Todd West '97
I came to Swarthmore because I wanted to double major in engineering and art at a small liberal arts college, and Swarthmore is just about the only place on the planet where that's possible. Originally, I wanted to be a mechanical engineer, but switched to electrical for no deeper reason than EE units are simple while ME units are a mishmash of english units and SI.
I focused on digital systems, as that seemed to be where the most jobs were at the time and joined Intel's Platform Architecture Lab in Oregon after graduation. I spent two years there writing oscilloscope device drivers and signal processing tools to measure USB signal integrity and power network performance, along with a mismash of exotic analog electronics, PCB design, and a dash of crisis EMC debugging on some 810 chipset platforms which managed to implement wake on sleep. I wound up writing the first draft of the USB 2.0 electrical spec, owned the USB-IF's electrical compliance testing program (http://www.usb.org/developers), and contracted with Intel for another year while getting a MSEE in computational electromagnetics and signal processing at the University of Washington in Seattle.
After UW I landed at FormFactor in Livermore, California as a principal engineer for autolayout engines and autorouters for massively parallel probe cards. Fitting 4000 signal nets timing controlled to 100ps in with over 500 power planes on a 40 layer PCB which has to be held planar within 20 microns when 8000 springs make contact with a wafer is radically different from the low cost design approaches which dominate the PC industry. However, I cleverly decided to quit the job, move back to the Pacific Northwest, and start looking for new work right before September 11th. I wound up unemployed for several months before spending two years back at UW writing best in class OO C++ coupled electromagetic field and circuit equation solvers. This involved an 80% pay cut from what I was earning in California and months of 12 to 16 hour days, but I was able to do most of the photgraphy, skiing, and kayaking I missed in California and consolidated the transition I'd made from being a hardware engineer to a software engineer.
Having pushed my programming skills as far as I could in the context of a single application, I left UW to join the Windows core security team at Microsoft. Microsoft is easily the most challenging and rewarding thing I've ever done. Windows is perhaps the ultimate piece of infrastructure software, and I spend every day figuring out how to support the diverse needs of the hundreds of millions of people who use Windows in a ways which are simultaneously easy to use and secure.
What I've learned along the way is hardware is constrained by both the laws of physics and by the capital costs of production tooling and masks. The majority of innovation and differentiation therefore happens in software, which in turn means there roughly 9 software jobs for every hardware job. Building an excellent piece of technology is not that hard compared to putting that technology into the hands of an unskilled user in a way which makes it easy for them to accomplish what they set out to do. While I have no desire to ever be a professor, this proposition is eerily similar to the challenge Swarthmore faces in turning high school students into college graduates. I can only hope I eventually manage similar mastery.