Christian Merino graduated with his Electrial Engineering Degree from UCI in 2016. During the summer of 2018, he came by to visit the campus and talk with some of the students. Based on feedback and requests from some of them, Christian has generously put together a Q&A for our current and future students. He would love can be reached via his LinkedIn profile.
Christian Merino – (added 8/2018)
LADWP Student Engineer – Summer 2015
Extron Applications Engineering Intern – 2016
Extron Applications Engineer – 2016-2018
Honeywell Electrical Engineer II – 2018-present
1) What was the difference between your duties as an intern versus as a full time engineer?
- As an intern both at LADWP and at Extron, my duties began at a smaller scale than what the engineers were working on. I’d end up working on one dimension of a project at a time and eventually seeing things come together.
- As I progressed through the internships, I was given more responsibility and expected to start figuring out things on my own instead of leaning on the engineer who assigned me the work.
- My knowledge of what I was working on at Extron was majority surface level (enough to set systems up, troubleshoot, program them) until I became full time
2) How did you know what specialization you were going to pick?
- It was always going to be Electronic Circuit Design for me. But that’s not always the case with students.
- I know plenty of people who went down one specialization and ended up doing something completely different so don’t sweat it that much.
- If you have a vision of what you want to do, look at the catalogue and look at what classes are required for each specialization and if you have questions about what you can expect in that class, shoot me an email.
- If you have no idea what you want to do, it’s still okay since most of these classes are upper division. Still, start looking at job descriptions of companies in the area and find some inspiration and I can help you maybe pick one.
3) What kind of programming have you done in the industry?
- At LADWP I had to learn Excel VBA. The office I was in was focused on bulk data and financial analysis and Excel VBA is a mix of C fundamentals and data aggregation.
- With Extron, they have a proprietary programming software. It most closely resembled an FSM in that input status affected what the next state of a system would be and what actions to take, but the goal is control of 3rd party devices (displays, video/audio conferencing hardware/software, lighting, projection screens, anything that uses a relay for operation (fire alarms), and anything else in the realm of audio/video).
4) For transfer students how do you get internships given that you don’t have any applicable experience yet?
- This is also a problem for students who didn’t transfer. For me, I didn’t know anything and had nothing to contribute to a company really until I had taken 70A and 70B. At that point you have some lab experience and theoretical experience. At the end of one of those classes, I forget which, we did AM transmission of iPod Audio. I threw that on my resume; don’t just list your classes with your GPA, that is a no-go. Any significant lab assignment is worthy of bragging about if you’re still inexperienced.
- I emailed small local companies, I emailed professors asking if they had any research that I could contribute to. I paid attention to any email blast about research (UAV Forge, UCI Racecar). A small firm in Irvine offered an unpaid internship but I was able to join a joint EE/BME/ME project that lasted a year and gave me valuable lab experience and education in Arduino microcontrollers.
- Don’t just go up to the big company booths, strike out, and call it a day. There are so many engineering companies. They may not all have the resources to go to the career fair so you may have to find them online. It’s not the end of the world if Boeing doesn’t call you. There’s just a LOT of competition.
- If you can’t land a research spot, unpaid or paid internship, no big deal. Buy a breadboard and an Arduino. Look up Arduino projects and keep yourself busy over the summer. I made a little sensor setup so that if my parents or siblings came within 6 feet of my door, a bunch of LED’s on my desk would light up. Have some fun!
5) In reference to my final LADWP project, how did I handle creating an algorithm to deal with 35,040 data points of kWh?
- Like anything else that seems overwhelming at first, break it down into smaller chunks. I didn’t know right off the bat how i was going to handle that many points of data. But I knew what the end goal was. So instead of taking 35,040 data points (a full year of interval kWh data for the City of Los Angeles), I took a month worth of data and figured out how to parse the data by hour. Once i knew that, i zoomed out a bit and took a few months of data and figured out how to parse by month (and i already knew how to do it by hour at that point). By the end, I had a massive code but it was much more manageable when I figured it out piece by piece.
6) Would you recommend grad school for Electronic Circuit Design since most of those jobs require an MS or several years of experience?
- You’re most likely not going to go straight into a Design position and that’s not a big deal. Companies have so many departments and people can flow in and out of them. You can shoot for their entry level jobs designed for new grads and work your way up.
- Like I was saying, it’s not just Boeing/Raytheon/Northrop. You can find a small/medium company who have these opportunities or something similar. In a few years, you have more experience than a Master’s student and you can go into those positions, and often as a level II (my case). Several of my friends from LADWP never took ECD classes as in depth as ours but still ended up at those big companies by starting somewhere else first and building their skills. Still, with so much competition there’s never a guarantee. Just keep applying and keep improving those speaking and presentation skills.
- If the first 2 routes aren’t very appealing, maybe a M.S. is a good fit for you.
General Tips:
1) Put any big project that you’ve done in class on your resume until you have years of experience under your belt. And understand what you did in the project very well in case you’re interviewed about it.
2) Never lose your fundamentals. Don’t just delete your codes at the end of your final. Save them, review them, enhance them. Make study guides at the end of each class and save those, review them constantly. Especially the 70 and 170 series. I’ve had friends blank on the most basic questions.
3) No, the jobs don’t all go to your friend with a 3.8 GPA. Try to get to 3.0-3.5 just because bigger companies do have minimums, but how you present yourself matters so much. What is a 3.8 worth if you can’t explain something coherently to your interviewer? Practice your presentation skills. Hold mock interviews with your friends, take classes outside of engineering that require you to write essays because that makes you a better speaker too. Let me know if you need help in this regard because superior presentation and speaking skills can land you a job over someone more technically qualified.
4) If an interviewer asks you a question that you have no idea how to answer, do NOT just freeze up and say you don’t know. Even if you haven’t taken a class on that yet or your professor taught it terribly or it’s been a long time since you’ve dealt with that material, DON’T give an excuse. Offer a solution. Tell them you don’t know, but tell them HOW you’d get the answer. Even as a fourth year you won’t have the answer to everything and managers know that. But they don’t want the person who gives an excuse with no plan of how to solve the problem. That’s not going to cut it.