Every time you surf the internet, use a cellular phone, watch TV, open a refrigerator, play your favorite CD, listen to your iPod, or burn a DVD you are using inventions and designs created by electrical engineers. Because the field is so varied and widespread in today’s society, it’s impossible to say exactly what you’ll end up doing as an electrical engineer. So let’s start with what interests you and see how you might be able to pursue those interests through a career in electrical engineering:

• Looking for light? Electrical engineers work on a wide array of devices and systems involving the transformation and transmission of light, from photovoltaic solar cells to fiber optics and lasers.
• Turned on by power? Electrical engineers are responsible for many aspects of power generation. They work to increase the efficiency of appliances and transmission lines and design power plants and grids.
• Gotta have gadgets? Electrical engineers create the electronic components and algorithms that run many consumer products, increasing their utility, convenience, reliability, or entertainment value.
• Care about communication? As compulsive communicators, we humans rely on electrical engineers to make it possible to share our words, voices, and images over long distances or to broadcast them to wide audiences.
• Wonder about wireless? Cellular phones, wireless computer networks, and global positioning systems are just the beginning of the wireless technologies designed by electrical engineers.
• Have a biological bent? Many medical imaging and diagnostic technologies have been developed with electrical engineering expertise. Engineers are also working to develop human-machine systems and computers that mimic biological systems.
• Fascinated by the future? Electrical engineers anticipate the needs of tomorrow. Smaller and faster computer chips, virtual reality, robotics, remote-sensing satellites, circuits at the molecular level, and superconducting materials are just a few of the new technologies electrical engineers are working on.

Whether they work in established or emerging industries, electrical engineers apply the basic sciences of mathematics, physics, chemistry, and materials science to control and transform energy and information in ways that are vital to the operation of modern society.