 MEET THE STUDENTS
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Fushpal's Three Favorite Things about the ECE Department:
1) There are many opportunities at Maryland. There is always some program somewhere on campus that will help you realize your interests. For example, if you are an engineering major, that does not mean that the only way you can learn about business and entrepreneurship is through adding another business major. There are programs like Hinman CEOs and Quest that are there to provide students will real world business experiences.
2) The location and the quality of the engineering curriculum make the university a hot spot for recruiting. Plenty of opportunities exist, both in the public sector, in the form of government related jobs, and private sector, in the form of highly competitive start up companies in the Washington metropolitan area. In addition, owing to the recent jump in university rankings, a lot of blue chip companies are also beginning to recruit heavily.
3) The research opportunities at Maryland are tremendous. I was surprised to see the magnitude of research that goes on in the ECE department. No matter what your research interests are, you can always find a faculty member that has the required expertise on the subject and would be willing to guide you through. You just need to take the initiative and be prepared to do the hard work.
Advice to Incoming Students:
If you have a goal of what you want to achieve by going to college before you begin, you will conquer half of your college experience right there. Your motivations can be anything from being rich and famous or learning for the sake of knowledge. As long as you have a strong reason to go to college and you are willing to go lengths to achieve your goals, you are likely to excel.
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Fushpal
talks about ECE @ Maryland:
"I was born in Mumbai, India, and later moved to Delhi. I come from a family with very little academic background. I am told that the first thing I asked when I received a toy as a child was 'How can I open this up?' Realizing my inclination towards engineering, my parents greatly encouraged me to pursue a path in science and engineering. From then on, I have always been part of science quizzes and math Olympiads, as they seem to be naturally attractive to me.
I came to the University of Maryland College Park at the age of 17. I made the choice to come to a top notch university to learn from the very best and I am not disappointed at all. The initial attraction was the growth that the ECE department had seen in recent years and the quality of faculty it had managed to recruit. I think the size of the school, and the location (right next to the nation's capital) were also important factors.
The top quality education, research infrastructure, and entrepreneurial spirit, along with the university’s location, provides a perfect combination for a well-rounded education that most young students look for. Very few students know what they want to do in life when they start college. The beauty of Maryland is that no matter what path you chose, there is always something that the University would be able to offer you to realize your goals.
The professors are the very best in the business. They are as good as individuals at some of the top private schools in the country. To summarize the environment here: do whatever you like, as long as you are good at it.
At Maryland, I participated in the ECE Honors Program and the Hinman CEOs Program, and was awarded the Bodharamik Scholarship for Academic Excellence and the Yurie Scholarship for Academic Excellence. In addition to being a part of engineering honor societies, I was a Teaching Assistant for two semesters and also served as a grader.
My interests mostly lie in distributed computing, exploiting parallelism both at the hardware and the OS level, real-time operating systems and other related technologies. I am also interested and actively involved in business. I used some of the tools I learned in engineering like random processes and queuing theory and apply them to derivatives to perform pricing of options and other derivative products that helped me in my investment decisions.
I was also involved in entrepreneurial activities through the Hinman CEOs Program. The degree to which entrepreneurship has affected this school is quite visible through the rise of Google, a start-up company founded by a CS and Math Major at the University of Maryland. I simply grabbed the opportunity to learn about corporations and how businesses are run.
I hope to eventually start my own company and build it up to a level where I can take it public.
My engineering education taught me how to break complex problems into small manageable units and seek solutions by modularizing the problem. I think these skills will come handy in almost everything else I do in future."
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