Career Day 2000

Engineers from both industry and UWEE faculty and staff led a panel discussion of why they find engineering exciting, interesting, and fun.

About Career Day

The UW Department of Electrical Engineering's Career Day is a once-a-year chance for talented high school students to get a feel for what a typical day in college life is like - including labs, classes, homework, and social activities. The department hosted this group of students with the intent of recruiting them into engineering and hopefully, to the University of Washington.

Interested students participate in a competitive application process to be paired with an undergraduate or college professor for the day. This year most of them were seniors; however, some ambitious sophomores and juniors were there as well.

This was our first annual Career Day. It is the intent of the department and college to expand it college-wide in 2001, with at least 150 students volunteering from across the various engineering departments. This year Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science & Engineering, and Bioengineering provided student volunteers, in addition to Electrical Engineering from which the majority of volunteers came.

This Year's Participants

We had several extremely talented high school students from top-notch schools in the Puget Sound area. Here is the roster for Career Day 2000 - if you have JavaScript enabled, you can click on their name and see both them and their Career Day mentor:

The students were given the chance to interact with a panel of talented engineers and EE professors. Industry panelists included Eric Blom, Senior Engineer at TelaWave Technologies; Gary Garrabrant, Senior Digital Signal Processing Engineer with Palm Computing; and Jeff Silverman, System Administrator of EE's Research Computing Services. EE faculty members on the panel were Professors Dave Allstot, Chen Ching Liu, and Greg Zick.

Future Career Day Plans

Where you find students, you'll generally find pizza.

Student feedback was positive overall about the experience. Some requests were made for design competitions, further introduction to engineering, instructions on how to apply, etc. However, since the intent of Career Day is primarily to expose students to typical college life, in all likelihood we will, in the future, keep the tag-along activity simple and straightforward.

Per student's request, during next year's Career day we will provide an introduction to engineering CD and a video to engage the visual right brain of these students.