Life, the Universe, and Engineering

Today I had the opportunity to do something completely different from my norm. I spoke with a class of close to 20 students at Bob Jones High School about software engineering and life as a defense contractor. I was pretty nervous about it, but a few YouTube videos and a lot of humor seemed to hold their attention pretty well.

It helped that a lot of them have read the same sci-fi books and watched the same shows as I have. They got it when I titled my presentation "Life, the Universe, and Engineering," they laughed at the corporate Borg references, and several of them totally lit up when I showed the photo of the "Stargate Fountain" in Colorado Springs. In between I hope they learned a few things about engineering and process and how to get into this career field.

Here's a photo of me with the happy class- happy because they didn't have to do any actual classwork while I was there. :-)

And here are the videos I played for them. I also played a DVD called "We are Raytheon." I jokingly call if the "propaganda" video. It's definitely 4 minutes of rah-rah-Raytheon! Unfortunately, it's not on YouTube so I can't link it here.

CWIS Test Fire (the night fire at the end is very cool)



SM3 Satellite Intercept (remember that satellite we had to shoot down earlier this year? This is it!) Warning- the music is extremely cheesy.



Quite possibly my favorite- the Raytheon Sarcos Exoskeleton. It's very Master Chief.



Multi-Kill Vehicle. This one got some definite attention.