CompE or CS?
By Joel Jordan


     For many beginning students, the distinction between electrical/computer engineering and computer science is quite fuzzy.  Since the classes you take now will invariably determine the career path you're stuck with for the rest of your life (assuming of course, that your career as a professional kazoo player fails to take off), I've prepared a short quiz that can help you determine whether you should be taking ECE classes or CS classes.  Try to answer all the questions immediately without thinking about the answers too much.

1) A virtual machine is:

  1. An abstraction of an underlying computer architecture that lets us create beautiful, portable programs.
  2. An evil, bloated program that sits on top of the dazzling intricacies of the computer itself to provide stale, boring interfaces.
  3. Something that can't be soldered, and therefore not worth knowing about.

2) The x86 instruction set is:
  1. Is that like MIPS?
  2. Stack-based floating point unit? Stack-based floating point unit?
  3. The book I use to prop up my oscilloscope.

3) A good way to store data for fast access is:
  1. Using a B-tree implemented in C++.
  2. Using blocks of SRAM cache on the processor core.
  3. Using large pads of green graph paper.

4) The best programming language is:
  1. C/C++.
  2. Assembly.
  3. Solder.

5) Object-oriented programming is:
  1. A convenient way to make programs more modular and code more reusable, while providing for better conceptual understanding.
  2. Slow, bloated, and inefficient compared to my assembly code.
  3. Not as fun as drawing Smith Charts.

6) A digital signal processor is:
  1. Is that like MIPS?
  2. A chip with an extremely parallel architecture, allowing for fast memory accesses and multiply-accumulates.
  3. A fancy way of doing this better suited for op-amps.

7) What is Moore's Law?
  1. Every eighteen months, code becomes more abstract and beautiful.
  2. Every eighteen months, the number of transistors on chips doubles.
  3. What makes programmers lazier than me.
    4.

For each of the questions on the left, if you answered A give yourself one point,  two points for B, and three for C.   Add up your total score and compare it to the chart below:


7-10 points

     Computer Science all the way.   Don't even go near Everitt Lab


11-16 points

     Right in the middle.  Play it safe and go for CompE. You can always switch later.


18-21 points

     You were born to be an Electrical Engineer.  Now go back to your lab bench where you belong.

Chair: Joel Jordan
Email: sigarch@acm.uiuc.edu

Meeting Time: Thursday 7:00 PM
Place:  L510 DCL

     After completing the amazing Digital Dancer project for Engineering Open House, SIGArch is not content to rest on its laurels.  We're changing our name to The ACM Dancing All-Stars, and our troupe will be debuting its show, entitled FFT, at an upcoming ACM general meeting.  The show's music, choreography, and even costumes will all be designed by a computer, using state of the art DSP techniques.
      Meanwhile, non-dancing SIGArch members will continue to program PIC micro-controllers to do amazing things, with the hope that one of our creations will achieve sentience and take over the world. We'll also be designing more custom circuit boards for strange applications like serial and USB interfacing, which we'll use to build the ultimate party lighting system.
     Also, look for the upcoming SIGArch Ladies. Night, the annual party where SIGArch shows its appreciation to women in engineering. Further details can be found on our web site as the event nears.

3