Can you make it any harder? Student combines interests with a dual major

In three years at Illinois, Adam Miller has taken just one nontechnical elective. The lone economics class he took his freshman year was the only one he could afford. With a dual-major in electrical engineering and computer science, openings in his curriculum aren’t easy to come by.

Miller, a junior from Crystal Lake, Ill., came in as a mechanical engineering major, switching to electrical engineering in his second semester. But didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity to study another interest of his, computer science, leading him to a dual-major in both.

“I guess I’m just greedy,” Miller joked. “Had I not dual-majored, I probably would have taken the same amount of courses. I just find it interesting.”

Despite the added curriculum, Miller is on track to graduate in four years, helped by the fact that several electrical engineering and computer sciences courses overlap and that he’s been able to knock out most of his general education requirements in summer school at McHenry County College. He started his college career taking 17 to 18 credit hours per semester but is currently enrolled in just 12 hours.

“I don’t really have to take a ridiculous amount of hours as long as I select my courses strategically,” he said. 

As his third year of college nears a close, Miller has built up an impressive resume. On campus, he’s been involved in machine learning and audio applications research in the Computer Science Department since freshman year.

“I’ve always been fascinated with how people can learn, how the learning process takes place,” he said. “And I’m drawn to technology, so the ability to kind of emulate that is really appealing to me.”

He also began working with a postdoc at the Beckman Institute on creating a portable EEG headset that can be used to measure neurosignals while a subject is on the move.

“One of the limits of all these psychological studies is people sit in a room, they stare at a computer and click buttons,” he said. “It’s not really indicative of what the real world is like. Hopefully we’re creating something so we can study people doing things they actually do on a daily basis.” 

Beyond on-campus research, Miller spent last summer working at IBM in New York and will head west to Palo Alto, California to intern with Facebook this summer.

While Miller’s dual-major is impressive, he said it isn’t what pops on his resume with employers.

“I did it more out of interest,” he said. “People looking for new recruits aren’t actually going to pick you because you have two majors. They’re recruiting for a single position.”

But it does broaden his career opportunities so that he can venture into both computer science and electrical engineering fields. After graduation, Miller plans to attend graduate school and is interested in working with machine learning methods and algorithms, something that has a foot in both his majors.

"To those considering dual engineering majors, if it's something where the classes overlap a lot, like what I'm doing, then it's definitely doable," Miller said. "But I would make sure that you're doing it out of interest in the field and not just for the dual-major, because I don't think it will be worth it then."
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Writer: Chad Thornburg, Engineering Communications Office

If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, editor, Engineering Communications Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217/244-7716.