Feedback from an employer (Northrop Grumman)

Three people, Eric Pearson, Justin Doyle, and Brandon White, from Northrop-Grumman visited the College of Engineering on Friday, Sept. 12, '03. Doyle and White serve as recruiters for NG and are part of their Professional Development Program, a program that new NG recruits go through that takes them to different parts of NG to bring them up to speed; Pearson is a manager of the program. Mr. Pearson is a senior person with NG and has been with them for many years; Doyle and White are very recent hires; Doyle is an OSU ME graduate.

The purpose of their visit was to build relations with different programs in the college, to tell us about their recruiting needs, and to learn about the individual programs in the college. (They also spent time at the ElectroScience Lab with which NG has strong ties.) Their visit consisted primarily of a common breakfast session with people from several departments as well as the dean, followed by 45-minute individual sessions with several of the programs. Bruce attended the joint breakfast session; Bruce and Neelam attended the CIS session.

Here are the main points that we got during these sessions:

Almost all of their work involves developing software to some extent.
Their work mainly involves embedded systems (sensors of various kinds, etc.), networking, graphics & visualization, etc. Scientific computing is an important part of their activities.
A key requirement is that their people be able to work in multidisciplinary (i.e., people with backgrounds in different engineering disciplines) teams.
They have been happy with the people they have hired from OSU (the only CSE grad currently in NG whose name they could recall was George Locktish, a recent graduate from our program).
They have an active summer internship program and would very much like to consider our students for this program.

Bruce and Neelam summarized some of the key aspects of our program:

Our courses, especially the beginning 221-sequence, stress conceptual foundations.
We have many students working in areas of interest to them such as embedded systems, but they are primarily grad students; the point being that employers shouldn't really expect BS CSE graduates to have had a lot of exposure to such topics since we have to focus (as noted in the point above) on ensuring a solid foundation in computing and software engineering principles and practices.
Team working is an important part of the program, especially in the beginning sequence and in CIS 560. (We didn't get into any serious mention of our capstone courses.)
We have a recently-developed Applied Software Engineering sequence that tries to provide other (i.e., non-CSE) engineering and science majors with a reasonable background in software development techniques and software engineering principles.

Paul Sesto of NG will be visiting the college on October 2 for the college's annual "Expo", and on October 27 for the career day. We will try to meet with him on one of those days since he is their software/IT person and will be able to talk to us in more detail about our program and their needs.

Paul Sesto did visit on October 2. Paul is a software person and has a graduate degree in CS. He has been with NG for over twenty years. I (Neelam) met with him for about 45 minutes (Bruce couldn't make it). Here is a summary of the meeting and the points Paul made:

NG recently hired George Locktish (graduated not long ago from the CSE program) and are quite happy with him. They have recently interviewed Kara Rowley (very recent CSE grad) and are likely to make her an offer.
Paul did not have any detailed comments about our curriculum since he was not familiar with the details of the curriculum. (I gave him a copy of the UG brochure.)
Paul recently learned (maybe from the reports he got from our previous meeting with people from NG) about the close relation between our CIS and CSE programs. As a result, he plans to try and look at CIS students as well as CSE students during future recruitment visits.
Paul was interested in some details of our Software Engineering courses. I told him about our 560, 757, and 758 courses. He seemed quite happy with what he heard.
Paul listed the following items as the software-related knowledge, skills, and experience they would like to see in people they hire:
- Experience with designing (as against just coding) reasonable-sized software systems.
- Some knowledge of process-related items including UML, the Unified Process, etc.
- Good communication skills and team-working skills.
In terms of other topics, NG is particularly interested in networking-related issues, in general operating systems-related topics, and in embedded systems.

Overall, NG has a very favorable impression of our students. Paul was interested in talking to our students both about technical topics as well as about opportunities in NG. We will try to arrange a talk by him on the evening of October 22nd.

Dipal Bhatt (bhattd@cis), the OSU-ACM president has arranged for Paul to give a talk on October 22nd. Paul is expected to give an overview of NG Systems highlighting specific Software Engineering job opportunities, and have sufficient time for a question/answer session.