 Daniel D. Holt
Electrical Engineer
Genetronics Inc.
San Diego, CA
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 B.S. -
Electrical Engineering, San Diego State University |
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Electrical Engineer
working within the fields of Electrofusion and
Electrochemotherapy. |
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"Students should
seek out practical experience while they are still in school.
Work on projects sponsored by their schools, professional
organizations, or clubs." |
 
"I have had the opportunity to, to bounce around in a small company. I
don't have one thankless little task to work with. I have all these
different opportunities and different technologies I get to work with. The
fact that I get to go from, from one type of hands-on technical to in
front of a computer for a week designing or drafting a circuit board and
the next week doing programming, the next week back out on, on the bench
working on the actual product again. As opposed to just one task, the
small company gives you that much more global feel where you don't; not
that you don't know where you're going next, but there's an excitement
there that you don't have to worry from day to day that oh, I've got to go
back and do the same thing."
When Daniel Holt began working, he was amazed at the difference between
engineering at school and the real world of engineering. Holt works at a
small company, Genetronics, where he has had the opportunity to debug
boards, do surface mounts, do circuit board layout, design Powell
programs, and program an operating system. He thrives on the variety, but
would have liked school to prepare him for the working world. During his
undergraduate years, he says, "I kind of felt that engineering was a bunch
of math: it was equations; it was formulas. Out here, I've done very
little of what felt like day to day work as a student."
Holt gives several examples of the differences he discovered. "Coming out
here, you're given a board. You're not given a piece of paper with numbers
on it. You're given an actual product and asked to sodder it and asked to
find a problem in that device." He describes the difference in magnitude
between projects done at school and those in the real world. He explains
that one particular product "was a very large device compared to anything
I had learned in school. I had learned very small, 16 gate devices. This
device has well over a hundred internal gates. Pin count is much higher
than anything the school ever taught. But the fundamentals were still
there, and knowing them from school was the only reason I could even
attempt doing" the project.
Another aspect of work that is not taught at school is the importance of
documentation. "We go weeks at a time working on a program's
documentation, and documentation is one of the biggest aspects of
engineering that is described so little in school that you never realize
that you're going to get out here and be in front of a computer and
probably a word processor as an electrical engineer for so much of your
time. They don't stress enough the fact that you need to be a good writer
the fact that you need to be able to take something that you've worked on
and put it on paper so that someone else, who is non-technical, can
understand what you're talking about."
Holt strongly recommends that students seek out practical experience while
they are still in school. He tells students to work on projects sponsored
by their schools, professional organizations, or clubs. They can also work
on their own independent projects, "doing something completely on the
outside that gives you the experience of actually purchasing parts,
building a board, designing, laying out a circuit board all the way to the
point of actually making sure your design does what you expect and having
a worthwhile product when you're done."
In his own case, Holt took a project he had developed to his interview at
Genetronics. "We spent two hours during the interview discussing my
product. And he, my boss now, could ask me any question about the
schematic, the circuit board, any of the components. And I was able to
answer every question about every little detail simply because it was my
device and I had spent months in developing it." Having a specific project
to discuss at an interview gives a candidate a decided advantage.
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