Bypass capacitors are used in analog circuits as well. Not sure what is wrong about that uni. Anyways I am a former physicist and do not have any formal education in electronics. I learned electronics on my own and bypass capacitors were definitely not the last thing to come by.
I think your experience reinforces my point that you can get to be proficient in electronics from either end: formal theoretical education leading to hands-on, or hands-on with theoretical learned as needed. Your case seems like the latter, and you learned about bypass capacitors early on. My case was the former, and I learned about them later.
Same experience in my university. I think the curriculum has analogues with the CS/SW dichotomy. CS programs are not meant to teach you programming. Similarly, EE programs are not meant to teach you how to build stuff.
In fact, the electronics for physicists course often had more practical material than you'd get from an EE course.
Engineering programs in the US are required by accreditation boards to have lots of lab courses. One of the primary reasons is the industry advisors on these boards want graduates to be able to build stuff. And from what I've seen, it's a lot easier to get an engineering degree by being able to build stuff but struggling with the math, versus learning a bunch of math but not being able to build anything. Assessment courses in your final year of school are required to test you at real-world-level tasks.
Similarly CS is required to have labs which force students to be able to program. If someone gets a CS degree but can't write a program, they either cheated their entire way through every programming assignment, or got that degree at some international university that would never be accredited here.
This is pretty much the same in EU, modulo some controversy about the exact point during the course of higher education when you should be expected to be able to design things on your own.
I have no idea how an EE curriculum doesn't cover bypass capacitors. They're in virtually every real-world circuit. Even if it's not an item that's specifically covered in a course, lab or seminar, there's no way you can put a real-world schematic on the projector and not run into one.
I can't point at a specific course I took where they were covered but I am sure everyone who made it to the third year knew what they were. I definitely remember talking about them extensively in at least three courses (Circuit Theory, Digital Circuits and Digital Instrumentation).
> Engineering programs in the US are required by accreditation boards to have lots of lab courses. One of the primary reasons is the industry advisors on these boards want graduates to be able to build stuff.
Let me summarize almost all my engineering lab courses:
"Design and build X" where X could be some kind of amplifier, etc.
The "design" part is identical to a HW problem. You already know in advance the circuit (one of the standard ones in the textbook), and you just need to figure out R/C/L values to get the desired output. Then you build it and show it to the lab TA who'll check it is actually behaving as desired.
This isn't a good lab assignment: It's just a theory problem masquerading as a lab exercise. After the first semester, any idiot can put the circuit together on the breadboard if they already know the circuit topology.
And yes, while I was there, the accredition board actually reaccredited the program. And yes, they looked at the lab assignments we were getting.
After graduating, I visited my department a number of times, and I did give them the feedback that "your lab assignments are useless".
> And from what I've seen, it's a lot easier to get an engineering degree by being able to build stuff but struggling with the math, versus learning a bunch of math but not being able to build anything.
Definitely not the case at my university. If you struggled with the math, you'd get really poor grades. And we had a mandatory requirement to get a B in second semester circuits (and pass the final with a score of 8/12 or better). Until you did that, you were not allowed to take junior level EE courses. The labs were trivial, but the exams were tough.
The only time when not being able to build anything was a barrier was for a Senior Design assignment we all had. And lo and behold everyone either got an electronics book (notably not a textbook), or searched the Internet.
> If someone gets a CS degree but can't write a program, they either cheated their entire way through every programming assignment, or got that degree at some international university that would never be accredited here.
Eh. It's not so much that they couldn't write a program, but that they would forget the stuff fairly quickly. In my university there definitely was a fair amount of nontrivial programming required in some CS courses. But on the EE side most of the lab assignments were just trivial.
I would quibble a little with you on the EE/CS comparison (even though I'm the one who introduced it to this thread). IMO, EE is a lot broader a discipline than EE. Stuff that is considered part of EE: Electromagnetics, control theory, acoustics (believe it or not), information theory, semiconductors, signals (e.g. Fourier transforms, etc), power, electronics, and others. There are quite a few professions that fall within the aegis of electrical engineering but have little to no circuit aspect. This is less true of CS. So it is a tad bit more understandable that someone gets an EE degree but sucks at electronics.
