tips for the course. I think the faculty prescribed textbook for this course (Dorf & Sabada) is needlessly complicated. A better suggestion would be Alexander & Sadiku. That’s what I used. The course content itself really just requires a lot of practice. Like many other degrees, electrical engineering has a sort of “language” of communication, that being circuits. It’s important to become well versed and know this stuff like the back of your hand. Prof. Aneta George Traikova is phenomenal for this course.
CEG 2136: Computer Architecture I
Design a digital computer to execute a given instruction set. Design of digital computers. Register transfer and microoperations. Designing the instruction set, CPU and CPU control. Basic machine language programming. Using pipelines for CPU design. Designing the memory unit. Designing Imput-Output subsystem.
I thought this course was quite difficult and required a lot of work to do well in. For starters, the prerequisite to this course (ITI 1100, Digital Systems I) is not demonstrable of the difficulty of this one. In-fact, I would say it’s significantly more challenging and requires a much different type of thinking. Whereas in Digital Systems I you could get by simply memorizing techniques, application and understanding is far more important here. The textbook isn’t much help, neither are the lecture slides (for the most part). The tutorials, however, are a great help. Though not of much personal interest to me, it’s been mentioned a lot of elementary embedded systems works builds of the concepts in this course - which may be useful to you. Prof. Wassim El Ahmar and Prof. Fadi Malek are both pretty good for this one - I had Prof. Wassim.
ADM 1100: Introduction to Business
Gain the knowledge necessary to effectively understand the functions of business and management. Learn what constitutes the manager’s role and how planning, organizing, leading, and controlling are used to oversee the organization’s human, financial, material, and commercial resources. Develop critical business skills including communication and teamwork skills, problem solving and critical thinking skills.
This was my “free” elective for the Fall term. Overall, I think you get in what you put in with these sorts of courses. A lot of the content was highly relevant to the real world, and touched on some important topics - I don’t think I fully appreciated this in the moment. This course offered in the Fall is done entirely online, and the assessment strategy is quite fair. I thought the delivery was quite dull (mostly textbook readings, slideshows) - but overall, an easy course to do well in and offers some interesting insights.
Previous versions of my course reviews can be found on my courses page.