Kevin Baumgartner
ECE 400
2/1/2012
Professional Statement
As an electrical engineer planning on entering the work force in a matter of a few mere months, I believe I have a lot to offer the engineering community. But I also know that I have a long way to go with familiarizing myself with the industry I work in once I get there. However, I do think that I have all the tools needed to develop into a great engineer. I have been grooming these tools throughout my college career with various courses, projects, internships, and activities. All of these, which I will highlight details of later, have contributed to enhancing my knowledge of the electrical engineering field as well as develop my problem solving skills. One other important tool that I believe will prove equally valuable is my ability to communicate with oral as well as written communication.
First, I will highlight all of the activities I participated in prior to my college career that I believe will benefit me as a me as a future engineer. I didn’t go to a typical high school. My parents chose to home school me throughout high school. Most people think of homeschoolers as sheltered, anti-social students who cannot effectively communicate their ideas. But I used the spare time that I had as a homeschooled student to participate in several activities with other students and try to break the stigma attached to homeschoolers. Some of these activities included participating in several homeschool groups, interacting with other students, joining an honor society, and playing on a local basketball team comprised of other homeschool students. Another benefit that homeschooling provided was that it allowed me to focus on some of my interests, in particular, computers. I was able to spend a lot of time learning about web design, developing several websites, mostly by teaching myself in the spare time that I had. As an engineer, problem solving is a very important attribute, and exposure to this through web design at an early age has helped with my success thus far in college and will help even more as a develop in the future.
Thus far in my college career, I have had great success in my course work, which I believe is an indicator of my ability to learn and apply new things. This can be highlighted with a summary of several projects that I have worked on in college, or am currently working on. The first project I had to work on was in a class called Electronic Circuits and Systems Laboratory. The project I had completed was an audio mixer, which took four different audio signals, and combined them to one. The project itself was not a difficult design but it was significant because it could work in collaboration with another student’s project, an audio equalizer. Senior design also provided me with a challenging project, where my duty was to analyze a single line of a video and determine its shade, indicating whether the video image was aligned or not. This project presented problems that I had never seen before and required that I figure them out, which is very important for an engineer to be able to do. It also gave me exposure to engineering development process, requiring design progress reports, and additionally allowed me go get experience working in a team setting and adhering to design specifications. Not only did I complete the project, but I was also awarded a Designer/Leader Award by the instructor, which is an indication of my ability to solve problems and communicate them to a customer as well as my team members. Currently, I am working on a semester long project developing an Android Application which will give me exposure to java programming.
I am also involved with several activities at my university. For three semesters I was involved as an undergraduate teaching assistant for Introduction to Digital System Design, in which I instructed two lab sessions per semester. This gave me an opportunity to show that I was a strong communicator and to confirm what I had learned when I took the course.
I had the opportunity one semester to intern at ArcelorMittal, which is a world leading steel production company. I worked in the slab caster of the steel producing department, where molten iron was taken, refined into steel, and cast into large slabs. I worked with the electrical maintenance manager, troubleshooting electrical failures and overseeing the scheduled planned maintenance to the equipment throughout the steel producing department. This task is very important as just a short period of down time could potentially cost the company millions of dollars.
All of the areas I highlighted provide insight to the development of my problem solving and communication abilities as well as how I have applied them to various projects, activities and internships. I possess the tools I need to succeed as an entry-level engineer, as well as the eagerness to learn and obtain as much industry knowledge as I can to become the best engineer that I possibly can. I am confident that the engineering community will look at me as a strong asset no matter where I am.
