Essential ECE Probability Course for EE MS?

[austinmw89]

Hi, I'm currently taking classes to catch me up to speed to do an EE masters program (did my undergrad in something unrelated, but already accepted to the MS EE) and I have a lot of freedom in choosing what courses I feel that I'll need to prepare myself. Is a course in probability something that is considered essential or should I pass on the course and save the time/money if I'm not required to take it? This is the syllabus for the course: http://www.bu.edu/ece/files/2014/10/ec381-syllabus.pdf

I'm looking at doing the EE MS in more hardware & solid state related areas, but would still like to take one or two courses on signal processing. Is there anything to an ECE probability course that would be expected knowledge in graduate courses? Any advice is greatly appreciated, thanks!

 

[jasonRF]

Hi, I'm currently taking classes to catch me up to speed to do an EE masters program (did my undergrad in something unrelated, but already accepted to the MS EE) and I have a lot of freedom in choosing what courses I feel that I'll need to prepare myself. Is a course in probability something that is considered essential or should I pass on the course and save the time/money if I'm not required to take it? This is the syllabus for the course: http://www.bu.edu/ece/files/2014/10/ec381-syllabus.pdf

[PLAIN]http://www.bu.edu/ece/files/2014/10/ec381-syllabus.pdf[/PLAIN]
I am an EE and consider probability to be pretty essential - whether or not you take it from an EE department is not such a big deal, but you want to know basic probability theory. The syllabus shows some time would be spent on detection theory and Markov chains - both useful topics, but not worth taking the extra course if you already know the remaining material on basic probability.

I'm looking at doing the EE MS in more hardware & solid state related areas, but would still like to take one or two courses on signal processing. Is there anything to an ECE probability course that would be expected knowledge in graduate courses? Any advice is greatly appreciated, thanks!

Whether or not your graduate courses would expect such knowledge is something only your school can answer. I personally ran into probability theory quite often in graduate school in courses that did not list it as a prereq, but I did not do hardware (did plasma physics). Most (if not all) EE undergraduate programs require at least one probability course, so it would be fair game, I would think.

jason