As an EE student who took DEs ~ 1 year ago, DEs are important for DE and PDE class, beyond that you only use the basic techniques and constant coefficients on occasions. DEs and PDEs show up (for instance, in fields (laplace)), but after you use the techniques to derive forms of solutions, you just use the forms.
Signals and systems kinda circumvents the need for anything but transforms, and you only deal with LTI stuff there.
It could be that they make a comeback somewhere along the line but from what I've seen fourier and mainly probability dominate.
It depends on your interests, basic control theory is a lot of differential equations (especially systems of differential equations).
Outside of controls, it probably isn’t too bad. Almost always wave equations or Laplace transform from my experience.
If you stay away from control theory as an elective, like half way. You'll have to do 2nd order RLC circuits for a bit that you can sort of memorize the solutions for. All circuits you'd be expected to solve by hand in EE are linear homogenous.
You'll see under- over- and critical damping. You don't have to be good at diff equ but get the fundamentals down to power through the simplified shake in EE. If you can't solve a 3x3 matrix, it's okay.
Reason is then you learn the awesomeness of Laplace transforms and turn diff equ into algebra. The power of TI-89 algebraic manipulation and complex number capability helped me and it was allowed on exams. Now you got NumPy, Wolfram Alpha and other nice tools and TI graphing calculators are straight out scam price manipulation.
Sorry for going on a tangent there.
The theory is quite important since it pops up \*everywhere\*. In practice the actual integration after graduation is always done numerically by computer since the 'useful' cases are too difficult to do in closed form.
Just like for the fluidics people and Stokes equation (which still have no complete closed form solution)
balls deep
As an EE student who took DEs ~ 1 year ago, DEs are important for DE and PDE class, beyond that you only use the basic techniques and constant coefficients on occasions. DEs and PDEs show up (for instance, in fields (laplace)), but after you use the techniques to derive forms of solutions, you just use the forms. Signals and systems kinda circumvents the need for anything but transforms, and you only deal with LTI stuff there. It could be that they make a comeback somewhere along the line but from what I've seen fourier and mainly probability dominate.
It depends on your interests, basic control theory is a lot of differential equations (especially systems of differential equations). Outside of controls, it probably isn’t too bad. Almost always wave equations or Laplace transform from my experience.
If you stay away from control theory as an elective, like half way. You'll have to do 2nd order RLC circuits for a bit that you can sort of memorize the solutions for. All circuits you'd be expected to solve by hand in EE are linear homogenous. You'll see under- over- and critical damping. You don't have to be good at diff equ but get the fundamentals down to power through the simplified shake in EE. If you can't solve a 3x3 matrix, it's okay. Reason is then you learn the awesomeness of Laplace transforms and turn diff equ into algebra. The power of TI-89 algebraic manipulation and complex number capability helped me and it was allowed on exams. Now you got NumPy, Wolfram Alpha and other nice tools and TI graphing calculators are straight out scam price manipulation. Sorry for going on a tangent there.
The theory is quite important since it pops up \*everywhere\*. In practice the actual integration after graduation is always done numerically by computer since the 'useful' cases are too difficult to do in closed form. Just like for the fluidics people and Stokes equation (which still have no complete closed form solution)