Page 38 - The Art and Science of Analog Circuit Design

Barry Harvey

tertainment easily available to them today. Further, drugs destroy hobbies.
As a result, the college students I've interviewed over the years have grad-
ually lost pre-college experience with their field. Twenty years ago college
grads had typically been working with electronics for two to seven years
before college, and the new grad could perform well in industry. Regret-
tably, it now takes up to three years of professional experience to build a
junior engineer, titles notwithstanding.
Perhaps worse is the attitude change over the years. The new grad was
considered an amateur; "amateur" from the Latin, meaning "one who
loves a field": motivated but inexperienced. Increasingly, the grads are in
electronics for the bucks, and seldom play in the art for their own amuse-
ment. Present company excepted; I know the readers of this book are not
in that category. To be fair, present electronics focuses on computers and
massive systems that are hard to comprehend or create in youth. Con-
struction of projects or repairing home electronics is mostly out of the
realm of kids not encouraged by a technical adult.
I think this places an obligation on families and schools to support elec-
tronics projects for kids, if we are to generate really capable and wise
engineers in the future. By the time a present grad has had enough years
of experience to become an expert in some area, the technology is liable
to change. Breadth of technical experience is the only professional answer

Figure 3-3,
A really beautiful radio from the 1950s. A so-called Tombstone radio; the fins are wood decoration. This is elec-
tronics as furniture; the radio is good but the cabinet is exquisite. The dial is artistic and several frequency bands
await the curious. Not fully visible is the same radio flanked by different cabinets made by competitive groups
within Zenith. From the John Eckland Collection, Palo Alto, California. Photo by Caleb Brown,

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