Hi, my name is Thinus.
I'm a professor of electrical and electronic engineering at Stellenbosch University.
Welcome to our Open Day presentation.
Today, myself and a few of our students will guide you through this very important life decision that you have to make.
So we'll be telling you a few things about the degree, and the things that we'll be telling you,
are captured on this slide. We'll basically be covering what an E&E career offers you.
We'll be looking at what our department specifically offers you.
So firstly, 'Why study E&E at all?'; and then, 'Why study it here?'
And then we'll be looking at the five different disciplines or streams that we offer in E&E engineering.
We'll be looking at energy, telecommunication and electromagnetics; informatics, robotics, and data engineering – our young one.
Then we'll look at the job opportunities when you finish your degree, both in South Africa and abroad.
Finally, we'll give you a link that you can access for more information, visual information,
videos with industry partners, links with industry partners, etc.
Hello, my name is Phoka Tlali,
and I am a final year electrical and electronic engineering student.
Firstly, we're going to have a look at why you should be studying towards a career in E&E.
Essentially, what does a career in E&E offer you? It allows you to explore different interests,
as well as take on multiple or different challenges within industry.
And the skill set that you'll be gaining here
allows you to work within different industries and different sectors, from the healthcare industry
to the software industry, to the energy sector, the public sector, as well as the private sector
– all of which you'll be able to explore with the skills set that you have gained in this degree.
This great variety of industries that you're able to explore comes with great job opportunities that you'll be able to take on.
We’ll touch on some of these in more detail later in this presentation.
So bringing it home, we're going to explore why you should be studying towards an E&E degree here at Stellenbosch University.
Firstly, we offer exceptional education.
This is proven by the fact that we are rated the second-best engineering university on the continent of Africa.
This means that here you get the best of the best. I would argue that we are number one!
Our degree is actually recognized and accredited worldwide by ECSA, the Engineering Council of South Africa,
as well as the Washington Accord,
which is an agreement that accredits and recognizes engineering educational programmes all over the world.
We have 70 staff members for every 600 students.
And if we activate our engineering math brains, that is about one staff member for every eight to nine students, which is pretty great.
We have various and strong ties to industry, with some of our staff members
having worked previously in industry, and also currently working in industry.
We also have some of our graduates going on to do great things in industry.
Furthermore, after completion of your undergraduate degree, you'll be able to explore an excellent
post graduate programme, which allows you to grow yourself and acquire different skill sets,
as well as grow the way that you think. We'll touch on some of this later in this presentation.
Hi, my name is Mohini Takoorparsadh, and I'm a first-year master's student specializing in renewable energy.
In this portion of the video, I'm going to be talking about the fields that you can go into within E&E engineering.
So when you choose to study engineering, you have to choose which type of engineering you want to do.
And when you choose to do E&E engineering, you'll have to choose which field you specialize in.
So let's get into it!
Within the E&E engineering degree, you get to choose one of five options,
four of which are historical in nature.
The four historical fields are energy, electromagnetics and telecommunications, informatics and robotics.
When you choose one of these four fields, you have a common first, second and third year,
where you learn the skills set that are required for each of these industries.
It's only in your final year that you actually have to specialize in one of them.
These disciplines still exist, but in the past year we've introduced a new field of specialization.
And this is the data engineering field.
The University recognized that industry is in great need of data engineers, and so they created this course.
The difference with this course, is that you'll have to choose it in your first year.
So this means that in your first year, you'll have some modules in common with your friends that are doing the historic courses,
but you will quickly deviate from that into modules that are more suited to your type of engineering.
So the types of modules that you do will be based more on statistics, probability and data science.
Let's get into a little bit more detail about the different fields of E&E engineering, starting with energy.
Energy basically incorporates all the aspects of generation, distribution, control of energy, and energy conversion.
When we think about generation in our faculty, it's a bit broader
than what you think of when you think of the electricity that Eskom produces.
We incorporate concepts to do with renewable energy, with coal and combustion engines,
with even vehicular energy – we do the whole spectrum.
When we get to the distribution side, we basically talk about how we distribute the energy that's been generated.
This incorporates transmission lines, energy transfer, and transformers. When it comes to the control of energy,
we go into concepts that have to do with how we use energy, and how we can control energy properly.
When it comes to energy conversion, we talk about, for example, transforming one type of energy
level to another, or a voltage level to another. This can include changing from AC to DC,
DC to AC; and from electrical energy to kinetic energy or thermal energy. So as you can see,
the energy discipline incorporates a broad spectrum, for example, renewable energies, such as hydro, solar and wind power.
We even cover smart grids and electric vehicles.
We even do electric drivers, such as motors and generators, high-voltage DC lines, and a whole lot more.
Next we get to electromagnetics and telecommunications.
This discipline specializes in broadcasting and communications,
radar, radio astronomy and superconductors. Some examples of this are cellphones, TV,
radio, antennas, including Wi-Fi and 5G, radar and satellite communications, and so much more.
Our faculty of electrical and electronic engineering are actually some of the best
at telecommunications and electromagnetics, as well as energy.
Hi, my name is Franco Grobler,
and I'm a final year electrical and electronic student at Stellenbosch University.
Informatics is where electrical and electronic engineering meets computer science.
Here you cover topics such as computer hardware and software, digital communication, and
also the broader computer science field.
Within computer science there is machine learning, which covers topics such as
speech recognition, image recognition, machine intelligence, and so forth.
All those little buzzwords you always hear about – that's where you cover them.
Internet of Things topics, which is also something that's expanding in today's world, are also covered.
Data science is also covered within the informatics field, but is broadly in the data stream.
Robotics is the playing field of electrical and electronic engineering.
This is where you build all your drones; it covers satellites as well, and just everything in between.
Within the unmanned vehicles, you have your computer-controlled autonomous systems
for guidance and collision avoidance – all the topics.
Also, you have your robotic modelling and simulation, which is the design of these drones, or unmanned vehicles, as well as satellites.
Stellenbosch University actually has the SUNSAT programme,
which is the first South African built satellite in space. And that was launched in 1999.
And for all the cool unmanned vehicle projects, you can actually look at the ESL YouTube channel.
Quite cool topics and projects covered there.
As mentioned earlier, data science is the only stream that you choose from your first year.
You have quite a few modules in common with the classic electrical and electronic streams.
The only difference is that you have statistics, data science, and computer science
as modules, instead of a few others, like systems and signals, and so forth.
This is the stream that prepares you for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
You focus a lot on software development, on data science, obviously; and just general statistics and probability.
This prepares you for the modern world full of data, and everything you can do with it.
Hi, my name is Tyrese Swartz, and I'm a third-year E&E student.
I will be talking about job opportunities in South Africa.
Most of the companies that I will speak about are world-renowned companies.
And the degree that you earn in South Africa is accredited, so that you're able to work for these international companies.
In the telecommunication industry, you have companies like Telkom, Vodacom, MTN, etc.
In the defence industry, you have Denel Dynamics, Reutech Radar Systems, BAE Land Systems, Saab Avitronics, etc.
In the process and motor industry, you have Sasol, Iscor, etc.
And in the electrical industry, you have Eskom; you have ABB;
you have renewable energy companies; and of course municipalities, because they need E&E engineers.
Next we get the high-tech and space industries. You have SKA, high-tech start-ups,
CubeSpace – which was actually started in Stellenbosch.
You have the computer industry – all companies doing computer hardware and software development:
you have Amazon, IBM, HP, Microsoft, Siemens – these are of particular interest to me.
Then you have the electronic product industry.
There are numerous SME companies doing innovation and product development.
Most of these small and medium enterprises, if you get involved in them, you learn a lot, because you are given a lot of responsibility.
In the machine learning industry, you have Capitec, Media24, Google.
This generally falls in line with the data engineering stream,
because most of these are dealt with in terms of machine learning.
In terms of Stellenbosch, the tech transfer office for Stellenbosch University is InnovUS.
There are things such as InductEx, which deal with superconductors and nanoelectronics.
You have CustosTech, which has a novel anti-piracy approach using cryptocurrency
– cryptocurrency is the hot topic at the moment in terms of cyberspace.
Then s-plane automation, which is aerospace and defence: product supply and development of autonomous systems.
Next you have BridgIoT, which deals with the Internet of Things: geysers, water, energy and assets.
That was actually started by our professor, Thinus. And obviously you have CubeSpace,
which is a Stellenbosch start-up, which deals with components for microsatellites.
As you can see, we cover a lot of bases; we are doing a lot of interesting projects;
and there's a lot of interesting people involved in our department.
If you need more information, feel free to go to our website or our Facebook page.
That is at ee.sun.ac.za; or you can look at our Facebook page, as I said.
And if you want, you can also contact us by email, or using our telephone.
Good luck with this very important decision and we hope to see you next year.