EE is Hard

Happened to read about an article online introducing in layman’s words (well, probably not so layman if you never took a signal processing related course) about wavelet transform, its background, applications, and relevance to Fourier transformation. Thought it was so cool and what a pity that I did not have access to such good learning materials when I studied signal processing many years ago as an undergraduate student.

But I soon realized that even if I read it way earlier, it might not help that much. Learning Fourier transform and wavelet transform is hard if all you have are a bunch of rigorously pruned mathematical formulas (does any EE veteran still remember how struggling it was to be exposed to continuous time Fourier transform at first, then followed by discrete time Fourier transform, and all of a sudden all sorts of jargons flying around that perplexed you like never before?). Yet, as a layman you probably will not obtain much from an introduction all written in friendly ambiguous terms. Why? Because you have no hands-on experience at all, never did a back-of-the-envelope derivation of some formula, never wrote any code to generate a signal and analyzed its spectrum with Matlab or observed waveform and its frequency plot on a physical spectrum analyzer, how can you possibly form any in-depth understanding of such transforms by merely listening to somebody talking about very high-level concepts or analogies?

EE is hard. Most students before college have no access to EE related learning resources. You buy a computer and you can start coding right away, but few have the opportunity to make a functioning circuit – let alone do some signal processing, not even trivial ones. A lot of concepts in EE originate from engineering problems, then theorists generalize them, define them in rigorous mathematical equations, with the ultimate goal of re-applying them to our real life problems. Often our college students only see the mathematical part of it, and it would take many years of training to enable them to understand the logic under the scene, which is like a blind person tries to understand an elephant’s body with his bare hand by mere touching.