Technology companies need talented, highly educated employees who can contribute from day one and grow into leadership roles over time. For their part, students seek meaningful career paths that will allow them to put their education, knowledge, skills, and experience to good and rewarding use. Most universities have programs to engage with industry and serve the multiple topics of overlapping interest, including research, education, and shared facilities. The Corporate Affiliates Program (CAP) at UC Santa Barbara is especially effective at integrating the complementary goals of STEM students and graduates with those of successful, forward-looking companies.
Companies join CAP for multiple reasons that align with their long-term strategy. They know that UCSB students receive a top-flight education, that many of them want to remain in Southern California after graduating, and that once they find a good job, like those available at CAP partner companies, they tend to stay in them longer than they might at jobs in other places.
Northrop Grumman: a Question of Balance
For nearly a decade now, UC Santa Barbara alumnus Chris Adams (BS, mechanical engineering ’97), Sector Vice President and General Manager of the Intelligence Systems Division at Northrop Grumman’s Redondo Beach headquarters, has spearheaded a successful partnership linking the company to CAP and UCSB. He says that UCSB students’ education and familiarity with California make them especially desirable as employees.
“California is a wonderful state, but it can be difficult to get people to move here because of the cost of real estate,” Adams says. “But students at UC Santa Barbara are familiar with the state and tend to love the coastal lifestyle. As a result, we have good success in terms of long-term retention among people who are already on the West Coast versus those who transplant from other areas.”
Adams finds that UCSB graduates bring a range of important qualities to industry, chief among them, perhaps, being balance. “The college strikes a really good balance between the analytical and practical sides of an engineering degree,” Adams says. “Different schools tend to focus on different ends of that spectrum. Some institutions tend to be deeply analytical, while others focus more on the practical, hands-on, production-and-manufacturing side of engineering. There are advantages to both, depending on where you want to go with your career, but I see UCSB as having a good balance between those two approaches.”
Adams suggests that the social aspect of the UCSB campus, seen by some as a distraction, may actually provide its engineering students with an important advantage in industry. “I think the UCSB community creates more ‘sociable’ engineers, graduates who are more effective communicators and better presenters,” he says, adding that sociable engineers often make good leaders.
In his role as executive sponsor to CAP, Adams provides valuable feedback to the university in terms of the quality of the students he sees — “what’s really good that you want to continue, and also what is potentially missing. One of the things we had talked about for a long time, which is not unique to UCSB or the other UCs, was that UCSB undergrads were not exposed to the field of systems engineering in aerospace and defense. It’s a large field with a big percentage of the workforce and can be a very successful career path.”
Adams and other Northrop Grumman representatives offered a guest lecture for fourth-year undergraduate students in the capstone classes for electrical engineering and mechanical engineering. Feedback indicated that many students who had not been aware of the systems-engineering career path said that, after the lecture, it was something they were interested in pursuing.
To Adams, who says, “I built my career in systems engineering,” his deep personal connection to UCSB overlaps with his professional duties. “In part, UCSB made me who I am, and that relationship is important to me, as is continuing to build the pipeline from UCSB into Northrop,” he says.
Teledyne FLIR: Proximity Helps to Grow a Garden of UCSB Engineers
Being located a mile from UCSB is key for Ted Hoelter, VP of Engineering and a UCSB alumnus (BS, Physics ’90), who has spent the past twenty-six years at what is now Teledyne FLIR — which specializes in infrared technologies at its laboratories in the Goleta technology zone. “Our proximity to the university really enhances the level of interaction and engagement we have with the College of Engineering, so it makes sense for us to be a part of CAP,” Hoelter says. “We always have engineering or physics interns at FLIR, and the rest of the company has seen the success of our interns who, over time, have moved up into key technical roles or leadership positions within the engineering organization. Other areas are starting to add interns, too, because they've seen how effective ours have been in engineering.”
Hoelter has identified a couple of key reasons why UCSB graduates succeed. “UCSB is incredibly selective about the students they admit, and between that, the training they receive, and the quality of their education, when they come to us, they are very capable right away and confident even as interns.”
Hoelter provides one striking example of that “ready out of the gate” performance from a few years ago: “Someone who is a senior engineer for us now began as our intern. I gave her a project to do, figuring it would probably take her a whole week. She came to me at lunchtime and had finished it. That was a product of both her work ethic and what she learned at UCSB. She has been exceptional ever since.”
Hoelter counts on CAP as a go-to resource. “If I have something I think the university can help me with, CAP allows me to find that help,” he says. “I don't have to hunt around. I can call [CAP associate director] Alaina [McGrath] and say, ‘Hey, I have this particular problem I need to solve,’ or, ‘We're about to hire a bunch of people. Can we put together some kind of on-campus engagement for new grads?’ Having that entry point into the university is really useful.”
Beyond that, Hoelter adds, “Our affiliation with UCSB provides us access to shared facilities like the Nanofab, where we have people all the time. We also sponsor a capstone project every year, and some years we have sponsored multiple projects.”
The Engineering Capstone Program [the year-long course in which teams of seniors are linked with a corporate sponsor to build something that addresses a real-world challenge] turns out to be not just about the projects, but pathways to the profession. “I’ve hired students from our capstones before; in fact, my relatively new electrical engineering manager was on one of our capstones a while ago,” Hoelter explains. “Through that experience, you get to know who the standout students are. When one of them stays in town after graduating and works at other local companies, we keep in touch. Eventually, for this one, we had a position open up. He went from being our lead designer to the manager of our department now. We see that over and over.
“Our best engineers at this point — aside from those who came in early with the startup company — are all people we got to know through some engagement with UCSB. We currently have about thirty UCSB graduates in engineering and engineering design and research roles, who make up roughly thirty percent of our engineering force.”
Lockheed Martin: A Strong Partnership Tied to Local Roots
Long before Lockheed Martin became an aerospace-technology company, the Lockheed brothers made the first flights of some of their early plane models on Santa Barbara’s East Beach. Lockheed later merged with Martin Marietta to become Lockheed Martin, but, notes Philip Hueneke, Director and General Manager at Lockheed Martin Santa Barbara Focal Plane, “We say, kind of tongue-in-cheek, that Lockheed Martin ‘started’ here when it was just two brothers.”
The Corporate Affiliates Program, Hueneke says, “is very important for Lockheed Martin in the Santa Barbara-Goleta area, ensuring that we can maintain our connection with the university, which we leverage heavily for new employees. We've also used UCSB lab facilities, and all of it together helps us to maintain this important relationship and this important conversation between industry and academia.”
One important part of that conversation is a CAP program called the Graduate Student Seminar Series, which allows students to speak to industry leaders and learn about their perspectives on research and technology, processes, and more. At Lockheed Martin, Hueneke explains, “We bring in mostly PhD students, on a quarterly basis, to show us what they're working on. The students get to share some of the interesting ways they're pushing the envelope of technology, and we find out what researchers at UCSB are thinking about and how we can maybe apply it to what we do.
“Presenting to a group of people, many of whom are esteemed in their industry, is a unique experience similar to a peer review but different,” Hueneke continues. “Getting on stage with the intention of making their work comprehensible to somebody who may not be right in that pocket of where they're working teaches them how to ‘fly at different levels,’ that is, to present with different degrees of granularity, because not everybody in the room is an expert in their field. It’s an audience that students will not be exposed to naturally during their PhD work. The ability to communicate advanced technical concepts to a broad audience is a really important skill set to have in life.
“We love our partnerships with UCSB,” Hueneke adds. “UCSB is a significant target for our recruitment efforts, and UCSB students from material science and engineering across the board are the single biggest source of new employees for our Santa Barbara facility.”
Lockheed Martin shares with UCSB an important commitment to collaborative research. “I've worked at Lockheed Martin for over twenty years, and I've seen how closely knit our community is here,” Huenke says. “Much like UCSB, where disciplinary overlap is the norm, our work place has very few barriers separating employees and preventing us from being as effective as we can be,” he explains. “We’ve been able to instill and maintain a culture of collaboration at the site that I think is directly correlated back to the collaborative culture for which UCSB is known. When we hire from UCSB, it’s almost like transferring that collaborative university environment straight into the workplace, where knowledge is treated not as a currency to be held tightly, but is, rather, shared, so that we can solve problems together.”
HRL: Long-term Connections that Work
Dave Chow, Chief Scientific Officer at HRL Laboratories (formerly Hughes Research Laboratories) and the HRL executive sponsor for the past decade, says that the most important piece of HRL’s CAP engagement stems from the fact that, “A very large fraction of our staff comes from local Southern California schools, especially UC Santa Barbara, UC Los Angeles, and Caltech, so we have a long-term relationship with the university, and CAP is part of that.”
Chow’s relationship with the university goes back much farther than a decade. “UCSB is a very strong engineering school and has been for decades now,” he says. “When I first arrived at Hughes, in 1990, the College of Engineering was just starting to grow in stature. The inflection had occurred, and all those folks — Herb Kroemer, Art Gossard, and others — had arrived and were starting to build this enterprise. But it was early. It really started to take off as the world of semiconductors was about to explode: Light-emitting diodes, lasers, detectors, and high-speed transistors — it was a great time. As a result of a combination of many factors — the time, the people involved, the faculty, including your dean, Umesh Mishra, and other people in that sphere — ties developed between Hughes and UCSB, especially in the area of high-speed semiconductor devices. And that established what is now a very long-standing pipeline of students going from UCSB to HRL.”
As the CAP rep for HRL for roughly ten years, Chow has seen growth and evolution of the program. “It has been rewarding,” he says. “It’s a really good corporate-affiliate program that has always been a good value for us.”
One would have to search long and hard to find a CAP member who would disagree.
