I spent this morning at California State University Northridge (CSUN), my wife’s alma-mater. I’m a member of the Industrial Advisory Board of the School of Engineering and Computer Science there. At times I feel out of place with all the “important” people there—people who can arrange donations of $10K or more to the school, presidents and vice-presidents. But I do serve a function: I can represent Aerospace‘s interests and try to direct students to come to work here.
It’s hard to do. It is difficult to get a company to establish relationships with new universities, especially the CSU system when they are used to UCs (such as UC Davis, ellipticcurve‘s alma-mater, or UCLA, my alma-mater). Yet CSUN does have a good engineering program with great practical knowledge—they even have faculty working in Computer Security, and offer MS degrees. Yet for some reason I can’t get the company to look north. Sigh.
As for the rest of the day: I’ve taken a vacation day and am working around the house. Things have been quieter at work (remember the ebb and flow), so I figured I had some vacation time, and would use it for something useful: like getting ready for our vacation to St. Louis next week.
