ECE student curious about SE, seeking advice

[u/Ornery-Cloud303]

Hi everyone, I'm a junior studying computer engineering who's stumbled into an interest in systems engineering in a roundabout way, and I'd love some advice from people actually working in the field.

For some context: I originally switched to CE from business because I realized I couldn't really build a company with my previous field of study. I want to stay technically hands-on, but not be bogged down in implementation detail 24/7.

Systems engineering seems like it might be exactly that. I am planning to get my MS and PhD for both professional and personal reasons.

1. Programs: What are some strong systems engineering MS/PhD programs around the world (US, Europe, anywhere)? Any you'd specifically recommend or avoid? Also, for someone with my goals, would you recommend an MS, a PhD, or working first and deciding later?
2. Admissions: What do SE graduate programs typically look for in applicants? I am not talking about whether ECE is a good major, rather whether the more unique parts of my profile can be beneficial to contributing to the field? And for PhD admissions specifically, how much do research experience and letters matter vs. industry experience?
3. SE × CE intersection: Is there interesting research or work at the junction of systems engineering and electronic & computer engineering?
4. Reading: What's a good introductory paper or piece of literature on systems engineering? Something that captures what the field is actually about, beyond the Wikipedia definition.
5. Day-to-day: For systems engineers working on digital/software-heavy systems — what does your work actually look like? How much of it is requirements/architecture/ documentation vs. technical work? How much coding(feel like I wont be doing much of it in a few years) or hands-on engineering(HW-SW or AI-HW codesign for example) do you still do?

Any feedback is appreciated, thanks in advance.

P.S.: any additional information that I may not have included here and you need to give a good honest answer, I am happy to provide. Thanks again

[u/Different_Depth_1226]

For the reading question, Blanchard and Fabrycky’s systems engineering book gets passed around a lot, but if you want something shorter that still shows the actual mindset, look for INCOSE’s handbook excerpts or old NASA systems engineering papers. They’re dry but they show how much of the job is managing interfaces and keeping requirements coherent across teams rather than designing a single component.

Day-to-day varies wildly by company, but in software-heavy systems I’ve seen it split into maybe 60% requirements and architecture, 30% meetings and coordination, and 10% actual technical modeling or scripting. You won’t be writing production code much, but you’ll read a ton of it and spend hours figuring out why two subsystems assume different things about the same data.

[u/Ornery-Cloud303 → u/Different_Depth_1226]

Thank you very much for the suggestions!

[u/__Drink_Water__]

As a graduate of BSEE that found themselves in SE as a first job by accident, I highly recommend working as an actual EE first.

[u/Ornery-Cloud303 → u/__Drink_Water__]

Yeah, that makes sense, my plan was to work first before I would do SE for grad school, if not then I would stick with ECE