Odds are you will get silence or "Oh, that club folded years ago" as the
> answer. If you actually find a working club, talk to the faculty advisor
> and ask how many students are in the club. If there are a dozen or more,
> you've at least found yourself a prospective school.
That would rule out Oregon State... the typical number of people in the club varied between 0 and 10, always dwindling as the year progressed. Part of it might have been a lack of "advertising," though -- the first time I found their web page and contacted one of the professors involved, the number had been near-zero for a couple of years. We eventually started to get a little more proactive in letting people know we existed; see, e.g.,
formatting link
It's started to dwindle again though -- all the guys mentioned in that article have since graduated. One bright spot is that one of the newer (younger) professors that OSU recruited from Intel (yeah, a digital guy, but oh well :-) ) has become interested and mentions the club in his beginning EE classes.I think Oregon State turns out some decent chip designers (while I was there I knew one guy who it was already clear was going to go far), but like most universities they don't really have much emphasis on board-level analog design specifically.
TekBots
formatting link
have been quite popular, although they were struggling with how to move them out of being heavy on the microcontroller/programmable logic emphasis and into somewhat more challenging areas, such as control systems and wireless links/communication systems (where you're designing, e.g., the radio and the error-correction protocols yourself, not just using someone's off-the-shelf wireless module, which is already quite common).---Joel