I had a provisional plan for the remainder of my M.Eng earlier in the year. I knew that I’d likely have to adjust this based on what courses were actually made available at registration time in the years to come.
Without looking back on that plan, assuming what is available this year, will continue to be. I came up with the following new plan:
First choices
2016
- ECE1228H F Electromagnetic Theory, Professor M. Mojahedi
- ECE1505H S Convex Optimization , Professor S. Draper
2017
- ECE1502H F Information Theory , Professor S. Draper
- PHY2303H S Quantum Theory of Solids II, Professor Yong Baek Kim
2018
- PHY2403 F Quantum Field Theory I, Professor Michael Luke
Alternates
- MIE1210H F Computational Fluid Mechanics and Heat Transfer
- PHY1500H F Statistical Mechanics
- PHY1530H F Fluid Mechanics
- PHY1540H Y Mathematical Methods in Physics
- PHY2203H F Quantum Optics I
- PHY2321H S Many Body Physics I
- ECE1252H F ECE Introduction to Computational Electrodynamics
- ECE1243H F ECE1243H Topics in EM Waves: Advanced Engineering Electromagnetics
- CSC2426H F Fundamentals of Cryptography
Thoughts
Last term I ended up dropping ‘Microwave Circuits’ in favour of ‘Scientific Computing for Physicists’, which I was taking concurrently. The microwave circuits course was really about GHz domain electromagnetics, but it’s a material that I’d enjoy a lot more, and get a lot more out of, by reading the course text and doing problems, than attending the lectures (which were just taught from slides).
Because I’d dropped the uwaves course, I’m now down one ECE course. I need 5/9’s of my M.Eng course selections to be from ECE to graduate. This forces me to make additional course selections from ECE that I hadn’t initially planned for. For example, I’d rather take the MIE CFD course or the PHY Quantum Optics course than the ECE Information Theory course, which I selected primarily because it helped satisfy the graduation requirements.
Hello Peeter,
I can see you have lots of interests in Quantum Theories from your courses selection, and with your background of 20 plus years in computing programming, I would highly recommend you to focus on Quantum Computing area, this is because you:
1. have the interest in Quantum Theories
2. have strong technical background in computing
3. Quantum computing is probably be very big.
Okay, Quantum Computing might have more courses in Computing and Software department. In my school, we can get special permission if you are interested in taking certain courses outside of your department.
This is my two cents..
Since I don’t know your teachers, it’s hard to make sensible suggestions. A lot depends on how material is presented. That is especially true for Information Theory, which was actually one of my favourite topics back when I did my Dipl.Inf. in Karlsruhe. Prof. Dr. Wolfram Menzel has been one of the best teachers I ever encountered. If there is a chance for you to look into the course material upfront, do it and get feed back from other students regarding the professor teaching the subject.
Hi Guang,
I don’t expect Quantum computing to be big in the next 30 years. There’s a lot of hype about it, but it’s hard to scale it up when you have to run the system at 10 Kelvin. I’m curious about it, but don’t think that I want to take the time to formally study it at the moment.
Peeter
Hi Sandra,
I had some minor exposure to Information Theory in the “systems and signals analysis” course that I did as an undergrad student, and it was interesting. I’ll have to look around for any course notes from this Prof. I’ll probably also ask what text he is teaching from to get a bit of an idea what’s coming.
Peeter