Tom Bryan

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Job satisfaction:

The bad points of my job primarily involve business/organizational problems.  From disagreements about technical points of the project with other engineers to dissatisfaction with the guidance provided by those in (project) management, a range of organizational issues interferes with the technical work of the team.  Many of those problems have been mitigated by some staffing changes, but never underestimate the amount that co-workers and managers contribute to job satisfaction in the private sector.  While it is fun being able to influence the creation of these business processes, we still feel their absence on a day-to-day basis.

Another "bad" (or, at least, interesting) point with any career is the business case for work being done.  In academia, this manifests itself as a question of whether some body of work will be funded or published.  It can influence the direction of research and the specific problems that a professor or student can attempt to solve.  In the private sector, any effort has to have some distinct benefit for the product, team, or company.  For example, "cleaning up" code that was badly written but that works suffuciently well has a very low priority, but working with such code to fix a bug or make an enhancement can be extremely frustrating.
 

Employment history:

Before moving to North Carolina in 1999 and starting to work for Itron, I worked at Applied Research Laboratories at the University of Texas at Austin.  I worked at ARL in the Signal Physics Lab from 1997-1998 as a Graduate Research Assistant while finishing a Master's degree in Mathematics.  I worked from 1998-1999 as a full time Research Engineer/Scientist Associate.  My work at ARL involved a range of activities related to active sonar research.  My group focused on statistical methods to classify active sonar returns as targets or non-targets.  The group wrote software to prototype new algorithms based on factors such as water temperature, depth, salinity, etc.

Before working at ARL, I was a teaching assistant for a calculus course for UT Austin's math department.

Suggestions for students:

Get some good job experience while in college.  It will give you an idea of whether you like the career you've been considering.  It helps to be immersed in a job field for a few months to see what the environment can be like and to get an idea of what the day to day duties actually are.  It's better to discover what you are and aren't intersted in while you're still in school.

Having the job experience will also improve your confidence when applying for jobs after college and improve your chances of being hired.  Experience in a field related to to what you want to do is ideal, but any full time job experience is better than none.  This job does not have to be paid.

Finally and most importantly, do something that you enjoy.  A career comsumes *a lot* of time and energy both at work and outside of work.  You don't want to waste that much effort on a career that you dislike.  It would be like taking a full schedule of classes in which you have no interest  every semester for the rest of your life.
 

Miscellaneous comments:

E-mail Tom
 

Date of last update: March 11,  2001
 
 

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