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The job market is very good for EE grads
Some graduates get multiple job offers
By Sue Marquette Poremba
Contributing Editor
 'Despite an economic downturn, this is a good time to be graduating with a degree in engineering,” says John Attia, EE professor at Prairie View A&M University (Prairie View, TX). “Our graduates are getting multiple offers.”
The National Association
of Colleges and Employers (NACE, www.naceweb.org) reports that not only are jobs available, starting salaries
are on the rise. Salaries for new graduates in engineering overall rose 6 percent from 2007
to 2008. For electrical engineers, the average starting salary is nearly $57,000.
“There aren’t enough engineering grads out there, so the job market is very good for
them,” Attia notes. Nearly all the school’s EE grads get jobs by graduation, and many get multiple offers.
“We’re also seeing more women coming into EE,” he says. Female enrollment at the school is now between 25 and 30 percent, up significantly from past years.
One of the attractions of electrical engineering is the opportunity to branch out into a number
of fields. There are job openings in a variety of business sectors, including government, semiconductors, insurance, astronomy and power. “Students have the chance to gravitate toward their interests,” Attia says.
Campus career fairs offer students the opportunity to learn more about companies looking for EEs and the projects being staffed. Connections made at these events often lead to internships before graduation and jobs afterward. Of course students can also submit resumes for openings posted on campus job boards and elsewhere.
Diversity is key to FM Global’s success
HR VP and division manager James P Markan stresses the value of diversity at FM Global (Johnston, RI). “Our culturally diverse, global workforce of 4,800 employees is vital to serving the evolving needs of our worldwide clients, which include more than a third of the Fortune 1000,” he says.
A key element to FM Global’s success in attracting, developing and retaining a diverse workforce is its commitment to providing an environment in which each individual is respected, supported and rewarded on the basis of personal achievement and contribution. “Our approach is to provide employees the tools, resources and training they need to support our mission while achieving their own personal success and career satisfaction,” Markan says.
Michael Joe works in the field at FM Global
Michael Joe visits the Atlanta-area sites at some of FM Global’s largest customers. As a consultant engineer, he helps identify the property risks, natural and manmade, that can threaten the clients’ businesses. Then he works with the clients to help them manage their risks effectively.
FM Global is a worldwide commercial property insurer. The company has
been helping its clients manage risk through a combination of engineering, underwriting and claims services for nearly 175 years. Joe explains that unlike most insurance companies, which base premiums on information from actuaries, FM Global sends its 1,500 engineers into the field to “prevent the preventable. We discuss risk improvement measures
to prevent or minimize losses of all kinds: property, revenue, stock value, market share, even reputation,” he says.
Joe earned his 2006 BSEE at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, GA). A campus job posting for a consultant engineer led him to FM Global. The engineering position caught his interest because “It wasn’t an office job,” he says.
Like many engineers, Joe liked taking things apart and putting them back together. But he also liked computers and started his studies in computer engineering. He switched because he liked the hands-on aspects of electrical engineering. “I liked the idea that I could branch off into anything I wanted,” he says.
Joe did just that with his senior project. He and a group of classmates, including one from New Orleans, set out to develop a method for gathering information during a hurricane. They developed a buoy that collected and transmitted data in real time to a backup site. “We were excited when it worked,” he says. “We used the transmitter to call someone in the classroom.”
Joe admits that his job isn’t typical for an EE, but says his education has been invaluable.
“The degree prepares you for critical thinking and the amount of work you’ll have to do on the job,” he says.
Joe’s background is in power generation and he’s in the process of becoming a power generation specialist for FM Global. “I’ll then work specifically with the company’s power generation clients,” he says.
Faris Mohammed helps get power to Shell’s pipelines
Faris Mohammed is a project engineer at Shell Pipeline Company (Houston, TX). He’s in a group that’s responsible for the company’s major capital projects. “We take a project from concept to implementation,” he says.
The EEs in Mohammed’s group work remotely on Shell’s pipelines. They
team up with mechanical engineers in the field to get power and control lines to pumps and valves that are managed from a Houston control center. One
of Mohammed’s roles is to manage the design of the controls and communications systems. “Our systems enable a person in Houston to remotely operate a pump station 300 miles away,” he says.
Mohammed was born in Al Jubayl, Saudi Arabia, but lived there for only eight years. His father worked in the oil industry and brought his family back to the U.S. in 1990.
When Mohammed was young the growing Internet sparked his interest in computers. He attended a magnet program in the Houston school district that focused on engineering.
In college Mohammed started as a CS major, but switched to EE because he wanted to be more hands on. “I also thought it would give me a good foundation for whatever I ended up doing,” he says.
Mohammed earned his 2006 BSEE at the University of Houston (Houston, TX). During school, he worked as an intern for a variety of companies, including a utility company and a computer firm. But he’d always harbored an interest in working abroad.
A summer study solidified this interest. “I chose Morocco specifically to learn Arabic,” he says. Looking for a company that offered international assignments, he sought out Shell’s booth at
a campus career fair.
Mohammed says that his engineering degree not only provided technical knowledge, it also helped prepare him for the work world. “I was always working on five or six projects at a time,” he says.
Amy Bowen works on wind energy systems at NREL
 Amy Bowen is fascinated by energy. She chose EE because she was interested in power electronics. “I thought it was an appropriate field, with energy prices going up so much,”
she says.
Bowen tests small turbines at the National Wind Technology Center (NWTC) in Boulder, CO,
a branch of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Her task involves writing the software for testing the turbines and analyzing data. “The test results will help consumers know which turbine is right for them,” she says.
While working on her 2006 BSEE at Baylor University (Waco, TX), Bowen did several internships involving solar radiation instrumentation and wind energy at NREL in Golden, CO. NREL is a U.S. Department of Energy facility for renewable energy and energy efficiency research, development and deployment. NWTC is NREL’s wind research facility.
Bowen says the best part of her job is going out to the turbines. “Working with the technology hands on has helped me appreciate all the effort and innovation that goes into the designs,” she says.
Focusing on energy allows Bowen to work on another passion: energy systems for developing countries. As a student she worked in Africa twice when a professor invited her to work on a project there.
During the first year, her group designed a system using solar panels and LED lights at a school for the deaf. The second year, they redesigned the lights and the system using a wind turbine with a solar panel backup. “I learned how valuable this technology is for countries without reliable utilities,” she says.
Being a woman engineer has sometimes been a challenge for Bowen, but she’s happy with the environment at NREL and she loves the work. “I think that energy is one of the most useful and in-demand fields within engineering because it’s applicable to everyone,” she says. “Working at NREL has put me at the hub of a very exciting field.
Hector Malagon works with space noise on NRAO’s ALMA project
A work-study program introduced Hector Malagon to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO, Charlottesville, VA). Funded by the NSF, NRAO designs, builds and runs sophisticated radio telescopes for use by scientists around the world.
Before he finished his 2006 BSEE at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (Socorro, NM), Malagon was a work-study student at NRAO. As his hours at the lab increased, he joined NRAO’s documentation area, then moved into a job as a test engineer at its research facility on the college campus. Now he writes test code used in the backend of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) project. He says his work-study was like an internship. “If you do well, you’re likely to be offered a job,” he says.
ALMA is a cooperative effort among North America, Europe, Japan and Chile to develop an advanced ground-based facility for world radio astronomy work. It’s scheduled for completion in 2012. The facility will provide an unprecedented combination of sensitivity, resolution,
and imaging capability at the shortest radio wavelengths for which the Earth’s atmosphere
is transparent.
“We’re building sixty-four dishes in the deserts of Chile,” Malagon says. The 1999 movie Contact, he notes, filmed many of its scenes at NRAO’s older Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico. “The VLA dishes measure centimeter wavelengths,” he says. “ALMA’s dishes will look
at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths.”
Work on the backend for the Chile site is being done in Socorro. Malagon helped develop one $250,000 test set that synthesizes signals into the system. He explains that high frequency signals collected in the receiver unit are converted to lower frequencies, which are converted down even further and then digitized for scientists.
Stringent specifications and tight tolerances are required to prevent distortion of the signals. Malagon writes code that interfaces with the test set used to prove the modules are within spec. “This is real space noise,” he says animatedly. “It’s the stuff scientists look at.”
Malagon is the first member of his family to graduate from college. He “blames” his father for his interest in EE. “My dad was a plane mechanic who always dabbled in electronics, and I kind of followed him in that regard,” he says.
As graduation approached, Malagon “took the first position that opened up here to get my foot in the door,” he says. Within a few months he moved from documentation specialist to his current job.
Its campus location ties NRAO closely to Malagon’s school. “The company makes every effort to get students hands-on experience,” he says.
TI’s Jose Martinez works on DMDs
Dr Jose Martinez is a thin films process engineer at the digital light processing division of Texas Instruments (TI, Dallas, TX). He develops new fabrication processes for TI’s digital micromirror device (DMD) in an effort to improve the device’s mechanical and optical properties. The DMD is an optical semiconductor and a key component of the latest technologies in projectors and televisions.
Martinez came to the U.S. from Bolivia in 1998 to attend college. He started at Miami-Dade Community College (Miami, FL) and carried his credits to Florida International University (Miami, FL) where he earned his 2002 BSEE, 2004 MSEE and 2008 PhD in EE.
Martinez decided to pursue a PhD because he knew that job prospects improved with a graduate degree, especially for international students. He also had a personal goal. “There were no PhDs in my immediate family and I wanted to be the first,” he says with a smile.
Martinez’s specific field is micro electro-mechanical systems (MEMS). He discovered the field when he worked on superconductive RF MEMS in a school research lab. “I got hooked the first day I saw one of my MEMS devices moving under a microscope,” he says.
After completing his masters, Martinez met TI representatives at a SHPE career conference
and landed a co-op, followed by a second co-op the next year. He was offered a third co-op, but had to decline because he’d already worked ten of the twelve months international students are allowed. But he kept in touch and was brought back for a full-time position after he finished his PhD.
As a child in Bolivia, Martinez liked challenges. He chose to pursue EE because his math teacher told him it was the most challenging engineering field. “Since I always enjoyed breaking things and putting them back together, it seemed like a perfect fit,” he says.
Martinez likes his hands-on technical job, but says he’ll eventually go back to school for his MBA. “For now I like being in a factory and playing with wafers,” he says.
D/C
Sue Marquette Poremba is an engineering and construction writer in State College, PA.
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