Jeanie Kuhn

I am a 1999 Electronics and Computers Engineering Technology (ECET) graduate from Cal Poly Pomona and was an active member of Tau Alpha Pi and the Southern California Engineering Technologists Association during my last two years.

During my studies, I was interested in using software to control hardware. I chose to participate in one of the two ECET Micromouse teams as my senior project. With that in mind, I looked for jobs that involved software and hardware near graduation.

I was fortunate enough to obtain offers from Raytheon Missile Systems, the Hewlett Packard Test & Measurement Division, and Cisco Systems, Inc.'s Global Product Services. Even though HP offered me a higher salary, I chose Cisco because the Internet industry offered much more excitement to me than any other field. Also, three other Cal Poly ET graduates were already working among the department's group of 19 engineers.

At first, I was very surprised to be offered a position at Cisco because I had no formal training in the internetworking field. Now that I have been working for three months, I can see that my practical engineering skills learned at Cal Poly enables me to enter into this field with a solid foundation to learn new concepts.

Presently, I work at one of Cisco's San Jose, CA sites as a test engineer for the Catalyst 5000 switch team. My department handles the LAN products returned by the customers. The other test engineers and I are responsible for setting up the tests to be used by our vendors to identify the cause of the failures, so they can debug and repair the products. My tasks include editing scripts and setting up the hardware necessary to perform tests on my products in Milpitas, CA, Austin, TX, and Bordeaux, France.