Building and Sustaining Strong College and University Relationships
Marian Peebles, Peggy Zweben, Sergio Alvarado, Joseph Betser, Samuel Osofsky, Karen Owens, and Gary Stupian
The Corporate University Affiliates Program introduces students to Aerospace early in their academic careers.
The national security space community strives to acquire, develop, and maintain a workforce that has the critical skills and capabilities needed for dealing with complex space systems. Aerospace, along with the government, the military, and commercial contractors, must explore how best to meet this challenge.
The process of developing the corporation's next-generation workforce begins with making sure that among the people entering the overall workforce a pipeline exists of potential recruits who can meet the critical skill needs of the corporation and its customers. This effort is partially accomplished through nurturing ongoing scholarly and professional relationships with top colleges and universities across the United States.
As a technical research organization, Aerospace has developed strong ties with the academic community. Through both formal and informal associations, it has created unique partnerships with faculty and students at many of the nation's most highly regarded engineering and science schools. Though the relationships differ, they share a goal: to foster mutually beneficial opportunities for knowledge sharing and the exchange of technical information.
To manage these ties and create strong technical relationships, expertise, and research, in 1997 Aerospace initiated the Corporate University Affiliates Program (CUAP). The program serves as a mechanism for fostering partnerships among Aerospace technical staff and college and university faculty and students.
How the Program Works
Through CUAP, Aerospace establishes formal agreements with schools or academic departments to accomplish specific technical tasks and identify research projects in areas of crucial interest to the corporation. Criteria for a school's participation include its ability to address the corporation's critical skill needs.
Skills of special interest that are related to Aerospace's work in national security space include those needed for mastery of a variety of subjects: photonics, electro-optics, and sensor design; nonlinear electronics, communication electronics, and information systems and software engineering; GPS and navigation and control; structures, composites, aerodynamics, and fluid mechanics; and networked systems, cost modeling, process improvement, and space policy. Students working in target disciplines related to these subjects are identified early in their academic careers through CUAP activities.
In addition, Aerospace acknowledges that it has a community responsibility to support outstanding colleges and universities in its own "neighborhood." Thus, one of CUAP's priorities is to recognize academic institutions physically situated near the corporation's laboratories and offices.
CUAP is an important recruiting tool. Its affiliations complement Aerospace's college recruitment and summer hire programs by inviting students to actively participate in Aerospace-supported projects, design competitions, and awards; guest lecture and dinner seminar series; academic societies and publications; alumni outreach; career fairs, open houses, and site visits; and workshops and symposia (see sidebar, The Herndon Memorial Science Competition).
The Aerospace Institute is responsible for the administration and oversight of CUAP in coordination with the Human Resources Directorate and the Engineering and Technology Group. This collaboration has developed strong internal operating relationships.
CUAP Affiliates
CUAP has 17 affiliations with institutions in five states and the District of Columbia. Each affiliation has a purpose and established objectives geared to the capabilities and strengths of its school or academic department. CUAP workforce development efforts are well established within a number of these affiliations, as illustrated by the following program descriptions.
Janet Sheung, a senior at Caltech and a participant of Caltech's Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship Program, presents the results of her research. |
California Institute of Technology
Aerospace's affiliation with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) is a campus-wide program not limited to a specific area of science or engineering or to a specific university department. Caltech students work with the latest technology developments, so they can readily understand the corporation's need to keep abreast of advances in science and engineering. Many of the participating students, who are highly motivated to succeed in their chosen fields, become prospective future employees.
Caltech's long-established and very popular Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program affords students the opportunity to do research in many technical areas in which Aerospace has traditionally maintained an interest: electronics, mechanics, and materials science. However, with the growing importance of new technologies for both national security and space exploration, that list has grown to include biophysics, geology, ecology, information sciences, nanotechnology, and robotics—disciplines that were not necessarily on Aerospace's radar in the past.
In the SURF program, Caltech students work with faculty mentors on campus during a 10-week period in the summer, and Aerospace employees meet informally with students during that time. In the fall, Aerospace employees attend the students' presentations of their research findings. The students are then invited to Aerospace to deliver their presentations and tour the facility. Aerospace employees have an opportunity to meet the next generation of science and engineering students while the students get an introduction to the corporation. Two Caltech students sponsored in summer 2005 became interns at Aerospace in summer 2006.
Aerospace's name recognition on the Caltech campus is important for the corporation's recruiting goals. Thanks to CUAP, that name recognition is increasing. Students at Caltech often go on to graduate school, where they may speak of their experiences with CUAP and Aerospace with students both at Caltech and at other institutions. Aerospace frequently hires people with advanced degrees, so name recognition in the graduate school environment is important. When graduate students previously sponsored through CUAP complete their education, the corporation may encounter them again as they search for full-time positions. Some will undoubtedly decide to pursue their career goals at Aerospace.
Paul Anderson shows Daniel Thai around the computer simulation laboratory at Aerospace. Thai is a participant of Caltech's Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship program. |
Harvey Mudd College's Computer Science Clinic
Harvey Mudd College's Computer Science Clinic began in 1993 and has grown from a single, narrowly focused project to a group of broad, multidisciplinary projects involving many organizations at the college and at Aerospace. Having developed such a strong relationship with Harvey Mudd, the corporation now assists with governance and strategic planning at the college. Aerospace employees serve on multiple committees, helping to shape the curriculum to address the future technical needs of the nation and introducing such new topics as biometrics, grid computing, network management and information assurance, launch telemetry processing, vibroacoustics, orbital analysis, and Internet standardization via the Internet Engineering Task Force (the international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the protocols and operational characteristics of the Internet).
The Harvey Mudd Computer Science Clinic began within the Computers and Software Division (CSD) with a focus on research projects such as supercomputing visualizations in support of aerospace industry research and development and work with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, including the decentralized-network management project. The scope of the projects expanded in size and technical breadth over time to include a broad spectrum of concepts and systems, such as VISPERS (Vibroacoustic Intelligent System for Prediction of Environments Reliability and Specification).
These advanced projects involved multiple divisions at Aerospace, including the System Engineering Division, Space Launch Operations, and CSD. They also drew upon various disciplines and endeavors such as distributed intrusion detection, biometric face recognition, and computing cluster enablement of Aerospace's Satellite Orbit Analysis Program in support of the Concept Design Center and other Aerospace users. These projects offered challenges in both computer science and engineering for the students and the Aerospace employees.
 A group of Aerospace employees and Corporate University Affiliates Program students from Harvey Mudd College's Computer Science Clinic gather for a photo at their fall kickoff meeting. |
During the past decade, Aerospace has recruited more than 30 employees from Harvey Mudd—12 new employees in 2005 and 2006 alone—including students, graduates, professors, and industry peers. This was accomplished by participating in on-campus recruitment, as well as via word of mouth by Aerospace employees who referred other strong candidates to the company.
The Aerospace Ambassador Program started when a Harvey Mudd summer intern (now a doctoral student at UCLA) referred to Aerospace three other graduate students from the top of the class in both mathematics and computer science. The program is designed so that Aerospace recognizes referrals of summer interns and encourages the referring ambassadors to recommend to their summer recruits that they eventually apply for permanent employment. The ambassador program continues to actively recruit high-performing newly graduated talent from many colleges and universities and to hire employees with great promise in science, engineering, technology, and mathematics.
Aerospace publishes multiple peer-reviewed conference and journal papers from this collaboration with Harvey Mudd students, and the company participates at the college in the Clinic Advisory Committee, the President's Corporate Advisory Committee, and the Engineering Visitors Committee.
Harvey Mudd College's Engineering Clinic
Aerospace's affiliation with Harvey Mudd's Engineering Clinic offers students real-world problems and seeks solutions with fresh perspectives. The clinic project requires that students apply their classroom knowledge by designing, building, and testing their own hardware. Operating as a mission-oriented investigation and experimentation effort, each clinic team addresses issues relevant to Aerospace's Communication Electronics Department, with a particular focus on satellite payloads. In response to a problem statement generated by the Aerospace clinic liaison, the clinic team develops solutions that can be applicable to several satellite programs. In recent years, teams have tackled such projects as a high-speed bit-error-rate tester, a digital feed-forward linearizer for high-power radio-frequency amplifiers, an imaging and positioning platform for picosats, an extended-range analog/digital assembly, and a chaotic radar unit.
The Harvey Mudd Engineering Clinic has been a great success. Several students from the college have been hired as interns and also as full-time employees. The 2003–04 engineering clinic team developed possible solutions for a positioning and imaging platform for picosats. The students developed the basic imaging platform design, which Aerospace engineers enhanced. These imaging platforms are present on picosats that were launched December 20, 2006, from the space shuttle Discovery. Numerous pictures of Discovery and Earth were received during the picosat mission.
Harvey Mudd's 2007 engineering clinic team will design a quick-response portable satellite beacon tracking system for picosats. Ideally, it will allow Aerospace to locate the picosats and use a small dish antenna to communicate with them.
University of Southern California's Center for Systems and Software Engineering
In the early 1990s, the University of Southern California (USC) contracted with Aerospace to establish the first Ground System Architectures Workshop (GSAW). GSAW is an international forum where spacecraft ground-system experts share issues and solutions with other ground system users, developers, and researchers through presentations, working groups, and panel discussions. Aerospace is the main sponsor of GSAW with cooperation from several organizations, including USC's Center for Systems and Software Engineering (CSSE). CSSE's director has been a keynote speaker, panelist, and member of the GSAW advisory and program committees. CSSE faculty and students have been speakers and panelists at GSAW conferences, which are held at Aerospace in El Segundo.
The CSSE hosts the Los Angeles Software Process Improvement Network and two major annual forums—the International Forum on COCOMO (constructive cost model, a method for evaluating the costs of developing software) and Software Cost Modeling, as well as the Annual Research Review. Both of these seminars include workshops on current systems engineering and software development topics such as life-cycle models, agile development methods, model-driven architecture, and costing the evaluation and integration of commercial off-the-shelf products into software-intensive systems. Aerospace employees and customers throughout the United States participate in these forums and associated workshops, sharing knowledge from industry and academic affiliates. Participants directly encourage research directions that will benefit the Aerospace community.
The forum topics have expanded over the years to include more systems engineering issues, including models for estimating the cost and effort of systems engineering, for estimating the cost and effort of integrating systems of systems, and for costing high-security systems. The future expectation is for Aerospace to share information with CSSE faculty and students on more systems engineering disciplines such as human systems integration, system-of-systems architecture, and critical success factors for acquisition and management.
Aerospace has also worked with USC on system dynamics modeling of software and system life-cycle interactions and choices. These are topics that hold significant interest for Aerospace, and the collaborations keep employees and students in close cooperation.
Institute for Software Research at the University of California, Irvine
An affiliation between Aerospace and the University of California, Irvine, was established in October 1997 with the University's Irvine Research Unit in Software, the predecessor of what is now the Institute for Software Research (ISR). The current Aerospace-ISR agreement was established in October 2002, emphasizing three major goals: for Aerospace to keep up to date on ISR's research; for ISR to participate in Aerospace's annual GSAW; and for both partners to conduct technical interchanges and meetings and plan for joint research.
This affiliation has enhanced Aerospace's expertise in software engineering and computer systems and has increased its technical leadership and presence through joint support for GSAW, the ISR Research Forum, and Aerospace's Computers and Software Division technical forum and through workforce development initiatives.
Major highlights of the UC Irvine affiliation have included the planning and execution of the Architecture-Centric Evolution Working Group as part of GSAW, the delivery of ISR minicourses at The Aerospace Institute, the offering of Aerospace summer internships to ISR doctoral students, and an exploration of the applicability of innovative software engineering and computer system technologies.
ISR led the team in developing two proposals submitted to the National Science Foundation: "A Partnership for Innovation in Software Architectures and Product Line Technologies" (directed to the Foundation's Partnerships for Innovation Program) and "Requirements, Traceability and Validation for Systems of Cooperating Systems" (directed to its Information Technology Research Program). In addition, ISR led the team in creating a report on challenges and approaches to information systems technology testing and software testing for the Department of Defense Test and Evaluation Office, Science and Technology Program.
This productive collaboration has generated recommendations for improving software architecture representations, development, and design for ground and space software-intensive systems. These recommendations have been defined at the annual Architecture-Centric Evolution Working Group sessions with input from government agencies, contractors, academia, and other federally funded research and development centers. They provide an important foundation for software architecture requirements that can be used in the acquisition and development of national security space and civil and commercial software-intensive systems.
Conclusion
The Corporate University Affiliates Program plays an important role in developing the next generation of space professionals at Aerospace. Its affiliations are an integral part of the corporation's recruitment efforts, research, and development, and they help to provide Aerospace with the best possible pool of potential new employees. These mutually beneficial collaborations build and sustain strong bonds across the nation between the corporation and colleges and universities. As the use of space resources becomes more pervasive throughout defense and national security agencies, demands on the skills of space professionals will increase. The information exchange and brainstorming that CUAP fosters makes for a more educated and invigorated workforce.
