Sandra H. Shichtman

 

 

ENGINEERS IN THE GOVERNMENT AND MILITARY SECTORS

 

Engineers play important roles to assure the security of our nation. They work for the Department of Defense itself and for companies that provide the products and services necessary to keep our military equipped and mission-ready. Profiled below are four engineers who do this important work.

 

DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: AN INTEREST GROWS, A DREAM BECOMES REALITY

Hendra Meggett-Carr’s interest in engineering began in her fourth grade class for gifted-and-talented students; they were asked to choose a topic for a report. “My mother always thought I would make a good lawyer,” she recalls, so she started writing about the law. Halfway through, she realized she had no interest in that field, so she scrapped what she’d written and chose her own topic: aerodynamics. She adds that her brother, who now works for NASA, drew pictures of airplanes and space ships as a child and that the siblings dreamed about designing fighter jets when they grew up.

 

While an undergraduate student studying electrical engineering at Widener University in Chester, PA, from which she graduated in 1998, Meggett-Carr co-oped in Boeing’s Rotocraft Division in Ridley Park, PA, where she was part of the flight controls design team for the Department of Defense’s V-22 Osprey. She worked part time during her senior year, verifying test procedures and assisting with test documentation, and then full time for Boeing after graduation, working with software and hardware, interface control documentation and design, and requirements management for the Department of Defense’s Comanche helicopter.

 

Later, she returned to her hometown of Edgewood, MD, and joined Science Applications International Corp (SAIC) as a systems engineer for the Army Test and Evaluation Command (ATEC), and was later hired directly by the Department of Defense, where she served as a live fire evaluator for the Ballistics Air Division. “I managed and executed test and evaluation programs of mostly guided munitions systems,” she explains. She also earned a master’s degree in technical management, with concentrations in program management and organizational management, from Johns Hopkins University in 2009.

 

Today, Meggett-Carr is a technology transfer program manager for the Army’s Research, Development, and Engineering command (RDECOM). She oversees the planning and execution of cost-shared partnerships involving research, development, and production engineering between industry and the military. “It’s the exchange of technology between the military, industry, and academia,” Meggett-Carr says.

 

CACI: GAINING IN-DEPTH TECHNICAL KNOWLEDGE

From Hong Kong, where she was born, Ada Yick came to the United States, settling in Philadelphia with her family when she was 12 years old. She attended Widener University in Chester, PA, and earned a bachelor’s degree in management with a concentration in management information systems. She co-oped for one semester in DuPont’s information technology (IT department), where she did logistics work and basic computer support. “After graduation, I started working for a little while, joined a company, and started doing help desk analyst work,” she remembers. “Then I moved on and worked as a desktop engineer.”

 

She’d taken management information systems classes during her undergraduate days, so she felt she had a good basic understanding of IT and information systems. “But I just didn’t feel that it was enough and I wanted to have a more in-depth technical knowledge,” she states. So she returned to her alma mater and earned a master’s degree in computer and software engineering.

 

Jobs at small companies followed, including help desk work for an energy company outside of Philadelphia. Several years later, Yick moved to the Maryland area and began working for a large defense contractor.

 

She’s worked for both small companies and one of the largest defense companies. Small companies offer a lot of intimacy, but the growth potential is not as good as in larger companies. The very large company was not a fit for her, either. Just as Yick was pondering her next career move, she was contacted by a staffing agency who told her about an open position at CACI. Yick was looking for a position that was more challenging than the one she had. The position at CACI was just what she was looking for, so she interviewed and was hired.

 

CACI provides information solutions and services that support the Amed Forces of the United States by keeping them informed, equipped, and mission-ready. The company’s headquarters are in Arlington, VA.

 

Yick came to CACI four- and one-half years ago, as an operations manager for its help desk operations and its network monitoring center. She completed project management tasks, helping to set up CACI’s help desk and monitoring center and working with its engineers as they set up their tools, systems, and environment.

 

“As time progressed, I actually became the site lead for CACI for our customer locations,” Yick reports. She was promoted in August 2013 to a position as program manager. She adds that she received sufficient management and financial training to prepare her for this new role.

 

As a program manager, she supports the U.S. Department of Defense environment. She manages a half dozen small programs, more than 30 employees, has profit- and-loss, program performance, customer relationships, and business development responsibilities in this position.

 

She is a member of both the Asian-American Resource group and the newly-organized Women’s Resource group at CACI. Yick explains that she’d been working on the customer side of the business and her membership in these groups will allow her to become acquainted with and network with her colleagues within the company. She is also a member of PMI, the Project Management Institute, an organization that, through speakers and seminars, provides information to its members about new standards for program and project management.

 

ROCKWELL COLLINS: UP, UP, AND AWAY TO A CAREER

“I always had an affinity for math and science,” Debarati Ray says about why she chose to study engineering. There were also engineers among her family members, including her father. “These great role models influenced me early on while I was growing up,” she declares.

 

Born in India, Ray was raised in Oman, and came to the United States in 2007 to study aerospace engineering with a minor in mathematics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, FL. “I’ve been flying since I was six months old, traveling between India and Oman. I was always so interested in aviation,” she notes. She earned her degree in 2011.

 

As an undergraduate, Ray co-oped at Rockwell Collins, an aerospace and defense firm based in Cedar Rapids, IA, that provides advanced communication and aviation electronic solutions for military applications. The company is “a big name” at Embry-Riddle, where its recruiters give on-campus presentations and conduct interviews. “As a co-op, I got the opportunity to prototype a new, cutting-edge technology for the flight management systems department and also interacted with the customer,” she remarks. She knew that a company that would put so much faith in a co-op was a company she wanted to join.

 

Two months after beginning her co-op assignment, she learned that she would become a full-time systems engineer when she graduated. “I was hired on in an E1 Band entry-level,” she says. She designed, implemented, and tested performance features for the flight management system department. “I would do clean sheet design and write requirements for the software engineers to implement. They would then implement it and I would go back and test it in our cockpit simulation to verify functionality,” she explains.

 

Last year, she was promoted to the next level of systems engineering, where she takes on project engineering and test focal roles. “I’m the test focal for the Mitsubishi Regional Jet,” she offers, adding that, in this role, she interacts with both internal and external representatives of Mitsubishi.

 

Rockwell Collins sponsors an official mentoring program. Ray has dedicated mentors who guide her to reach her goals successfully.

 

Ray considers herself a responsible, dependable, and hard-working person. She demonstrates good communication and interpersonal skills and is well-organized, all necessary qualities for being successful in her present position. Ray is always eager to learn new things and, this spring, she also expects to earn her MBA from the University of Iowa.

 

Ray is the commercial systems chair for the Rockwell Collins New Hire Employee Network. In that capacity she organizes networking events and fosters welcoming environments where new hires interact with each other as well as with senior executive leaders. She adds: “At Rockwell Collins, there’s also a woman-to-woman peer mentoring circle, an informal meeting where women in the company get together and talk about their issues, learn, and exchange ideas.” Ray is also a core board member of the local section of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), which provides good networking, leadership, and mentoring opportunities.

 

DRS TECHNOLOGIES, INC.: FROM A BROKEN RADIO TO A CAREER

Adrian Gilbert traces his interest in electrical engineering to a walk he took while living in his native Nassau, the Bahamas. “I was walking home and I saw this broken radio and there were all these ‘things’ in it. Not like the radios today. This was a transistor radio with big tubes in it. It was just fascinating. I asked myself, What are all those things? I couldn’t get it out of my mind,” he recalls. His fascination with the radio and the fact that his father was an electrical engineer who was doing well in his chosen profession, convinced Gilbert that he, too, would become an electrical engineer.

 

He came to the United State to attend college, first at Norfolk State University in Norfolk, VA, where he studied electronic technology, then at Morgan State University in Baltimore, where he earned his bachelor’s of science degree in electrical engineering in 1994. While at Morgan State, Gilbert spent a summer doing research on monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) devices. He explains that MMIC is a type of integrated circuit device that operates at microwave frequencies. Following his graduation, Gilbert enrolled in Johns Hopkins and earned his master’s degree in electrical engineering in 1996.

 

Master’s degree in hand, Gilbert headed for Los Angeles, and a position with Hughes Space and Communications, now called Boeing Satellite Systems, where he designed MMIC circuits. Later, when his wife wanted to move east, he landed a job with a small company, Elcom Technologies, where he worked as a project/systems engineer and program manager.

 

In 2006, Gilbert came to DRS, a defense technology company that supplies integrated products, services, and support to military forces, intelligence agencies, and prime contractors, as a project/systems engineer working in its signal solutions division, a position he continues to hold today. DRS is a well-known company for creating high-end receiver products and he sees a direct correlation between his previous design experience with lower level circuitry and the higher-level receivers and transmitters that he works on at DRS. He adds, “This is a very good company to work for if you want to be challenged.”

 

Since DRS is a provider of products to the government, engineers always face the challenge to produce those products at reduced cost but with the same quality and more functionality, while staying on-schedule.

 

But Gilbert is patient and willing to listen, be it in conversations with colleagues or with the customer. Sometimes, he has to explain to the customer what can and what can’t be done because of the customer’s budget or time frame; at that time he presents the facts to the customer so that a compromise can be reached.

 

“The systems engineering market is changing globally, and, in my role as a systems engineer, I need to know what’s going on in the industry and what the best practices are,” Gilbert concludes. In order to keep up-to-date, he has joined the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE).