Subject:  Re: thanks
          To: FArchambeau@fsc.edu
 

Professor Archambeault,
       Sorry for the lateness of my reply. I was accepted into the Masters program at WPI and start classes today. Thank you again for your letter of recommendation. Below is a short description of what I'm doing and some related  comments about the FSC curriculum as you requested. But before that I do have to relate a funny thing that happened this summer. Bryan Dunn, who works at Raytheon as sys admin on my project, and I were trying to get my headphone jack. Bryan took the case off and after moving a few things out of the way, found that  the jack wasn't connected to anything. So we put the machine back together and then it wouldn't boot, it couldn't read the disc. This was Bryan's second week so he was nervous about screwing up. We tried a whole bunch of stuff and nothing worked so we quit for the day. The next morning we came back to it and it dawned on me that it could be a bent read pin. We checked it out and sure enough it was the old bent pin trick. If it wasn't for all that frustration in the hardware labs we probably never would have thought of it and I wouldn't have had a machine to work on and Bryan would have looked pretty bad his second week on the job.
       Here is my understanding of what I do. I am a software engineer in Raytheon's air traffic control section. I work on a project called P1, which is an ATC system for Germany, and is entirely written in C. I work in the Radar Data
Processing group. RDP gets the radar info and processes it for display and use by other groups. Right now I am making some changes for the newest release. It is more than just coding. There is a whole process from design to testing that we must follow. There are several levels of documentation that have to be chnged to reflect the new behavior of the program. Once this is done a plan of what  changes have to be made and how this code will be tested has to be submitted and reviewed. Then you finally get to make your code changes and test them. Once you have your code changes you have to have a code review so people who no better than you do can make sure you didn't make any mistakes. After the review you integrate your changes with everyone else's changes and wait around while its tested to fix the stuff that broke.
       As far as the FSC curriculum is concerned. I feel that the C course (Systems Programming) probably helped me out the most for my particular job. The story above relates the importance of the hardware courses. Overall, I feel that the curriculum prepared me for an entry level position in this field and provided a solid foundation for my graduate studies. Although, I do think that more attention should be paid to UNIX, since most work seems to take place on UNIX. Systems Programming was really the only class that we had to use UNIX.
       Thanks again for all your help and I'll probably run into you again sometime.
 
   -Roberto