Electrical vs Electronics Engineering

There's often a confusion between electrical and electronics engineering, and because most of the videos I make are about electrical engineering, many people leave comments saying, well, what about electronics engineering? So I figured it's time. In this video, I'm going to tell you what is electrical engineering, what is electronics engineering, what the difference is, and which one is for you. And this is actually going to blow your mind, because what I'm about to say is not what you expect. From a dictionary perspective, we know that the word electrical relates to electricity and anything that has the electrical phenomena, which has to do with charges, and electronic has to do with electronic devices, basically smaller electrical systems, such as like chips and integrated circuits. So off the bat, the common distinction is that electrical is related to like large electrical power things, and electronics is related to like small electronic things. However, in my opinion, this is totally wrong. The problem is that we are humans, and as humans, we need language to describe things, and very often that language is misleading or just not accurate. From a fundamental perspective, you can't really compare electronics and electrical engineering, because they're not two different things. Electronics engineering is a branch of electrical engineering. Electrical engineering, which in fact should be called electromagnetic engineering, is any application relating to electric and magnetic fields. And this includes many things, such as power systems, telecommunication systems, and you guessed it, electronic systems. That's because the microelectronic devices and the electronic devices that are used, such as cell phone or whatnot, rely on microelectronic circuits, very very small circuits, which use resistors, capacitors, transistors, and these devices are electrical. In fact, they're electromagnetic. For example, the inductor that is used in circuits operates on the principle of magnetic fields, where some of the energy is stored in a magnetic field, while the capacitor stores the energy in an electric field. This is why it's very important to understand the fundamentals, because if you understand electromagnetic physics, you'll see that it is really the foundation of everything. So here sits electromagnetic physics, which has electrical engineering as its application, which again, I really think it should be called electromagnetic engineering. Then you have electronics as a branch of this electrical electromagnetic engineering. In other words, in any video where I put electrical engineering in the title, I am referring to the umbrella term of electromagnetic physics being applied to the real world, which involves many things. Again, telecommunications, photonics, radars, software, and electronics, including electronic circuits and things like robotics, which interface with mechanical systems. Now this is again discussing it from a fundamental knowledge, deep understanding perspective. Unfortunately, universities don't share the same view that I do, and very often you'll see the same university will have like an electrical program and then an electronics program, and they're two separate things. And usually the electrical one is more broad, and the electronic one has a focus on electronic systems. So more circuit stuff, more microelectronic devices, and that's okay. But what you need to understand is that those are not completely different fields. It's just simply that this field falls within this field, and it just happens to have so much stuff within it that it's worthy of being its own major in some countries and in some universities. For example, I went to the University of Buffalo in New York, and we did not have an electronics engineering program. We only had electrical engineering. However, in my electrical engineering program, we learned a lot about circuits and microelectronic devices and microelectronic circuits. And that is really the foundation of electronics engineering. Now, if this all sounds super confusing and you're like, wait, what just happened? You probably want to re-watch this video just to like understand the definitions and understand what I'm actually talking about. But one other thing you should do is familiarize yourself with all the different subfields of electrical engineering. And I actually wrote about this in my book in chapter three, I believe. I talk about the types of different electrical engineers, and I list 15 different subfields within electrical engineering, which you should go ahead and read, figure out which one is for you. And just by going ahead and reading it, you will come to understanding of like what the tree looks like, where electrical engineering is on top, then you have all the different branches, including electronics on the bottom. If you don't feel like reading, not to worry, I got you. Because in this video over here, I do talk about all the different subfields of electrical engineering, the careers within electrical engineering, and just why electrical engineering is the greatest thing ever. So you should go ahead and watch it. Peace, love. See you there.