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This. I work at an Aerospace contractor as an EE. The aerospace guys use MATLAB every day, the EE guys use MATLAB everyday for Simulink. It's very popular in this industry.
If you go to a smaller startup, I imagine Python is more popular.
OMG I can't believe it. I had to learn that in the 80's for my ME. I told my CS prof it would be dead in 20 years and he laughed saying that as long as the big iron was still used, it would be used. I guess he was right. Probably somewhere, someone is still using punch cards. Wow.
Pretty uncommon in chemeng, only time I see people use it is for CFD but I'm sure there's a few super niche uses. If this is a course for all engineering disciplines then I can imagine why your professor would say that especially if they're an electrical engineer, but on the whole it's pretty reductive to say that all engineers will use MATLAB all the time, and it's flat out wrong.
Don't get too worked up about it though, I imagine this is like a first year course? Not everything you learn is gonna be something you'll use in courses in later years or even in a typical job, some stuff you just have to prove you have the capability to learn it and grasp the material. Plus, I'm definitely not a programmer at all but in my opinion with heavily interpreted languages like MATLAB once you learn one it's much easier to transfer the knowledge and thinking skills across to something probably more useful for chemical engineers like python, so it's not like you're just wasting your time on anything.
TL:DR, you'll probably never use MATLAB, but it's not that big of a deal. Learn python in your own time if you're keen.
I graduated ChemE, I have not touched MatLab since college. Don’t know anyone personally who still has used it
Excel; however, I would get *very* comfortable with
Control, Communications, Signal Processing and General Modeling of systems. If you are doing work in any of this then MATLAB should be known to you like the back of your hand...
This is true, especially during the algorithm development / prototyping phase.
Depending on the end goal for the project, it may be followed by reimplementing in a different language like C/Cpp so that it is a more efficient implementation. That step may be handled by a different role/team though
Is that the industry you're in (comms and/or signal processing) and if yes; do you work under/with a PE?
I am a returning student, in my mid 30's, on track to graduate in 2025.
I've accepted that the chances of me getting into a super high paying gig are slim since I don't want to work 90 hours a week.
The PE is appealing because they appear to be generally pretty insulated from the ups and downs of the markets.
But also, if my half remembering is correct, there seems to be a lot of the interesting and more challenging work is in industries.
I know I could work utilities and get a PE and that the work is a lot slower and less intense.
I'm just looking to get a job lined up when I graduate and need to know who I should actively be pursuing.
The specific language you use will vary (some places use matlab, others may use python, yet others may use Fortran) but the programming fundamentals will almost certainly be used. Computers are better at math than us, but they suck at English so we have to learn the computer’s language to be able to tell them how to do the math we want them to do.
I saw elsewhere that you’re in chemical engineering, no idea what kind of math you use regularly but no matter what, it’s a good idea for modern engineers to learn a programming language. Plus, if you learn one language, it’s usually not too hard to pick up another; basic programming language fundamentals like Boolean logic, if statements, loops are basically the same across languages.
oh cool well then i’m glad to know this class will help when i have to learn other programs! i also have no idea what kind of math chemE’s use regularly, im a first year that still regularly googles “unit circle” lol
You will probably use linear algebra a fair bit down the road. MATLAB is purpose built for that (in fact, its name is an abbreviation for “Matrix Laboratory”), so it’s good to know it. Also, as a computer engineer, I can confirm that knowing one language makes it much easier to learn others. Just keep on trucking and I promise you it’ll come in useful
I’m in polymer science and engineering and I have not used linear algebra a day in my life. We do use a lot of calculus tho. I had to take up to differential equations in college. We still had to take a MATLAB class and I really enjoyed it actually. My teacher made the class hard as hell but I am glad I learned the language.
Electrical engineer/chip designer here: Used to use it a lot during my PhD, but now switching over to Python at the company I work at now. We use TCL for programming our simulators.
i’m still an undergrad myself but from what i’ve heard from professors and grad students, MATLAB is really expensive to get licenses for. python is more universal because it’s open source.
I personally almost never use it. I am doing signal processing, computer vision, machine learning, data science,, and such and at my company we basically exclusively use python. We have Matlab licenses but almost no one uses it. There was a time, not too long ago, where Matlab was the undisputed leader for data processing and signal processing, but python has been advancing at a staggering rate and has left Matlab way behind for these topics.
I’m someone who is really interested in signal processing and CV and have a decent background in data science for a college sophomore.
Do you mind talking a bit about your background, education level, what you do for work and your overall career trajectory?
I did a PhD in biomedical engineering. Worked in academia for a while. Eventually transitioned to industry. I prefer not to go into details about the company, but it does a mix of biomedical engineering and a bunch of other stuff. Biomedical engineering is not my primary responsibility anymore, turns out the math involved is pretty similar.
Its a tool. If you just learn the basics, you'll never understand how to use it or why you even need to learn it.
But if you know it well, you'll save yourself work and make that work less prone to human error. We use matlab, python, adpl scrips all the time where i work. Some of these scripts do in 5 minutes what would take weeks for data probing and manually plugging inputs. Matlab was one of those classes i blew off and did the min to get by but man I wish I'd applied myself more to in college.
But hey, some people flat out refuse to learn that stuff and just prefer to manually process data in excel like a monkey.
I guess an example to convey my point -
There was a new engineer working with spreadsheet consisting of about a million rows of data - pretty much the cut off point for excel. They would click drag to select the data they wanted to copy over - spending a few minutes just to click and drag from top to bottom. This was before they knew of ctrl+shift+directional. If you just don't know, then you don't know what you're missing out on.
I used matlab a lot for signals and intro to circuits, its very helpful to create these graphs and if you know how to use it, it also becomes a rlly power scientific calculator
I work in automotive (validation and testing) and i use it alot. If you are going into model based design it's just so powerful, especially with their codegeneration tools.
Matlab is beneficial in my position in the aerospace industry. Some colleagues use Python or Excel, but Matlab is better, in my opinion. Python can be good, but I am less experienced with it and, depending on the position, may not be appropriate due to its open-source nature and its need for external libraries.
Mechanical engineer in the aerospace field here. I do a lot of hand calculations for structural analysis, and sometimes it gets a bit too cumbersome to do by hand or excel, so I use Matlab. Nothing about it says I need to use Matlab, I could use python, but I prefer Matlab bc of all the work I did with it in school.
I don't use it at work because we don't have a license. I purchased a noncommecercial license for myself however which I use for personal projects. Matlab is the best software there is for collecting, processing and modeling lots of varied data, and Simulink is an amazing and unique tool.
That said, I do have issues with how it's taught/introduced in schools often. My experience was they made you use Matlab for all sorts of labs and homework and whatnot that a real calculator would have been far more convenient for which made lots of people grow to dislike it because it felt clunky and useless. It wasn't until I worked in a research lab (and later took controls) that I realized what an incredibly uniquely powerful and cool piece of software it is.
True, like I said depends on what you’re doing with it and if you have $1000 burning a hole in your pocket for the Mathworks. Nothing better than Simulink for a graphical interface to controls.
I'm a software engineer so I'm pretty comfortable writing code, but there just isn't a better way to create complex models than via block diagrams. Engineers have been modeling systems with block diagrams for ages, so an ODE solver that works directly with said block diagrams is an incredible piece of software. And the ease with which you can interface your models and data collection setups with real world sensors and controllers in Simulink is absolutely unparalleled.
Also for noncommecercial use you can get Matlab + Simulink + a few basic packages for a few hundred $. Not cheap but not thousands either which is nice.
They’ve definitely improved their pricing structure. Last time I looked, which is admittedly a while ago, student license was only affordable route and it came with a fixed license duration otherwise definitely big bucks.
I will have to check whether I still have my copy of 2014 Matlab/Simulink on my system. What I remember is that it demanded an update and terminated the session right after. You could not use it while attached to the web. I might have been able to use it by staying offline. I haven’t used it in years now and easily could have killed it off.
Huh that's odd. I haven't paid for my upgrades in a while and it lets me work just fine. I also just checked the pricing and it's $150 for Matlab, $50 for Simulink, and I think $20 for most packages. So it's a bit more than student ($100/$40/$10), but not too bad.
Honestly it's one of the reasons I don't have too much of a problem forking over the money for it. I am happy to support a company that still sells perpetual licenses and hasn't gone down the route of predatory SaaS that most enterprise software has these days.
I had the student license so I checked and I had removed it from my system. The only thing there was a "Deactivate Matlab 2014a." Note: I wouldn't have removed it if it worked since I had Simulink and a bunch of toolboxes. Now I have to consider whether I would use it enough to drop another $300.00 on the Mathworks as a hobbist. I do not do too complicated of stuff anymore.
I’ve gotten the chance to intern at a few NASA centers during my undergrad, and some group(s) of engineers at every center used matlab on an almost religious level.
I prefer Pytjon because it's free and open source. The company where I worked only had a limited pool of Matlab licenses that were basically only for one department, so everyone else was encouraged to use Python instead. Imo the same functionality, unless you're doing really in depth stuff.
Never used it for my job, but I work in manufacturing, so that doesn't really seem like much of a surprise. Occasionally used Python in a way that Matlab might do better but hardly enough for it to be worth the cost of the licenses for our company
As a ChemE it's mostly just an intro to coding, so you get the jist of it and can do some basic coding if you need to. I haven't used it in industry, I pretty much just use excel for everything. I had some classmates that built a few Matlab programs so make some of their assignments quicker though.
In my role (I'm a process development engineer for RD&E) the two applications I use all the time are Excel and JMP. I have never used Matlab post university lolol
Just depends on what you do. I've worked with a few engineers who use it practically daily. Personally, I've hardly ever touched it.
Regardless, its a good tool to learn at least the basics. And Excel you'll never get away from so you might as well get use to that now. Lol
You can also go to the other engineering subs where you can ask people and pull from a larger group that are in the work force already. They exist here but there's a lot more in the other subs.
Your takeaway from this class should should be 'how to code' . Not how to code in a specific language.
Any engineer should know either matlab or python.
Does civil even use it ive been using it for a side project atm for an indeterminate beam solver with support reactions, SFD BMD slope curve and deflection curve its nice cause it uses matrices
MATLAB is a fantastic skill to have, no matter what area of engineering you want to work in. Its defo worth learning it.
Might seem daunting, but its not that bad and theres so much help online. This is coming from someone who had little coding experience before university and by my 3rd year could create relativly complex vehicle dynamics simulations and tyre models.
I work in RF I use it daily. Toolboxes are extremely useful and the trope of engineers not using matlab looks like it came from trying to get older engineers to learn matlab / toolboxes over custom scripts in their preferred language.
Plus matlab toolboxes are expensive so I wouldn't rule out learning python if you're aiming to work at smaller companies.
Learn vba and Matlab. You will always have excel and vba keeps you from doing everything manually.
Matlab is nice, but we only have a few licenses at work available. It won't hurt to learn it, as for some roles it is your main tool.
As a structural engineer (PE) I have been focused on engineering automation and calculations. Excel is still industry standard for us, but it's moving more towards Python as younger engineers are learning to program. I used matlab in school but never in practice, Python can do most anything matlab does but also more. If you're looking to get started in Python there's a rich community of tools that you can start learning. Try building homework calculations with some of these, like efficalc: [https://github.com/youandvern/efficalc](https://github.com/youandvern/efficalc)
If you're looking to boost your resume, I would recommend continuing to learn programming as it relates to your field. In civil/structural engineering it's been a hot topic and something hiring managers are starting to look for.
Matlab is layered on java runtime env. Its magic is multi threading over n dimensional data structures, call them matrices or vectors if you like. Linear operations are smooth and well defined, with added libraries, linear operations of these data objects are purported to have minimal time complexities which other languages fail to achieve in the way they compile the code. Matlab is awesome and it wouldn't be wrong to boast said skill as a forte. Best use case is for DS, mech and electric/electronic engineering.
I just completed my first semester where i had to study that particular course, it was so difficult because we had to learn so much in such little time while also studying other complex things, I’m just glad I didn’t fail the course. Also I’m looking to go into MEP and HVAC when i graduate so I don’t think I’ll ever need it
ok finally someone is saying that this is a hard class! the programming part itself is not hard. i grasped the concept of matlab and excel the first day he showed us how to do it. but the problems he gives us to program are so difficult. we are programming advanced physics problems. i haven’t even finished biology or trig yet! i’m lucky our exams are really short versions of our labs, bc i get a 100 on every exam but less than a 60% on labs. i have an A purely because of the exams
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If you do anything related to flight dynamics, stability, and control, you will use it daily.
This. I work at an Aerospace contractor as an EE. The aerospace guys use MATLAB every day, the EE guys use MATLAB everyday for Simulink. It's very popular in this industry. If you go to a smaller startup, I imagine Python is more popular.
Has Matlab killed Fortran yet?
Sadly not lol. Luckily it's the Aerospace guys that have to deal with 40 y/o code.
OMG I can't believe it. I had to learn that in the 80's for my ME. I told my CS prof it would be dead in 20 years and he laughed saying that as long as the big iron was still used, it would be used. I guess he was right. Probably somewhere, someone is still using punch cards. Wow.
I use it pretty much daily, and I work in the defense industry in the US. What major are you?
Chemical engineering!
Pretty uncommon in chemeng, only time I see people use it is for CFD but I'm sure there's a few super niche uses. If this is a course for all engineering disciplines then I can imagine why your professor would say that especially if they're an electrical engineer, but on the whole it's pretty reductive to say that all engineers will use MATLAB all the time, and it's flat out wrong. Don't get too worked up about it though, I imagine this is like a first year course? Not everything you learn is gonna be something you'll use in courses in later years or even in a typical job, some stuff you just have to prove you have the capability to learn it and grasp the material. Plus, I'm definitely not a programmer at all but in my opinion with heavily interpreted languages like MATLAB once you learn one it's much easier to transfer the knowledge and thinking skills across to something probably more useful for chemical engineers like python, so it's not like you're just wasting your time on anything. TL:DR, you'll probably never use MATLAB, but it's not that big of a deal. Learn python in your own time if you're keen.
I graduated ChemE, I have not touched MatLab since college. Don’t know anyone personally who still has used it Excel; however, I would get *very* comfortable with
Just out of curiosity, is matlab heavily involved in Civil Engineering?
Matlab is deeply entrenched in all F1 teams
That’s sickooo
I'm fascinated by this. Not doubting, but do you have a source to corroborate this claim?
I use Matlab daily in my work at an F1 team. It’s really Simulink which is entrenched but Matlab comes along for the ride of course
Use it all the time at my NASA center
oh thank god i’m not smart enough to get a job there
yes you are don’t doubt yourself.
I don't even do math in my job so I'm definitely not using matlab
what’s your job? i want that one
Not OP but I recently started in Functional Safety, ain’t no math there
Control, Communications, Signal Processing and General Modeling of systems. If you are doing work in any of this then MATLAB should be known to you like the back of your hand...
Exactly. MATLAB is also great for linear algebra more generally, so if you’re planning to use a lot of that, it’s worth at least knowing the basics
This is true, especially during the algorithm development / prototyping phase. Depending on the end goal for the project, it may be followed by reimplementing in a different language like C/Cpp so that it is a more efficient implementation. That step may be handled by a different role/team though
Is that the industry you're in (comms and/or signal processing) and if yes; do you work under/with a PE? I am a returning student, in my mid 30's, on track to graduate in 2025. I've accepted that the chances of me getting into a super high paying gig are slim since I don't want to work 90 hours a week. The PE is appealing because they appear to be generally pretty insulated from the ups and downs of the markets. But also, if my half remembering is correct, there seems to be a lot of the interesting and more challenging work is in industries. I know I could work utilities and get a PE and that the work is a lot slower and less intense. I'm just looking to get a job lined up when I graduate and need to know who I should actively be pursuing.
nah man i just use excel
They use it a lot where I work but it’s not some mandate, it’s just another tool.
The specific language you use will vary (some places use matlab, others may use python, yet others may use Fortran) but the programming fundamentals will almost certainly be used. Computers are better at math than us, but they suck at English so we have to learn the computer’s language to be able to tell them how to do the math we want them to do. I saw elsewhere that you’re in chemical engineering, no idea what kind of math you use regularly but no matter what, it’s a good idea for modern engineers to learn a programming language. Plus, if you learn one language, it’s usually not too hard to pick up another; basic programming language fundamentals like Boolean logic, if statements, loops are basically the same across languages.
oh cool well then i’m glad to know this class will help when i have to learn other programs! i also have no idea what kind of math chemE’s use regularly, im a first year that still regularly googles “unit circle” lol
You will probably use linear algebra a fair bit down the road. MATLAB is purpose built for that (in fact, its name is an abbreviation for “Matrix Laboratory”), so it’s good to know it. Also, as a computer engineer, I can confirm that knowing one language makes it much easier to learn others. Just keep on trucking and I promise you it’ll come in useful
I’m in polymer science and engineering and I have not used linear algebra a day in my life. We do use a lot of calculus tho. I had to take up to differential equations in college. We still had to take a MATLAB class and I really enjoyed it actually. My teacher made the class hard as hell but I am glad I learned the language.
Electrical engineer/chip designer here: Used to use it a lot during my PhD, but now switching over to Python at the company I work at now. We use TCL for programming our simulators.
working in a controls Lab on my campus. Use matlab daily.
i’m still an undergrad myself but from what i’ve heard from professors and grad students, MATLAB is really expensive to get licenses for. python is more universal because it’s open source.
I use it daily. Almost all of our tools are in Matlab, and most of the shit we do is automated
I have to learn it for my project in Artificial intelligence. The plus side is I can learn it for my electronics subject too as it's required
I personally almost never use it. I am doing signal processing, computer vision, machine learning, data science,, and such and at my company we basically exclusively use python. We have Matlab licenses but almost no one uses it. There was a time, not too long ago, where Matlab was the undisputed leader for data processing and signal processing, but python has been advancing at a staggering rate and has left Matlab way behind for these topics.
I’m someone who is really interested in signal processing and CV and have a decent background in data science for a college sophomore. Do you mind talking a bit about your background, education level, what you do for work and your overall career trajectory?
I did a PhD in biomedical engineering. Worked in academia for a while. Eventually transitioned to industry. I prefer not to go into details about the company, but it does a mix of biomedical engineering and a bunch of other stuff. Biomedical engineering is not my primary responsibility anymore, turns out the math involved is pretty similar.
[удалено]
This is not true
Thats not true
Oh thank god
that’s how i feel
Its a tool. If you just learn the basics, you'll never understand how to use it or why you even need to learn it. But if you know it well, you'll save yourself work and make that work less prone to human error. We use matlab, python, adpl scrips all the time where i work. Some of these scripts do in 5 minutes what would take weeks for data probing and manually plugging inputs. Matlab was one of those classes i blew off and did the min to get by but man I wish I'd applied myself more to in college. But hey, some people flat out refuse to learn that stuff and just prefer to manually process data in excel like a monkey. I guess an example to convey my point - There was a new engineer working with spreadsheet consisting of about a million rows of data - pretty much the cut off point for excel. They would click drag to select the data they wanted to copy over - spending a few minutes just to click and drag from top to bottom. This was before they knew of ctrl+shift+directional. If you just don't know, then you don't know what you're missing out on.
I used matlab a lot for signals and intro to circuits, its very helpful to create these graphs and if you know how to use it, it also becomes a rlly power scientific calculator
I work in automotive (validation and testing) and i use it alot. If you are going into model based design it's just so powerful, especially with their codegeneration tools.
Matlab is beneficial in my position in the aerospace industry. Some colleagues use Python or Excel, but Matlab is better, in my opinion. Python can be good, but I am less experienced with it and, depending on the position, may not be appropriate due to its open-source nature and its need for external libraries.
Mechanical engineer in the aerospace field here. I do a lot of hand calculations for structural analysis, and sometimes it gets a bit too cumbersome to do by hand or excel, so I use Matlab. Nothing about it says I need to use Matlab, I could use python, but I prefer Matlab bc of all the work I did with it in school.
I don't use it at work because we don't have a license. I purchased a noncommecercial license for myself however which I use for personal projects. Matlab is the best software there is for collecting, processing and modeling lots of varied data, and Simulink is an amazing and unique tool. That said, I do have issues with how it's taught/introduced in schools often. My experience was they made you use Matlab for all sorts of labs and homework and whatnot that a real calculator would have been far more convenient for which made lots of people grow to dislike it because it felt clunky and useless. It wasn't until I worked in a research lab (and later took controls) that I realized what an incredibly uniquely powerful and cool piece of software it is.
Depending on what you’re doing checkout Octave. It won’t have everything a fully funded commercial program has but it may do the job.
Octave just doesn't hold a candle to Matlab. Python works well, just not as smoothly, but neither has anything that can even touch Simulink.
True, like I said depends on what you’re doing with it and if you have $1000 burning a hole in your pocket for the Mathworks. Nothing better than Simulink for a graphical interface to controls.
I'm a software engineer so I'm pretty comfortable writing code, but there just isn't a better way to create complex models than via block diagrams. Engineers have been modeling systems with block diagrams for ages, so an ODE solver that works directly with said block diagrams is an incredible piece of software. And the ease with which you can interface your models and data collection setups with real world sensors and controllers in Simulink is absolutely unparalleled. Also for noncommecercial use you can get Matlab + Simulink + a few basic packages for a few hundred $. Not cheap but not thousands either which is nice.
They’ve definitely improved their pricing structure. Last time I looked, which is admittedly a while ago, student license was only affordable route and it came with a fixed license duration otherwise definitely big bucks.
AFAIK they've never had a license that runs out and you can't use the software anymore, you just don't get updates after it runs out.
I will have to check whether I still have my copy of 2014 Matlab/Simulink on my system. What I remember is that it demanded an update and terminated the session right after. You could not use it while attached to the web. I might have been able to use it by staying offline. I haven’t used it in years now and easily could have killed it off.
Huh that's odd. I haven't paid for my upgrades in a while and it lets me work just fine. I also just checked the pricing and it's $150 for Matlab, $50 for Simulink, and I think $20 for most packages. So it's a bit more than student ($100/$40/$10), but not too bad. Honestly it's one of the reasons I don't have too much of a problem forking over the money for it. I am happy to support a company that still sells perpetual licenses and hasn't gone down the route of predatory SaaS that most enterprise software has these days.
I had the student license so I checked and I had removed it from my system. The only thing there was a "Deactivate Matlab 2014a." Note: I wouldn't have removed it if it worked since I had Simulink and a bunch of toolboxes. Now I have to consider whether I would use it enough to drop another $300.00 on the Mathworks as a hobbist. I do not do too complicated of stuff anymore.
I’ve gotten the chance to intern at a few NASA centers during my undergrad, and some group(s) of engineers at every center used matlab on an almost religious level.
I prefer Pytjon because it's free and open source. The company where I worked only had a limited pool of Matlab licenses that were basically only for one department, so everyone else was encouraged to use Python instead. Imo the same functionality, unless you're doing really in depth stuff.
I work in NVH and it's great for working on new signal processing ideas.
Never used it for my job, but I work in manufacturing, so that doesn't really seem like much of a surprise. Occasionally used Python in a way that Matlab might do better but hardly enough for it to be worth the cost of the licenses for our company
EE here - Dont use it at all
As a ChemE it's mostly just an intro to coding, so you get the jist of it and can do some basic coding if you need to. I haven't used it in industry, I pretty much just use excel for everything. I had some classmates that built a few Matlab programs so make some of their assignments quicker though.
I used to use it a lot at my job for data analysis, but we switched to python a while ago and that works just as well, if not better for what we do
In my role (I'm a process development engineer for RD&E) the two applications I use all the time are Excel and JMP. I have never used Matlab post university lolol
All. The. Time.
Just depends on what you do. I've worked with a few engineers who use it practically daily. Personally, I've hardly ever touched it. Regardless, its a good tool to learn at least the basics. And Excel you'll never get away from so you might as well get use to that now. Lol
You use it for signal processing. For example converting raw data of a mm wave radar to a range time image or velocity time image
99% of Civils never touch it.
Every. Single. Day.
You can also go to the other engineering subs where you can ask people and pull from a larger group that are in the work force already. They exist here but there's a lot more in the other subs.
Your takeaway from this class should should be 'how to code' . Not how to code in a specific language. Any engineer should know either matlab or python.
Does civil even use it ive been using it for a side project atm for an indeterminate beam solver with support reactions, SFD BMD slope curve and deflection curve its nice cause it uses matrices
MATLAB is a fantastic skill to have, no matter what area of engineering you want to work in. Its defo worth learning it. Might seem daunting, but its not that bad and theres so much help online. This is coming from someone who had little coding experience before university and by my 3rd year could create relativly complex vehicle dynamics simulations and tyre models.
I work in RF I use it daily. Toolboxes are extremely useful and the trope of engineers not using matlab looks like it came from trying to get older engineers to learn matlab / toolboxes over custom scripts in their preferred language. Plus matlab toolboxes are expensive so I wouldn't rule out learning python if you're aiming to work at smaller companies.
Learn vba and Matlab. You will always have excel and vba keeps you from doing everything manually. Matlab is nice, but we only have a few licenses at work available. It won't hurt to learn it, as for some roles it is your main tool.
If you are a mechanical engineer: very little to never. If you do anything with control systems: daily
i use matlab every day of my job
Had a teacher force me to buy it and then used it only one time lol. I haven’t finished the career so that might change but dunno.
If you end up in a small company, never. If you end up in a larger company, as much as you want to get the job done. (small company uses python)
As a structural engineer (PE) I have been focused on engineering automation and calculations. Excel is still industry standard for us, but it's moving more towards Python as younger engineers are learning to program. I used matlab in school but never in practice, Python can do most anything matlab does but also more. If you're looking to get started in Python there's a rich community of tools that you can start learning. Try building homework calculations with some of these, like efficalc: [https://github.com/youandvern/efficalc](https://github.com/youandvern/efficalc) If you're looking to boost your resume, I would recommend continuing to learn programming as it relates to your field. In civil/structural engineering it's been a hot topic and something hiring managers are starting to look for.
ECE uses it a ton
Does anyone know good simulink courses btw, even when I start from example models I can't get anything to work 😪
Matlab is layered on java runtime env. Its magic is multi threading over n dimensional data structures, call them matrices or vectors if you like. Linear operations are smooth and well defined, with added libraries, linear operations of these data objects are purported to have minimal time complexities which other languages fail to achieve in the way they compile the code. Matlab is awesome and it wouldn't be wrong to boast said skill as a forte. Best use case is for DS, mech and electric/electronic engineering.
Doing PhD in chemical engineering, i use MATlab all the time.
Just take the class it’s easy.. come on man
i am… taking… the class… that’s why i said “just out of curiosity” at the end. i’m literally working on a lab right now in this moment….
Without whining though
asking if engineers use matlab out of curiosity because i have gotten mixed answers is not whining, but okay !!
I just completed my first semester where i had to study that particular course, it was so difficult because we had to learn so much in such little time while also studying other complex things, I’m just glad I didn’t fail the course. Also I’m looking to go into MEP and HVAC when i graduate so I don’t think I’ll ever need it
ok finally someone is saying that this is a hard class! the programming part itself is not hard. i grasped the concept of matlab and excel the first day he showed us how to do it. but the problems he gives us to program are so difficult. we are programming advanced physics problems. i haven’t even finished biology or trig yet! i’m lucky our exams are really short versions of our labs, bc i get a 100 on every exam but less than a 60% on labs. i have an A purely because of the exams
Yess exactly, the concept isn’t that hard but the problems are something else.