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Letter from the Real World:
2003 EECS alumnus Tobin Fricke
by Tobin Fricke
EECS alum Tobin Fricke graduated from the College of Engineering
in spring 2003. Forefront will stay in close touch with
Tobin through a series of letters, following him as his life-after-Berkeley
unfolds.
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Engineering
alumnus Tobin Fricke (B.S.'03 EECS)
ANGELA PRIVIN PHOTO
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San Diego, California
Sitting on the terrace at the UC San Diego Institute for Geophysics,
I’m writing this letter in winter’s early twilight.
I hear the roar of waves crashing on the ocean; on the horizon
the gray blue of the sea meets the glowing remnants of what must
have been a fine sunset. There’s just one star visible.
I spent the day meeting researchers and grad students—networking
in its purest form. I came here at the invitation of my advisor
from an internship in Alaska who’s now consulting here.
Riding a burst of optimism, I’ve been thinking this could
be a fine place for grad school.
I spent last summer in Switzerland at CERN, my last undergraduate
summer internship. Lectures in high-energy particle physics, afternoons
climbing around the test beam apparatus, and long evenings in
the Geneva countryside were the routine. I learned that the practical
operations of an experiment at an accelerator laboratory more
often involve tangled cables and scarce oscilloscopes than mathematical
formalism.
This internship buffered me from the practicalities of post-graduation
career hunting. I was going to CERN; it could wait! But now it’s
hit me: Is it going to be work? Grad school? Computer science?
Engineering? Physics? It’s time to specialize and that scares
me.
Job hunting has been harsher than I’d expected. The experiences
I’ve had so far have woken me up to some of the peculiar
realities of the engineering hiring world.
I left one on-campus interview feeling elated. I described my
experience on a robotics project with a group of friends, and
the interviewer dutifully jotted down ‘team player.’
They called back, saying they wanted to fly me to Boston for another
interview, but then I never heard from them again.
Then I was lucky enough to have an interview with that famous
Internet search engine company in Mountain View. But eventually
a sympathetic HR representative said, “There wasn’t
a strong enough match.” It was a wake-up call to the realities
of hiring in an industry that recruits the best of the best, where
interviews consist not of a discussion of previous accomplishments,
but an on-the-spot technical exam.
As for grad school, I’ve never seen anything strike with
so much fear, self-doubt, and pessimism. I have one friend, a
straight-A Harvard student, who is vacillating over whether to
take the GRE again; others who wonder whether they should even
apply to MIT. Few of us are confident about our applications no
matter how impressive our resumes.
The self-doubt is infectious. Each application, each earnestly
written personal statement, seems like a shot in the dark. Lots
of undergraduate research, a GPA that’s good but definitely
shows the wear and tear of taking on too much, a huge number of
basic technical courses, but no clear focus—now to find
a doctoral program that believes in such a resume.
Maybe there’s a project in San Diego that will put me on
the path of physics or boost my grad school admission possibilities.
It turns out that finding a career in research is itself a research
project.
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