Laura McDonald

Role at the UMBC Career Center: I help students identify their passions, strengths, and career interests. I also help them prepare to achieve their long term academic and career goals.

Q: Where have you earned your college degrees?

A:Loyola University MD University of MD, University College University of MD, Baltimore County (Go Retrievers!)

Q: What program(s) did you study? How did you choose your major?

A: M.A. in Education/School Counseling (Loyola). I wanted to pursue a second career in counseling. I realized that I had a passion for helping others realize their natural gifts and pursue their dreams. M.S. in Computer Systems Management (UMUC). My goal was to stay cutting edge in the technology field, and increase my career opportunities. B.S. in Information Systems Management (UMBC). The area of IT was a fast growing field. I had strong technical and analytical skills and enjoyed the combined focus of business and IT that the program offered.

Q: Tell me about the job and internship process when you were in college. Were you able to find job/internship positions that were related to your major or your career interests?

A: Yes, I was able as an undergrad to find lots of Co-op opportunities! That is what excited me about going to UMBC. The school was "cutting edge" in this area in the mid '80's. I was able to get a co-op position in IT at NASA, and only delayed my graduation by 1 semester. As a result of having impressive work experience on top of a strong academic background, I got a job as a systems consultant with a Big 8 Accounting firm immediately upon graduation. I owe tremendous thanks to UMBC, and Dr. John Martello for making those opportunities possible. Internship opportunities were incorporated into the School Counseling Masters' program at Loyola. It was a great opportunity to work in a variety of school settings, so that I could get a feel for what was the best fit for me once I graduated.

Q: What is the best piece of advice you have ever received?

A: "Wherever you go, go with all your heart." -Confucious

Q: Why should students visit the Career Center?

A: AS SOON AS THEY GET TO UMBC, they should meet with us to learn about important steps they should take to discover their interests and strengths, and plan their career. This process begins immediately, and continues throughout their time at UMBC.

Q: What is your favorite aspect about UMBC?

A: It is a high quality institution that emphasizes the importance of obtaining valuable work and academic experiences. It's also a great value!

Q: What is one item on your bucket list?

A: To return to Switzerland and Austria with my husband and 3 kids and "re-do" our honeymoon.

Q: What is one aspect of the DC/Baltimore area that you often explore?

A: I love to go to the Baltimore harbor with my yellow lab, and anyone else who wants to join me, and walk along the water from Harbor East to Canton.

Want to connect with Laura or any of our great Career Center team? Call our office at 410-455-2216 or check out our contact us page here: http://careers.umbc.edu/aboutus/

Diversity Recruitment Dinner

Wednesday October 22, 2014
5:30 – 8pm
The University Center Ballroom

Name: Anil Jangam

Internship, Co-op or Research Site: FutureWei Technologies - Santa Clara, CA

Major(s)/Minor(s): Computer Science

Expected Graduation Year: Master Student - December 2014

Briefly describe your internship, co-op, research, or service-learning opportunity, including your day-to-day tasks, responsibilities, and assignments.

Internet with its current architecture/design, is becoming insufficient to cope up with the ever increasing bandwidth demands. As per the Moor's law, the computing and storage capability is increasing faster than the evolution of the core network. The increasing use of smart phones is also putting additional load onto the network. I could study some of these network related challenges to a greater detail, and the approaches research and engineering communities are devising to meet these demands. As an intern, I got the opportunity to work with a team of researchers at FutureWei, on a project in systems and algorithmic research in content delivery network architectures. The project involves using and extending existing open source tools to specify and prototype storage and distribution of content over a LAN-wide and in particular, how to distribute video streams.

Describe the process of obtaining your internship, research, or co-op opportunity.

Since I knew my requirements, I searched for the people and companies on Linkedin who were working in the area of my interests. After shortlisting, I wrote the email to each individual with my resumes, and followed each one of them for sometime before getting a call for further discussion. Overall it took about two months to get an offer letter.

Which of the following resources did you use to find your current experience?

Career Center, LinkedIn

What have you enjoyed the most about your position or organization/company?

Learning the problems through existing work being done in form of research papers, brainstorming and discussions, and eventually developing the systems to demonstrate the problem itself and the solutions. Enjoyed most on developing prototypes using various different opensource tools with corss platform deployments. Enjoyed coding in Java, C++ etc.

What have you gained from your experience that you could not have gained from another opportunity?

Research experience! FutureWei being a US R&D center of Huwwei, focuses mainly on researching the problems and proposing the solutions to them. Currently I am also in the process of documenting and publishing the work being done at a IEEE research conference. We are going to submit our work in form of a research paper.

What advice would you give to another student who is seeking an internship or similar experience?

Having worked in an industry on live projects before coming for full-time MS studies, I knew what I wanted to do. The same experience also helped me land an internship at FutureWei precisely in the domain area I wanted to be in. I certainly recommend to everyone to know your goals ahead of time and I would say, half the battle is already won! It's a win-win situation for both student, and the employer.

Please provide a short quote about what you liked most about your position / earning internship credit / the internship placement process.

Follow your passion, be consistent and you will be all right!