Cornell ECE has enabled me to develop problem solving skills required to tackle complex technical problems that I have come across throughout my career and provided a network, which I can always reach out to.
The technical skills that I built while I was at Cornell have helped me throughout my career. Through the undergraduate curriculum in ECE (specifically Computer Architecture and VLSI), doing research on faster architectural simulation with Sally McKee (now an Associate Professor at Chalmers University of Technology), and taking part in Cornell's Co-op program at AMD, I was able to build the experiences I needed to get my first job at Broadcom designing Blu-ray chips. Following Broadcom, I went back to school and joined MIT's Leaders for Global Operations (LGO) program and got a dual degree in M.B.A. and M.S. in EECS to get more experience in business, operations, and software. I continued to work in semiconductors after school as part of Business Development in Intel's Custom Foundry. There, the technical knowledge from my ECE degree helped me to make good business decisions. Today, I continue to use the coding skills that I learned through my experience in ECE as a Technical Account Manager at Optimizely.
In addition to providing the resources that I needed to build technical expertise, the Cornell ECE network has been extremely valuable for finding advice and mentorship throughout my career. I continue to be surprised by the number of Cornell ECEs from various years that have helped me in my different jobs, including senior engineers and managers at Broadcom.
However, the best part of my whole experience has been the friendships that I made from working on impossible coding projects and problem sets with my fellow classmates late into the night during undergrad. These are the friends that I still keep in touch with to this day. We have all gone on to pursue a variety of career paths including engineering, law, and business. Nevertheless, we continue to give each other advice about our careers, provide constant moral support, and reminisce about our college days.