I can feel that I’m quickly growing as a more competent engineer every day. But most importantly, I am having so much fun!

Name: Sean Soonhyung Hwang

What is your area of interest within ECE?

My biggest area of interest is in digital systems, especially in ASIC, FPGA, and combinational logic design. I also enjoy learning/developing Software Algorithms and working with powerful open-source libraries. I love how ECE offers me wide range of opportunities to improve all these areas that I’m interested in learning.

Why did you choose the Project Track?

I don’t enjoy learning from textbooks! Getting hands on experience gives me so much more opportunity to learn, while being incomparably fun. I really enjoyed a semester-long senior design project during undergraduate school, so the fact that I could have a 1.5-year project experience completely sold me. As I expected, I can feel that I’m quickly growing as a more competent engineer every day. But most importantly, I am having so much fun!

What project are you working on?

I am working on a project named Smart Pet Monitoring. We aim to build a pet monitoring system that utilizes computer vision and audio classification to automatically track and analyze different behaviors of our four-legged friends. We are currently training the system with deep learning to recognize different behaviors such as eating, drinking, sleeping, playing, etc., to help owners take care of their pet’s daily well-being and health.

What do you like about the program? What skills did you gain/are you gaining?

First and foremost, the people! The course staff who oversee our project (Prof. David Janes, Prof. Tillman Kubis, and Haimabati Dey) are very experienced project professionals who consistently provide feedback that helps us students to widen our vision. Also, I like that project track offers a chance for us to experience an actual industry level project from ideas to innovation, and from planning to prototyping. I learned a lot about managing a project and working with other engineers who share the same goal as myself. I’m sure these skills will help me throughout my entire career as an engineer.

How will earning the MSECE/participating in the project track help you reach your career goals?

I dream to one day become an engineer leader, beginning from a project manager to CEO/CTO of a company – hopefully! This means I will need to have a strong fundamental and technical depth in the field I’m in, which is why I chose to pursue graduate school education. However, I will need more than my technical abilities to become a leader. I would need to know how to work with other engineers, and really understand how to coordinate team tasks to meet a set of milestones and goals. Project track is well preparing me to reach my goal, by slowly developing the fundamental traits I need to become a leader in engineering. 

In what industry do you hope to work after graduation?

I worked as a Design Verification Engineer Intern at Samsung Electronics last summer (memory semiconductor development team) and am very excited to join Ford Motor Company as a Software Engineer Intern this summer. After I graduate, I am hoping to work with both software and hardware, preferably in the silicon (semiconductor) industry.