For my practicum, I worked at Wideband Systems, a Tech company in Silver Spring specializing in the storage and processing of Telemetry data. They are a subsidiary of Delta Information Systems, a contractor that takes Telemetry related jobs with many military and aerospace facilities in the US.

Although a very specific field, telecommunications is a very complex process, and data storage and playback is only the very end of that process. It starts with on-flight scanners collecting all types of interior and exterior data, which is then transmitted through satellite to on-ground bases. These on ground bases have multiple tasks, signal reception, and best-source selection. Best-source selection is the process of comparing streams of data and finding the one with the least noise, best data quality, and longest amount of continuous quality data. Finally, data recording is done in channels. Each source of data is input into its own channel, and multiple channels could be dedicated to the same or different types of data. Data is stored in sequences of packets, where each packet has a header including information about itself, and a body of raw data, just sequences of numbers representing the values received during the flight.

I admit this a little sheepishly, but I met my site supervisor (he was more or less just my boss), through my mom, as they work in the same industry. I have repeatedly heard that having connections is more important than having qualifications from almost everyone I know, and I'm lucky to have a parent in engineering who has worked for many clients across Maryland. For those without family in the industry, it's a little more difficult to get connections, but every college at UMD has their own career center with alumni in the field. They won't guarantee you a job, but like my mom, they might know someone who is looking for interns in your field. Career fairs really only look for Junior and Senior candidates, so getting personal with employers is your best bet.

At Wideband, I was an intern software engineer, and did code maintenance, built new post-processing utilities, and ported old utilities to make a modern suite of utilities for the company clients. Most of my work was done in a C++ framework called Qt, which is a somewhat popular set of tools for both frontend development, and lower-level development. When writing code, I used both the Qt features, as well as libraries from the company's decades long proprietary codebase, For the utilities I made or ported, I would typically create the user interface based on the layouts of the older Utilities, then take the classes from the older utilities which were relevant to the data processing. After programming came the testing process. We have a dedicated testing team for both software and hardware products, but it would still fall on me to do the early prototype testing for all utilities using previously recorded data. Finally, the outside testing phase would begin, where I would give my utilities to the testing team who would pick at them and try to find bugs by brute force testing all of the processes that could occur in the process.

The complexity of telecommunications really grounded me and allowed me to appreciate how much is done for the average person to have their devices connected to a global network. The fact that all of UMD is connected through long-distance data transmission and recording is amazing, and I cannot imagine how much convenience is provided to the students of 2025 compared to the professors of 2025 when they were students. I am more sure than ever that I want to major in computer engineering. The field is vast, and I already found one of the many interesting applications of it. There are other undiscovered applications of it that I would also like to explore, such as robotics, but if nothing peaks my interest, I can fall back on telecommunication. I want to work in the telecommunications industry at some point in the future, but maybe not to develop software. Although I like the process of coding, the general workflow of software engineering is really tiring and honestly a little repetitive. My favorite parts of the experience were when I was programming at the lowest level, so working on hardware or firmware might be an experience more akin to that. Going into software engineering is not a priority of mine, but it is also not out of the question.