Common Misconceptions about Computer Engineering

Being the sole person in my family that studies computer engineering, I get a lot of rather interesting comments/questions from people regarding what I study and do. Here’s some of the most frequent misconceptions that come up regarding my major:

• We’re hackers. Hacking in movies is often depicted as a hacker executing some command in a terminal and compromising a remote computer in a matter of seconds. In real life hacking isn’t that simple, and modern systems have security measures to prevent that sort of thing from happening (not that it’s impossible, just extremely unlikely). We do learn about things like computer security, but that doesn’t mean we know how to exploit vulnerabilities. If anything, a prof of mine once said “if there’s one thing I want you to take away from this course, it’s ‘don’t hack into things.’”

• We’re experts in IT/tech support. In my major I study things about computers, such as network protocols, databases, etc. However, that doesn’t mean I know how to fix your computer, or that I understand every single error message that comes up in Windows. Many problems can be solved using a little Google-fu, or just turning it off and back on again.

• ECE = Early Childhood Education ECE at Waterloo stands for Electrical and Computer Engineering, not Early Childhood Education. Although it does mean the latter at other universities.

So, what do we actually do?

Computer engineering can be best described as a mixture of hardware components and software. There’s no easy way to pinpoint what a computer engineer does, because it varies. We could work on things ranging from wireless communications, to software systems, to embedded processors. So it’s not as simple as saying “Oh, you study computer engineering, so you must be good at X”.