Well, I got out of college at a bad time ('91) for engineers. My future wife graduated a couple weeks before me (different school), went home to Atlanta, and had a job 3 days later. I lost, and the country boy from Wisconsin moved to Atlanta. I then found out that getting an engineering job in Atlanta without having gone to Georgia Tech (nothing against Tech) in a tough economy was going to be really tough. Spent 28 months doing temp work, everything from warehouse work to office work to electronics assembler and technician. I also started taking night classes at Southern Polytechnic in Marietta just to keep my brain working. We had about given up, and were going to move somewhere else when our lease was up. At a office party for my wife's company, I started talking to the husband of one of her co-workers. He mentioned he was an engineer, and said to get him a resume. I did, and about 2 months later got a call. It had ended up on the desk of the only engineer at the company that had attended the same college (
Rose-Hulman) that I had. That alone made him curious enough to have me come in for an interview. Turned out we had had the same adviser for our senior projects. Anyway, two more rounds of interviews later, I had a job, and have been there building spaceflight hardware for 13 years now.
Who I knew (and networking outside of the normal "engineer network circles") got me the interview. What I knew, and how well I interviewed got me the job. What I have learned since then has kept me the job, etc. At the time I knew almost nothing about RF testing, and absolutely nothing about working in the space business, but they were willing to take a chance, mostly based on the school's reputation and my interview.
It's been a great ride, and I have been lucky to work on a lot of great projects, including Cassini, a couple of Mars missions, and a lot of stuff that's now orbiting Earth, both research and communications. However, I do have to say that working with FIRST is the most rewarding thing I do, and I'm thrilled that the company is becoming more and more supportive of FIRST each year.
-Jeff Pahl
Project Engineer
Test Development Group
Defense and Space Systems Division
EMS Technologies, Inc.
http://www.emsdss.com/