MATLAB, in my humble opinion, is one of the most useful tools that you could possibly learn during your undergraduate education. Moreover, I would say that the sooner you learn how to interact with it, the better off you will be for all your future courses.

Now don’t get me wrong. I have seen reddit posts where people ask if MATLAB is used in industry, blah blah blah and I have seen people claim they never used it in their life and I note their “engineering discipline” is that they are a water treatment engineer. Ok, that is not a shock. However, for MOST engineering jobs that actually are “design jobs”, you will need to know MATLAB.

Secondly, MATLAB is the easiest programming language (Syntax + IDE?) to learn. It’s built on C++, it is Strongly Typed (i.e. caps matter), and so it gets you comfortable with all the standard programming constructs that you encounter with other languages such as C, C++ C#, Fortran, Pearl, etc.. It does this while removing a lot of the announce regarding declarative statements that C++ / C and Fortran require. There’s no need in identifying what subroutines are included, what data type is this variable, what data type is that variable, do I need to cast this variable from an integer to a floating point to do a follow up operation with a floating point?

All that stuff is removed and done behind the scenes. It’s truly what you see / intend is what you get. I can define a = 10, and it is an integer. I can then do an operation where b = 1.5 * a, and then b will be a floating point. It makes things so easier to learn when the rigamarow is out of the way and you focus exclusively on the programming logic.

What I do in class is I try to incorporate it into every topic we teach. MATLAB has a symbolic tool box and as such I can use it to integrate, differentiate, find roots, solve ODEs Symbolically, numerically integrate, numerically approximate derivatives, plot graphs / surfaces, find critical points, etc… basically you name it.

So I encourage you to go to your MyAPPS section of ASU and download it. Get it up and running and follow along in class. It can save you a ridiculous amount of time during the semester. Specifically when trying to identify small errors that can lay hidden in your work where a 2 somehow disappeared or a sign change happened on accident.