The VIGRE Workshop on Working in Industry took plane on Thursday, January 30, 2003 at the faculty club on the UW campus. The workshop brought together students and postdocs from the three VIGRE departments (math, applied math and statistics) with a panel of four professionals from industry. The panel consisted of:
Each of the panelists talked for a few minutes about their own background and how they came to work in industry, along with some perspective on what it is like to work for their particular employer.
Although the two panelists from Boeing come from different fields (Altschul from statistics and Lewis from numerical analysis), they both work in a group at Boeing which supplied mathematical and computational expertise to the rest of the company. In their presentation, they emphasized the broad array of problems they have met working in industry and the flexibility in approach that is required when solving problems in such a setting.
Steve Riley encouraged the students to have a practical mindset in their approach to work in industry. As an example, he pointed out that, while the development of new encryption algorithms is a topic of great academic interest, companies have a much stronger interest in the correct and secure implementation of existing encryption algorithms. However, the tools one acquired through advanced study in mathematics and algorithms may help one to prove that an implementation of such an algorithm is both correct and secure.
While jobs at the national labs have important differences from industry jobs, they are a significant employer of mathematicians with advanced degrees, and we were fortunate to have Van Henson take part in the workshop during his visit to Seattle. (Henson also gave a talk in the undergraduate ACMS seminar and spoke on life at the national labs to an audience of graduate students the next day.) Along with describing his varied career path (which included time in both the oil industry and the theatre), Henson showed great enthusiasm for his work at the lab which gives him the opportuinty to design, develop and implement cutting edge algorithms on some of the world's fastest supercomputers.
Following the presentations, the students asked questions of the panelists which often inspired discussion and a variety of viewpoints from the panel. The panelists stayed afterwards to meet with students and answer specific questions from students with interests in their particular field or employer.
UW VIGRE <vigre@ms.washington.edu>