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need help with career path for RF/microwave engineering, please help!

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skatefast08

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if you got a job interview at a power company as an Engineer II and had no experience with jobs and you wanted to become an RF/microwave engineer, would you take the position? would an RF engineer in the future want to take me as a candidate with having this experience? would it be better if I just apply more to RF engineering jobs or go to graduate school to get a masters degree in microwave engineering? what do you think the chances are for the best outcome, for a person who has the dream of becoming and RF/microwave engineer? (I have a 2.75 GPA from undergrad with a B.S degree in Electrical Enigneering). I live on the east coast of the US.
 

1) Any experience is useful
2) you have to eat. But If you can afford to wait, then keep looking.
3) power is quite different from RF; would you be bored doing that?
 
Keep away from RF Microwave Engineering. It's dead..( except Military industry..)
 
Dead? What kind of cellphone do you have? What kind of router do you have in your house?
I was talking about classical RF&Microwave Engineering.
%10-15 of the all circuits is RF, the rest is digital nowadays.In near future, there won't be neither Mixer nor oscillator nor something else..All RF parts will be integrated onto digital mates and all RF comms. standards will definitely matured and no company will manufacture discrete or application specific RF components.
There will be (LNA)+ADC+DSP that's it.(Or ADC+DSP+DAC+PA) The recent developments became too fast and Analog RF Engineers have lagged..
There is still a untouched fields at higher frequencies but I do personally not see any bright future for classical manner RF and Microwave Engineering.
The well known RF companies seeks RFIC Engineers with DSP/FPGA/Signal Processing knowledge..Think about it.. !!
If I were a fresh graduated engineer today, I would pass directly into DSP/FPGA/Signal Processing/Digital Design field
 
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    ferdem

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Out of the military and mobile phones area there are still a lot of RF engineering jobs in: cellular Base Stations development, designing devices for Point-to-Point microwave links, developing commercial radars (frequency range from 1GHz to 80GHz), developing wireless circuits for drones (this is a big business today, including anti-drones systems).
If you develop RF circuits and wireless devices using many RFICs this doesn't mean you have to be in RFIC semiconductor design business, but you still need to have deep RF/Microwave skills.

Perhaps there will be a time when all the radio receivers in the world will have the antenna attached directly to the ADC (so, zero RF engineering work) but I guess this will happen many years from now...
 

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