The
following are my “cornerstone” documents, relevant examples I have handpicked
and revised to highlight my professional writing at this phase of my collegiate
career. Please examine and critique
them. Feel free to inquire about their
composition and content.
Written
to chronicle an engineering achievement for a freshman year English composition
course, “Computing Then and Now” summarizes the rise of computers as an
engineering marvel. This research report
begins with ENIAC, the first modern computer system, then traces a path through
modern advanced microprocessors such as the octocore, thirty-two nanometer
Intel Itanium and innovative computing systems such as the parallel processing
and “Deep Question Answer” technology of IBM’s Watson. This report showcases concision and brevity
as well as fully researched and cited writing.
It displays an intersection of the many categories of computer
engineering, from very-large-scale integration on wafer-thin silicon to complex
algorithmic implementations of abstract programming concepts across thousands
of processors. Both are subject areas I
am passionate about, and the research, acronyms, and clever quips involved
place this among my personal favorite writing assignments.
Written
for Electronics I Laboratory in the spring term of my sophomore year, the next
entry is my first formal report for an electrical engineering laboratory. “Experiment #1: Semiconductor Diode Characteristics”
outlines the experimental procedure, observations, and conclusions for an
analysis of a 1N4006 diode. While only
the first experiment, and therefore not necessarily as complex as those that
follow, it was among the most involved as far as theory writing. It addresses the atomic properties and
construction of semiconductors, as well as the functional characteristics of
your average diode. This passage
combines application knowledge, mathematical analysis, and scatter plots to
create an exhaustive representation of electrical engineering principles.
Written for a professional writing course in the fall
term of my junior year, this document is an evaluation of the Kaveri
microarchitecture employed in the latest iteration (at the time) of accelerated
processing unit by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). “Down to the Numbers: A Competitive Analysis
of the Kaveri Microarchitecture in the AMD A8-7650K” is designed to be an
application of my discipline to a key aspect of professional writing, a
judgement and assessment on whether a product, service, or solution meets a
goal. It also serves as a comparative
analysis of competing alternatives. It
has persuasive components, outlining attitudes towards specific processor
characteristics and why particular views should be adopted. It is designed to be accessible and
explanatory to someone not well versed in the field. I enjoyed honing my professional writing
skill while applying my passion for computing architecture.
Written
for my engineering design class in the spring term of my sophomore year, the "Final Report for the Intelligent Ceiling Fan" was the official submission of a
full-fledged design project. This report
consists of an outline of the problem, heavily researched and cited background
information, and a thorough solution proposal and design outline. I worked with Wil Livengood, MET, lead designer,
modeler, and team lead; and Steven Bucci, MET, research director and economics
analyst. I was responsible for
electrical and electronics design as well as prototype construction. This work outlines everything from
manufacturing techniques to failure modes to investment distribution. My team and I finished second place in the
engineering department’s “Shark Tank” Engineering Design Competition and
received high marks from the director of the department.
Programming
As
a computer engineer, much of the professional writing I perform is in another
language. I have completed extensive
coursework in C, Ada, Verilog, and Matlab.
I have professional experience in ColdFusion, Javascript (jQuery, AJAX),
CFML, HTML, SQL, and HQL, primarily from a summer internship in software
development. I have additional personal
experience in Python, Java, BASIC, and various additional shell and terminal
syntaxes. I consider coding to be one of
my passions and an art form in its own right.
I have been working with code for roughly eight years now, and I am
grateful to have it come somewhat easily by now. There is a plethora of applications for
programming knowledge, and I know I am only scratching the surface. I hope to continue growing in experience with
numerous other languages and techniques.
I look forward to beginning to work with Assembly in the coming months,
as well as to take a class on artificial intelligence and neural networks next
year. Still, in my experience, coding is
not as exciting without a concrete hardware platform, and I hope to apply my
knowledge of programming to embedded system design, the internet of things, or
robotics. I have included some of my
more extensive programming projects for your consideration.
This
program was written for an information structures course in the fall term of my
junior year. Its purpose is to analyze
and compare the performance of stacks and queues. The program is designed to read a series of
records from a text file, load them into a stack and a queue, and then perform
update and delete processes on the records within those data structures. The packages for dealing with stacks and
queues were provided by the professor, while the CompositeStructures program
and the input file are of my own construction.
My goal was the employment of numerous isolated functions as well as a
clear, polished presentation. The link
above contains all necessary files and a text file of the output.
This
is a Matlab script written for an introductory course in the fall term of my
sophomore year. This program is an
animation script in which several objects or “balloons” travel around the
screen, bouncing or passing through the edges and “popping” when they collide
with a moving “pointy object.” The
collision detection algorithm was a particularly difficult feat to
implement. This course did not cover
functions in Matlab, so the code is extensive and repeating, but still clear
and commented. If you have access to
Matlab software, I encourage you to copy, paste, and run. If you wish, alter some of the user-alterable
constants to play with speeds and constraints.