Hi everyone! Today is a post for people who are either thinking of going into electrical engineering or are studying electrical engineering (I’m just gonna call it EE) and are wondering what a typical day is like. People ask this question on forums all the time, so this will also be something to just copy-paste at people.

There is no one typical day for any one typical EE. EE is a *very* wide field. Some people spend all day every day outside on industrial sites, others spend all day every day at their computer. Some are more hardware based, others are more software. I work in electronics for instrumentation, so it’s a mix of EDA (Electrical Design Automation a.k.a CAD for EEs) and firmware and lab work.

My current job is as an electrical engineer in the R&D department for Mass Spectrometry at Bruker. Sometimes my job is dealing with documentation, other times it’s making random little circuits to build up as tools, or to simulate or inspect or analyze some electrical thing in mass spectrometry. My team specifically works on Triple Quadrupole Mass Spectrometers (TQMS), with Liquid Chromatography sampling. This is what I did last Friday.

EarlierThanIShould O’Clock – Woke up and stared at the ceiling, thinking about a time I made a joke with an obscure reference, and nobody in the room got the joke…haunted.

LaterThanIShould O’Clock – Got out of bed, showered, smooched this dumbass Giuseppe Stromboli goodbye (pictured below), and listened to some Arlo Parks or an episode of Conan O’Brien on my commute to work.

8:30am – Arrived at the office, looked at emails, took care of some random corporate stuff

9:00am – Had a virtual meeting with our power supply vendors. I’m trying to modify the power supply’s output so we can improve how we ionize helium, and I wanted to get technical details on the power supply’s circuitry so I make sure I don’t blow it up. We talked about how to model/simulate plasma discharge, it’s a real tricky thing to do.

This is my desk. It’s in transition (aren’t we all?). We’re in the process of creating a new electronics lab for the R&D floor down here, but until then my desk is where all dev boards and equipment goes, which is a good and bad thing. Featured here are a Keithley 6485 Picoammeter and Thurlby Thandar function generator, a Teledyne LeCroy Wavesurfer 40Gsps Oscilloscope (40 fucking gigasamples per second come on), a Fluke multimeter and a power supply, and a bunch of ancient parts and dev boards I’m going to screw with for years to come.

10:30am – We have some stepper motors that move a tray of samples around in front of the ion spray (mentioned above), and that got moved in a redesign. Whenever there’s a mechanical redesign of the mass spectrometer that the sampler is bolted to, the firmware has to be edited and tested. So I did that for a bit. Programming, messing with motors, making sure it lines up mechanically. Anjunabeats for this part.

1:30pm – Lunch 🙂

2:00pm – We have some boards that were designed here in the US, but they’ll be manufactured in Europe. We use different software so none of our systems line up. This has been a months long process and each day I’m chipping away at converting our documents and files to a format they can use. I….hate this part so much. Ah well, it’s a job, I get paid the same. I put on some Saba or Boygenius and we’re off to the races.

4:00pm – Before the day is done, I want to test and measure that plasma discharge I discussed earlier in the day with our power supply vendor. My colleague sets up the experiment, I make some slight adjustments so we can measure things, and we go about sending 6kV across bursts of helium and get plasma and measure the current and voltage. I think I got what I needed, but I know I didn’t. What always happens is I go back and look at the data and think “Dammit, why didn’t I check for X? Ah, I wish we got Y at the same time.”

I didn’t get the results I wanted, so I’m setting up the experiment without plasma or helium in the electronics lab. When I’m along in the lab doing experiments and in the zone, 90% I’m listening to Wu-Tang Clan or some old school rap. I’m taking the physical thing that nobody wants to model, then modeling it in SPICE, then turning it back into a real circuit, then blowing it up. It’s not working 😦

5:30pm – I take about 20-30 minutes at the end of every day to do some “me time”, which means some small personal project or education that’s relevant to the job, professional development basically. Right now I’m just finishing up some lectures on advanced network theory for circuit analysis that covers modified nodal analysis.

6:00pm – Head home and crack open a brewski with the boys. Jk, Friday I stayed in and did homework, I’m taking a grad school class on silicon photonics. But Saturday was for the boys (and girls), and goddamn am I still hungover, that homemade limoncello was strong. Happy birthday Jared!

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