Intro to Engineering at Qualcomm

On October 17, 2022, the WE STEM Club came to Del Norte and offered students in AP Computer Science Classes and other classes an opportunity to listen to the experiences of multiple Qualcomm Employees. These talks were split into two different parts and one talk was on Monday and the other on Tuesday. The talk on Monday was about Intro to Engineering at Qualcomm with Sumalatha Arugolana (Staff Engineer) and Nisha Sethia (Director of Engineering). On Tuesday, the second part of the talk was about Intersections of Business and STEM at Qualcomm with Sreeja Nair (Director of Product Management) and Lindsey Kostas (Staff Machine Learning Engineer).

Sumalatha Arugolana’s Talk

  • She was inspired by her mother and really gained interest in engineering
  • She was taught by her mother about math and science before school
  • She chose engineering because she was inspired by her mother and after college she was able to have a career in Engineering
  • After finding out what each stream of engineering did, she tried really hard and chose the one she liked the most
  • She is a Communications Engineer
  • Her College Experience
  • Qualcomm wants to bring new technologies to other fields such as automobiles
  • She works with mobile phones
  • Engineering is a Team Effort
  • She takes a lot of breaks from her work such as playing Tennis
  • She is not always in front of the laptop always and takes a lot of breaks from work
  • Did not take any college classes in America, only in India

Nisha Sethia’s Talk

  • She was really inspired by her father and seeing all the things that he did
  • Girls were not taken that seriously for a STEM Major
  • She was very confused and did not know what major to do
  • She looked around and wanted to see why people chose the majors that they did and she reflected on herself asking what she wanted to do
  • When she graduated, the cellphone industry was not very big and she did not really know much about it
  • She was really curious about how the wireless phones worked and how they were able to function
  • After seeing, these phones she was really passionate about this field and really wanted to learn more about it so she started building 2G Phones
  • Felt the entire process was new to her
  • She gained a lot of interest in this field of mobile technologies and has not looked back
  • She made a goal to learn the system end to end
  • She joined Qualcomm in early 2010’s and helped to work on the 4G Phones
  • Today she works on the 5G Phones
  • To choose which field of engineering you want, keep a growth mindset and it may feel hard but try and get exposed to it and find which parts are your majors
  • Did not take any college classes in America, only in India

Insights

After listening to this talk, I think it is very important to not compare yourself to others and that you should always stay curious. One of the questions was which field of engineering should I take, and this was a question that I find myself asking. Right now I want to become a Mechanical Engineering but there are so many options in Engineering. A way to find out which field of engineering is to find new experiences. Knowing there are a lot of fields I think I have narrowed it down to software engineering, hardware engineering, or mechanical engineering, but within those fields there are still a lot of different options. I have tried to expose myself a bit more especially by trying to do a lot of different STEM options like Robotics where I have tried doing Electrical and I am also doing AP Computer Science Principles and am quite interested in that as well. One of the speaker’s sons was challenging himself and majored in Mechanical Engineering. I now want to challenge myself more and participate in more STEM related classes and learn more about the process of Engineering. Getting more exposure to Engineering in High School is really important and it is important to learn all these concepts early on so classes will be easier in the future.

Takeaways

This talk has helped me a lot to realize what I need to do if I really want to go into the Engineering field. This talk has really shown me that I need to take all the challenges I have and the opportunities related to Engineering. I need to show more interest in STEM fields because I am really interested and I need to narrow down the STEM major I want to choose. I am in Robotics but I think I need to participate in Robotics more and make sure I am getting as much exposure as I can. I also think I should really use this Summer to my advantage and try to get more Experiences in the STEM field.