Hi mate,
Just to make it clear, I did the degree before they changed around the engineering degree structure a bit (they took away alot of the 3 unit courses and made the first year alot more 'transfer friendly' with the flexible first year).
As for what you would study:
In the degree you do 18 units (3x 6 unit courses) of a 'strand' which you can sort of think as a minor (but isn't really).
It's a sort of second area you would like to study that has to be related to engineering or science.
There's a list of what you can do on the handbook page for PV. Alot of people do the ELEC ones. Physics is seen as a hard one, and the built environment one is seen as the easier one.
You can design yourself a custom one too (I did civil eng.).
In your second year you expand on the first year maths - a course in differential equations and a course in statistics (now both are squished into the one 6unit course which alot of engineers take together).
You also do a semester long 'project'. Basically it's a small group project where you come in for one day a week or so and modify a piece of machinery, design and make some equipment add-ons, work on the biodiesel trailer, etc. There's also a project where they get together materials and fundraise for a trip to some 3rd world country to install panels and energy appliances, etc. They went to Nicaragua and Nepal in 2003 and 2004, and somewhere else in 2006, but I wasn't involved with those projects so I'm not sure exactly how it went.
Not going to go too in depth into the other courses one by one (unless you reply and say you want me to).
But in 2nd and 3rd year you will have more courses of elec engineering (one from school of elec, which is more circuit theory related, and one from solar which is more basic semiconductor device theory - transistors, diodes, etc.)
Applied photovoltaics (nickname APV) is sort of the token 'easy' course that is offered as an elective for elec and telecomm students to pretty much increase the enrolment to make it worth running every year. Most of it will be revision once you get to it
Solar cells and systems is the token 'hard' (hardest compulsory, at least) course where you will need to use alot of the calculus that you should have learnt in 2nd year to solve and derive equations, etc.
In 3rd and 4th year you also do 30 units (5x 6unit courses) of 'professional electives' (also a list on the handbook page for PV).
These range from nice easy 'artsy' ones such as a course of Renewable energy policy and international programs' to more hardcore solid state physics devices ones like 'High Efficiency Si Solar Cells' (Where you will be solving Shrodinger's equation in week 1 or 2) and 'Advanced Semiconductor Devices' which is also no pushover.
So you can sort of select the courses based on how difficult you want to make your life during these 2 years. You can also do higher level courses from other engineering (I did one on 'New Business Creation' from Elec Eng aswell).
In 4th year you do your undergrad thesis, which will probably be the cause of the loss of much sleep in the later weeks of October when it's due. The walk around like a zombie thing for 2 weeks is all part of the engineering degree experience though.
As for career opportunities, as you have probably heard there is alot overseas. You can fairly easily go to Germany, Japan or China as a graduate pv engineer working in pretty much any PV field Production lines, R&D, fault diagnosis, ...). If you want to work overseas somewhere like those places, you have pretty much got it.
I guess half the people that do the degree are attracted by the whole 'Travel/Study/Work in 3-4 different countries before you even graduate' kind of thing - which is quite possible with the program.
As for locally, anything related to pv, green energy, energy efficiency are possible career paths.
People who have graduated work in:
Alot are working in 'Ecological sustainable design' (ESD), designing low energy use buildings, etc.
- Solar (BSCE certified) installer
- System design (basically sizing solar systems inverter size, etc.)
- Start their own business - two guys started the 'Carbon Institute (noco2.com.au) and their now employ 10 people
- There's a few in energy efficiency ('Energy Engineer' and 'Renewable Energy Engineer' (with PV degree).
- One guy was talking about a position with a company that trades electricity on the NEM (national electricity market). Not sure how it went but there's obviously at least some career roles out there in energy related finance/trading.
That's just what I know of, there's a fair bit of career paths out there (just use your imagination I suppose)
With regards to difficulty..
I read you're doing first year Phys and Maths now, so you should have a bit of a clue about what the first year is going to be like.
You can select a fairly easy strand (18 unit 'minor') - I guess we can make the assumption that less maths = easier, so you can do some built environment and first year architecture courses, or custom strand or whatever..
Likewise with the 2nd year project. I think the biodiesel guys did almost nothing the year I did the project.
Another guy and I had a rather hard (more correctly 'time intensive') project and designed a pretty large circuit, relays, switches, solenoid valves, drilled faceplates, etc. And hooked it up to a vacuum system.
Likewise with the professional electives, and likewise with your thesis topic - a nice relatively straight forward economic analysis that you can do without much research, or a heavily experimental topic where you only get your results a month before the thesis is due
On a relative scale, all engineering is hard.
I'll try give a (very crude) example, but hopefully it will help get my point across.
Assign BCom a hardness factor of 1 and Elec Eng as 9.5
PV will be something like 9.47, renewable 9.45 and civil something like 9.35.
In this respect, they are all difficult.
It is a bit misleading to say something like 'civil is easy' because really, you will need to apply theory to different situations in exams, that were not covered during lectures and tutes. (e.g You can do tute problem after tute problem on 2d statics or something, but find an obscure 3d problem in the final exam that will require you to use the theory you know and that works in 2d, modify it a bit and use your intution to solve the 3d problem)
The difficult part is the special way of thinking you need to adopt to do well in (and pass) the courses. This way of thinking is simply absent in other degrees and this is what make engineering in general hard.
(i.e. Don't do civil over elec for the only reason being it's 'easier'. Your interest and natural ability will easily make up for any different in hardness of the coursework).
One thing that helps in PV is that there are two undergrad computer labs, and the day/night/morning before any assignment is due, there will always be people doing the assignments and be heping each other/double checking answers, etc.
I can guarantee you that if you had a look into the PV labs on Friday 2nd May (day before your 1131 mid session) you will see alot of physics notes and textbooks scattered everywhere, and alot of first year students cramming together for the test.
If you can learn well in situations like this then you should at least have a clue going into most tests you take and do well enough to at least pass the course in the end.
On the other hand, if you do absolutely nothing all next week you have to sort of expect to fail the exam. In that case, your failing was more due to your lack of study than the hardness of the exam.
I don't know much about the failure rates, but at the start we had around 28-30 people.
18 ended up sticking around for the 2nd year project, and around 10-14 did their thesis.
Of course you need to take into account people doing combined degrees (so their 5th year and thesis would be next year), people who have done coop, extended their degree by half a year, etc.
Also people that started the year before but extended to 5 years would be included in the above thesis amount aswell.
Most of your classes will be shared with people doing the Renewable Energy degree (and later on masters students), so class size will usually be > 40. Every now and then you might also find an professional elective with < 15 people.
In PV there is a mix. Students are mostly local students from Sydney, with a few rural students, westies, greenpeace fiends, a few Chinese, etc. It's a pretty good mix year after year compared to say, Elec (which is mostly Asians and Indians/Lankans) or Civil (Asians, Mediterraneans, 'Aussies').
From a social point of their, there are your typical pub crawls and BBQ/Beers randomly scattered throughout the semesters. A few of the guys plan long bike trips for random 'green' causes, organise protests, hiking, sunswift solar car, etc.
There's plenty of social stuff and people to meet if you're up for it and have the time. I don't think there's any massively "geeky, non social" people (at least not the level you've seen in the movies)
This response has been waaaaaaaay longer than I wanted it to be, but just a few points about the degree:
- You get free printing in both computer labs (save you literally hundreds of $ throughout your degree)
- The lecturers speak proper English (I took this for granted until I did some courses from other faculties and, as if the content wasn't hard enough to understand, literally couldn't understand what the lecturer was saying)
- School office is somewhat competent and actually help you with your problems (Also took this for granted until I had to deal with Civil eng.)
I think I'm making less sense as I type so I'll stop it here, but let me know if you have any more questions, Cheers.
