Engineering
Alumni News
Please send your news to engineering@usm.maine.edu
See also the Applied Science, Engineering and Technlogy alumni page.
Nickole Gagne (2008)
Nickole Gagne worked at Fairchild Semiconductor in South Portland as an intern before graduating with a degree in Electrical Engineering in May 2008, and upon graduation was offered a position as a circuit design engineer. Immediately after graduation, she went to Hawaii for much-needed rest and recreation. The coolest parts of the trip were exploring lava tubes on Hawaii’s Big Island and visiting Pearl Harbor.
Here is what she says about her first few months as a circuit designer at Fairchild:
At first things were shaky. Even though I worked as an intern prior to accepting the full time position there is still a lot of information I have to constantly freshen up on. Julie Stultz [USM EE alumna] is my mentor/supervisor. I worked with her jointly on a lot of my projects. However, at the end of September, we were strapped for design resources, so I started working on my first solo design. I didn’t feel that I was ready, but in my experience, I have never really been ready. I like the expression: you either sink or swim. Now that the design is being wrapped up, I feel that I have made so much progress. I hit some really impossible goals that they had set, and working alone has taught me so much. It even looks like we might be able to patent the design I developed.
As an intern at Fairchild, I worked in process engineering, device engineering, and circuit design engineering. A little over a year ago, while working in device engineering, my mentor and I were able to create a new device. My assignment at the time was to lay the device out in a CAD environment so we could fabricate the idea. Fabrication can take a while for engineering samples, but it looks like the idea might be novel enough for a potential patent. Can you believe that - 22 years old and two potential patents? With all this patent talk I have been thinking of pursuing a second degree in patent law and, with Fairchild’s generous tuition reimbursement program, I could have it paid for.
Mark Kapsch (2007)
Mark has been working in the Network Engineering and Integration division of MITRE Corp. in Bedford, MA as a systems engineer. MITRE is a federally funded not for profit research and development corporation that operates in the public interest. Mark's work is concentrated on the issues surrounding airborne data communications and mobile ad hoc networking between airborne platforms.
Currently Mark is advising several US Air Force bomber platforms about datalink system hardware and software integration, and providing systems engineering guidance to those platforms to ensure that data communications system interoperability with other participants on the airborne network is achieved.
Mark is also working in collaboration with several other MITRE engineers to provide the vision for the future of airborne networking that takes an enterprise architecture, or system of systems, viewpoint into consideration. Mark and the other engineers involved are able to provide guidance on system design that allows dissimilar systems to interoperate much in the way that the terrestrial internet operates where the protocol defines the system, rather than the specific architecture of the user terminal.
In addition, Mark has begun an exploration with Mr. Richard Carter of the possibility of a cooperative education venture between MITRE and USM that would provide internship opportunities to USM engineering and computer science students and also provide additional resources, guidance and support from MITRE for those students in their capstone design projects.
