I recently finished my Master's in Electrical Engineering at USC, where I specialized in analog, mixed-signal, and RF integrated circuit design, and I now work full time as an engineer in the semiconductor industry. Before that I completed a double bachelor's at USC in Biomedical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience, which meant working all the way through the engineering math sequence before I ever touched a transistor. I mention that only because the math is the part students assume...
I recently finished my Master's in Electrical Engineering at USC, where I specialized in analog, mixed-signal, and RF integrated circuit design, and I now work full time as an engineer in the semiconductor industry. Before that I completed a double bachelor's at USC in Biomedical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience, which meant working all the way through the engineering math sequence before I ever touched a transistor. I mention that only because the math is the part students assume is the obstacle, and it usually isn't.
Teaching to me is a science. Most recently I was a teaching assistant for USC's Introduction to Analog Systems course, where I worked with over eighteen undergraduates on their first real circuits, covering JFET common-source, common-gate and common-drain stages, simulation in NGspice and LTspice, PCB layout in KiCAD, and how to actually read a vector network analyzer and an oscilloscope instead of just pointing one at a board and hoping. Before that I spent four semesters with USC's Science Outreach program running hands-on experiments for first graders on Saturday mornings, I tutored for three years in high school and edited a lot of college essays, and I have taught Indian classical instruments, Dilruba and Tabla, along with Gurmat Sangeet, writing my own syllabus, practice sheets and grading rubric from scratch. Six-year-olds to adults, one on one and in front of a room.
What I want to teach here is the beginning of electrical engineering: Ohm's law, diodes, op-amps, transistor amplifier stages, breadboarding, simulation, and basic PCB design. I explain through analogy first and equations second. I tell my music students that a beat is a plot of land and everything you build has to fit inside it, and I teach circuits the same way. I have designed op-amps, LDOs, and other simple amplifiers in 180nm CMOS across four chip tape-outs, so when a student asks why any of this matters, I can tell them exactly where it goes.
