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In this issue, I would like to talk about one of the ten points listed in my 5-year mission statement for the department (this appears in the ECE web page). One of the department's goals are to place our undergraduate and graduate students in LEADING companies and universities in the country. By looking at the records of where our students have been placed in the last few years, it is clear that the undergraduate students are finding lots of jobs, but they are mainly in local Chicago area small companies. Some, not all, are finding jobs in the top 20 companies. One of the possible reasons for this may be that students spend their years doing CO-OPS in local companies for personal or family reasons, and then stay in the region for their permanent jobs as well. In the future, we would like to place our students in the national top 20 companies in electrical and computer engineering such as IBM, HP, Intel, Sun, Lucent, Digital, Motorola, Dell, Mentor Graphics, Cadence, Ameritech, etc. This would help to create better ties with industry in terms of future student placement and industrial funding of equipment and research.
We also want to encourage more of our undergraduate students to continue on to graduate school and join leading universities. We will do this through regular meetings with the senior students in the department.
As a clear action plan, I would like to collect a one page resume of all the undergraduate and graduate students looking for jobs in a particular year (around January) and write personal cover letters to the corporate recruiters in the top 20 companies asking them to include Northwestern in their recruiting trip. We will coordinate this effort with the Career Placement Center. We have already started this effort and as a result, Hewlett-Packard has informed us that they will visit us this year.
Another plan is that each week, we get emails from various companies informing us of career opportunities. I would like to set up a link to our ECE web page so that we can place those career opportunities there for everyone to see (some kind of a career placement web subpage).
We also need to possibly advertise officially through our ECE web page all the students who are looking for jobs this current year. We would want to have their resumes handy for potential employers to examine. We will clearly need help from undergrad volunteers to set this up.
In any case, start thinking about how we can all proactively place our students in the best companies and universities. E-Mail other ideas to banerjee@ece.nwu.edu .
-Prith Banerjee
Chairman
VLSI Seminar Sep 30
TITLE: Slicing Floorplans With Pre-placed Modules
AUTHORS: F. Y. Young and D. F. Wong
SPEAKER: Kiarash Bazargan
ROOM: Tech L324 (ECE Conference Room)
TIME: 4-5pm
Control Seminar Oct 1
TITLE: Gain Scheduling for Nonlinear Control Design
SPEAKER: W. Jack Rugh, Electrical Eng., Johns Hopkins
ROOM: Annenberg G21
TIME: 10:30-11:30 am
There are no exams scheduled this week.
Prof. Alok Choudhary and his colleagues have received a new research grant from the Department of Energy as part of their Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) program on "High-Performance Data Management, Access and Storage Techniques for Tera-Scale Applications". The Principal Investigator of this grant is Prof. Alok Choudhary, and the co-investigators are Prof. Valerie Taylor and Prof. Prith Banerjee. It is a 3-year award at the rate of $292,000 per year, totaling $876,000.
Prith Banerjee will travel to Santa Fe, NM Sept. 30 - Oct. 1 to attend the DARPA PI meeting and to present posters on the MATCH project.
Alok Choudhary traveled to Syracuse, NY on Friday, Sept. 19 to attend Ph.D. defense of two of his Ph.D. students. He also attended a research meeting regarding his project from the DoD Modernization Program.
Alan Sahakian will travel to Montreal, Quebec, Sept. 25 - 27 to attend IEEE EMBS Executive Committee meetings as VP-Publications and Technical Activities.
Since the quarter has just started, the due date of the new ECE web page design contest has been extended from Oct. 1 to Oct. 8. Several students requested the extension.
Look at the current ECE page for details.
THERE IS A CASH REWARD OF $500 TO THE WINNER!
BE CREATIVE.
You can look at news from previous weeks in Old News .