I got married in 2000 to a wonderful lady. Dr. Fawcett was present to bless us. In 2002, I became naturalized. Today, at work and home, people count on me, and that is a great satisfaction.

I graduated from SU with CIS degree in 2002, and apart from OOD and Design Patterns, I also completed an exciting research on C++ Beans, under Dr. Fawcett's guidance. My interets are Design Patterns, Concurrent Programming and contemporary technologies."
[Picture taken following excellent M.S. Thesis Defense - Jim Fawcett]

Currently I'm working for MSN9 Client team, which is an enhanced MSN8 browser version with some new added functionalities. I work with Software written in C++ and develop test Libraries using Window's script components and Jscript, to test our API's and local databases. I took some interesting software courses like OOD and software studio while I was doing my Master's in SU. Those courses helped me a lot getting my job as well dealing with my current projects at Microsoft.

Eshwar

I currently work as a Project Manager for a Business Systems team at Fidelity, Boston. The five courses I took with Dr. Fawcett were invaluable, as I learned to patiently read and improvise on code functionality. My ability to read and write different types of code has made me an asset at work.

Currently, I am the technical lead on National sales campaigns at Fidelity. I use business intelligence tools, MS SQL, ORACLE SQL and several reporting tools to report on business performance. I use the writing skills acquired in Software Modeling and Software Studio to effectively write technical and businesses requirement specifications. In all, in my current job, I am happy to leverage the breadth of the skills I acquired at SU. Thank you Sir,

Smile and Go Orange!

In the past two years, I have worked with a couple of software vendors, helping them design and implement their future products. The development platform is Windows with C/C++. The knowledge and skills learned from your courses help me in my current job. Thanks!!

I took OOD, DP, IP, SMA and SWS. In some sense, your courses are even more challenging than the real work. Sometimes I miss your courses and every Friday morning’s help session, they are part of my life! You are one of the best teachers I have ever met. Wish you all the best.

Gang Cheng

I have been in three of your courses and have learned a lot. I thought Studio is one of the best courses because the experience of teamwork and deadlines is very important even to the best programmer! OOD taught me the design principles that made my life easier when working with design groups. I also admire the fact that you allow your students to "figure out" your code, which is exactly what happens in the industry! This experience also was fruitful for me! Finally, thanks for your teachings and I hope you keep teaching those courses for a long time!

My group is called the "Trading Systems/STP Feeds" group and I am in a subgroup that built a "workflow engine" which is an internal product that can be reconfigured for other subgroups use. It's a framework that uses an XML configuration file and accepts incoming data and dispatches the data as activities. The product is still being enhanced, and right now I am working on the serialization of generic classes. This uses interfaces and underlying ACE's [middleware] CDR_Stream through which we insert the host machine's Endian Byte order and then insert Standardized primitive data types. ACE is a framework for portable and robust C++ network programming.

I am currently with Mphasis, working on a permanent contract with Fedex at Orlando, FL. Never dreamed I could escape snow this winter ! Fedex has a really huge set of software components working on Solaris, which take care of about 19 million service transactions per day. Their current software is not scalable, and will not be able to handle the expected increase in transactions to 20 million unless they port their software to Linux to cut costs, at the same time, ensuring affordable scalabillity. I am working on this porting initiative currently.

Best Regards, Subha

As you know, I work for HP, currently for a division called Intelligent Fabric Engineering. We develop software to manage HP SANs. The plan is for me to start a parallel team in India. I will start one small project and then take it from there.

Things are fine with me. My MBA is almost over. If everything goes well the move back to India will occur in March, next year. All the concerned VPs have approved my proposed plan, I am currently working out minor details like the actual work, job title, salary etc..

I will give you a call sometime when I get a chance and fill you in on everything. Hope you are keeping fine Dr. Fawcett. -Bruno

Before I joined Oracle four years ago, I designed and developed educational, medical and financial software systems in different companies. Through all these years, I greatly benefited from the knowledge and skills I learned in the software design courses at Syracuse.

Although I left America almost two months ago and haven’t seen you for a while, I think of you very often. Every time I spend several hours trying to find out where a global variable comes from, I think about you. When I look at a function with 233 lines and it also contains some mysterious global functions, your face always pops up with a big smile and says “ Now you know!” Yes, now I know!

I have taken most of your courses and only have missed DP and IP (what a pity!). I still remember the midterm of OOD (wow!), the final project of SWMAA, the most complex stuff in the world (COM), the 10 choices of AWP and those nights with my team when I took Software Studio. I really liked all of them, although I nearly spent most of my time on them. It seems almost all of my graduate memory was to struggle with those interesting projects and your crucial requirements. However, to be honest, when I presented those projects in interviews and got more than 8 offers within two weeks I know I did something more than worthwhile in SU.

All I want to say is thank you. Maybe someday when you are too old to teach and even too old to remember yourself, I will take a break and fly to Syracuse. I can remind you some of your students (like Goldie!), those old jokes of yours (still remember most of them, ha!) and what a great teacher you are, dear Dr.
Don’t worry; I’ll always keep in touch! - Huang, Yi-Yang

I wish him good luck and health and hope he keeps teaching year after year.

I deal with software written in C, C++, C#, perl, VT, batch scripts and a host of other custom tools. Many of the good habits I learned through Dr. Fawcett's software engineering courses, I apply to almost all aspects of my daily work in varying degrees.

Learning for the Software Studio class, where I was the project architect prepared me the most for the workplace. It taught me not only about software development, but also about team dynamics. It taught me the challenges of working with people and deadline pressures. In this and OOD class I developed strong software development fundamentals. I learned to do things right the first time and put in requirement effort in planning a project for successful completion.

Thank you for teaching such useful classes and wish you all the best. Regards, Bharat Krishna

While at SU, I took your Software Modelling and Analysis & Object Oriented Design classes. Although I could not take the Design Patterns and IP classes, I did an independent study related to Design Patterns under your guidance. I implemented an Action Item Tracker in C# using ASP.NET technology for my final project which was again under your guidance. I also participated in the Software Testing brown-bag seminars held in 2003-2004. Although I am a CAD (hardware) guy, I found ALL of the work I did under you extremely useful for most of my CAD courses at SU. I implemented an Automated Chip Layout Generator for my CSE 788 class under Dr Chen using the Composite and the Visitor Design Patterns. This project also made use of the guidelines that were presented in the Testing brown bag seminar on Assertions. I used your concept of writing good test stubs for the all of my CAD programming assignments. Thank you so much suopporting my interest of CAD!!! Above all else, doing my course work under you built my character, gave me the self-confidence. I hope to continue to push hard and do well and bring good name to You and to SU.

Thank You! Take Care, Divyanand

At Syracuse University we acquired an in-depth insight into C++ concepts that are not common knowledge. This makes us sought after. Thanks for everything.

Over the last three years that I have been associated with Microsoft (counting my internship too), I have been handling a wide range of challenges. As an Intern PM, I designed a solution which increased the number of static and parked web sites supported by IIS 5.0 from a few thousands to over a million. As the full time PM for ASP, I was responsible for ensuring that ASP works faster on Windows Server 2003 and also for ensuring that ASP.NET integrated seamlessly with IIS 6.0. As the Security Program Manager for IIS, my primary goal was to ensure that IIS 6.0 that ships with Windows Server 2003 was rock solid.

My job also involved, traveling to a lot of conferences and seminars where I would talk about Windows Server and IIS security and show people how some simple coding errors can snowball into major security disasters.

After a very eventful two years in Redmond I decided to move back to India for personal reasons. These days I am working with 4 feature teams in the Storage Division, trying to design a better storage solution for Microsoft and its partners.

I still remember the day when I received an email from Microsoft inviting me to Redmond for a whole day of interviews. I was happy but at the same time confused on how I should prepare for the interviews because I was not aware of any person who had worked towards a PM's position before. But Dr. Fawcett is always there whenever you need him. He immediately took me to the campus bookstore and hand picked books for me which he thought would help me prepare for my interviews. Those books and Dr. Fawcett's guidance got me in.

I like the competition in the company and what it has to offer and I owe it all to Dr.Fawcett. The course work offered by Dr.Fawcett really prepares you for what goes on in the industry and you are ready to take on any challenge. The best thing I ever did after joining Syracuse was to take the CSE 784 class with him, where we did a massive project in very little time. It is not only that the course work is good but it is the quality and structure which are amazing. This course helped me realize the potential within me and things that needed to be worked on. It really gives you a feeling of team work and taste of success after the project completion.    

For all the Indian Cricket Fans, Dr.Fawcett is like Sachin Tendulkar he see’s the ball very carefully(code design) and then goes for the big one(writes code). You should see Dr.Fawcett code and you will understand what I am talking about.”  

Thanks, Amit Mohindra

Prior to this, I worked with a startup company which was an internal contractor for America Online. I was involved in designing and developing the workflow for the entire lifecycle of AOL Internet CDs, right from bidding by Vendors for parts of the CD to the final production and Customer sign in tracking information.

The interesting thing I noticed about the projects I have worked on is the wide range of challenges, deadlines, changes in customer requirements, system malfunction, design refinement, etc. I feel that my 2 years in Syracuse University and the courses I took have helped me stay confident and prepared for these kinds of challenges.

Thank you Dr. Fawcett.

Dr. Fawcett's presence is an encouragement and benediction. His energy, spirit, accomodating nature and above all, mastery and helpful guidance in the form of class handouts often act as inspirations for the students to put in more than 100% effort.

I was blessed to have undergone this enjoyable experience myself. I was also fortunate to have been his TA for the Object Oriented Design and Distributed Objects class, and I have managed to establish a very warm and almost father-son like relationship with him.

I wish him a long and healthy life and encourage all students coming to SU to take his courses.

Trust this mail finds you in the best of health and spirits. I have joined Cisco Systems, in San Jose and beginning to get settled. The campus is really vast and also my workplace is good. Work pressure is starting on me, but I guess i am liking the pressure. I had a formal round of introduction with my teammates here, The basic work is carried out in Java, jsp, websphere application server and related Java technologies.

I am primarily involved in adding and designing application side functionalities to a tool, which is used to automate approval process for special pricing on all sales through distribution. The other side of my work involves designing and implementing security driver routines for the tool, primarily in C, C++.

I have been benefited by my stay in SU, where i got to have a good stint on the security research and also to take excellent object oriented courses under you. I would surely miss having our discussions on the Java domain. Though my final course COM, really made me sweat during the last few days of mine in SU. I wish most of the students would be graced by your teaching and your guidance. Wish you all the best and pray that you continue to have a good teaching career.

[later message]
After an eventful period in Cisco Systems in San Jose, I have moved to Cisco India. The work has always been exciting and challenging. I have the role of an IT Project Manager, responsible for the account in Asia Pac. I work for the IT wing of Cisco, that drives the business for the Marketing and Sales team. I lead a team of 30 people and have 7 application tools that are to supported from here. So I am busy setting up interviews and hiring out here and my travel starts from next month.

The work is for application tools written to support Ciscos partners. I architect/manage most of the application resources. For all the tools we build the front end with Java/J2EE/Design Patterns/Struts and Oracle/PlSql on the backend.

I still regret not taking the Design patterns course under you, which would have really enhanced my work also here. There are lot of security drivers written in pure C and C++. 'The design of the tools and the technological facilties and infrastructure needs are tremendous here. Cisco truly believe in its motto "Change the way we work, live, play and learn".

My responsibilities include writing C++ Software for civil engineering end-users that uses AutoCAD’s ObjectARX interface. My work focuses on design of consistent annotation of Civil objects, implementing styles that collect common attributes, enhancing styles with attribute inheritance, allowing annotations with user-defined attributes, and laying out foundation UI classes interacting with a variety of Civil objects. In fact, my work uses knowledge that I earned in your classes. Thanks!

I just went through the syllabus/topics of discussion for the debugging seminars. Amazingly, I just completed a debugging training course taught by John Robbins himself for 4 days (Debugging Windows Applications). I would be taking Debugging .Net Applications shortly (in about 3 - 4 months). I really found it easy to do programming and design here. I was using all the stuff I learnt except for Analysis techniques used in CSE681. The only thing that was completely new and out of sync was debugging. It is a must for a developer at Microsoft to master debugging techniques.

We use WinDBG occasionally. NTSD and KD are the most commonly used debuggers. Also sysinternals.com has some cool tools that you can use along side while debugging code (I am taking a course "Windows Internals" taught by these guys). Right now I am all synced up but I still face some difficulty when someone sends me a stack trace and gives a remote debugger to me. One thing that I noticed missing in the syllabus is Kernel debugging.

I went through CSE775 syllabus and it looked fine. I see both COM+ and .Net Security which is good. It would be real great if there are projects that force one to use MTA model and involve writing out-of-proc components under varying security (normal user, admin, interactive, launching etc.,) models.

Srinivasa Neerudu

Recently we were responsible for providing networking/computing support and membership management for the National Society of Black Engineers-30th Annual National Convention at Dallas, Texas. I was responsible for designing and developing an ActiveX C# wrapper component to be hosted in IE which interfaced with Zebra badge printers attached to self registration terminals. They printed bar encoded name badges and receipts. This facility was used by 5000+ people at the convention for self-registration and saved manpower and long registration lines on site.

Syracuse will always have a special place in my heart since I’ve grown in both my personal and professional skills and bonded with a lot of people in the limited time I’ve spent there. I wish Dr. Fawcett the best of health and a long prosperous life in the years ahead.

Before graduation I had already done an internship with the SQL Server team at Microsoft. I applied the CSE687 OOD concepts I learned at SU both during my interviews and internship. I joined Microsoft as a SDET in March 1998 working with the Windows 2000 networking team on their audio video stack. I did this for a couple of years before moving to the PocketPC Team. I worked with them for couple of years as a developer on Pocket IE. We shipped PPC 2002 ,2003 and the first version of the Smartphone.

I am currently working with Microsoft Business Solutions as a UI developer for their PocketPC client. We have a very small solid team that is pretty much like a startup group. I own all of their UI for the device and its all written in C# using the .Net Compact framework. Luckily I dont have to write up the B-specs. However, I do interact a lot with our Program Managers to make sure we have everything specified correctly. Its a challenge doing UI development for the device because .Net CF is a subset of the deskop framework. I should say its been a pretty interesting year with this team. Your courses definitely set our foundations as good programmers. I apply those concepts everyday and its just a pleasure to see the end result. Thanks so much.

Regarding me, I live in a Wahington D.C. suburb (Ashburn, VA) with my wife and son. I have worked at AT&T, NeuStar Inc. and at present at GEICO as a software engineer. I feel very lucky mainly due to people I know. I wish you all the very best in life.

1. OOD by Dr Fawcett
2. Compiler Construction by prof Hansen
3. OS Concepts by prof Chapin

I am currently working at Sun Microsystems Inc, California as MTS(member of technical staff) in Sun Cluster(SC) product group. In the past 3 yrs I was mainly involved with developing and maintaining distributed infrastructure based on Corba 2.0 specification. I'm also adding new features to SC 3.1 (Cluster notification and reconfiguration protocol) and identifing and Resolving scalability issues with SC 3.2.

Apart from work I am quite active in Running, Hiking, Travel and Multi-sports. Dr. Fawcett, your current website is Very valuable resource to current and former students.

Anil Rao

Throughout my job I use principles of Object Oriented Programming extensively. Courses like Software Studio and COM proved extremely useful. My boss, Peter Miska, said that he admires my work and did not expect a Master's student to be this knowledgeable. I attribute this to these courses. Thank you Dr.Fawcett.

Well, this is all a small update. As for my project Burro, I dedicate the little time I have left whenever I can. I still would like to make a release at some point. Attached is a picture taken when I went to Valencia a few weeks ago. It is in front of the "Ciudad de las Artes y Ciencias" (City of Arts and Science). Whenever I take a good picture in Madrid, I will send it to you. I hope things are going well in Syracuse and that you have enjoyed your summer. Thanks again for all your help, lectures, tips, recommendations, etc. They are all coming in quite handy. I suspect they will for quite a while.
Regards, Alvaro Ramirez

In the past two years, I have designed and implemented an application for large file transfers over https (upto 2 G). I've also architected, designed and implemented middleware to integrate various instances of a product called Rational Clearquest (A bug reporting and tracking system) to have a single entrypoint from a web server frontend. And a windows based exe to perform the install and launch of various collaboration tools.

I also wanted to thank you for taking the time to make your website a wonderful resource for us alumni too. After graduating with an MS in SIS from Syracuse in 2003, I have been working as Software Engineer for Autodesk, Inc. on the development of a parametric CAD application that is widely used for designing industrial products. I develop both the UI and algorithms for a subset of the application and make regular use of C++, MFC, STL, UML and XML. Although I found Dr.Fawcett's courses extremely challenging, I am glad of the hard work they demanded because it inculcated good software engineering practices in me and gave me a solid foundation for a career in this field. In fact, I really wish I could have taken DP, Studio and AWP too.

I feel fortunate to have been taught by Dr.Fawcett and wish him and his students the very best.

Regards, Saket

I took 4 courses under Dr Fawcett, and use the knowledge I gained in my work. As a matter of fact, some of the software documentation techniques used in the course work is now used by everyone in the company who writes code. I use C++, MFC, Java, JSP and some scripting languages for Development, primarily on Windows platforms.

I am currently working as a software engineer at InfiMed. In my work, I routinely use the knowledge and skills that I gained from your courses. Our group is currently working on vendor-specific digital imaging system development using OOD, MFC, COM, ActiveX control, and XML technologies. We use XML a lot in our product development. Now I understand why many of your course projects included an XML component. Your courses were very practical and rewarded me more than I expected.

Haoyu and I deeply appreciate the help you gave to us when we studied at SU. We hope that you continue to teach more students and lead them to the software industry just as you did for me.

With just a year at BB I see my interests moving towards the backbone of trading i.e. Computational Financial Mathematics. I am looking forward to taking my career in this direction.

It would be a lie if I say I have learned everything Dr.Fawcett has to offer; even though I've taken all his seven courses. He has been more than a professor to me and guided me in every aspect. Dr.Fawcett is almost 70 and he made me doubt my dedication a few times when I received answers to my queries at 3 a.m. I guess Webster has to redefine the word dedication. I still remember my "days" of 17 interviews at BB when I realized that every investment in Dr.Fawcett was worth it. I wish him good health and long life."

Regards, Srinivas

I recently got a promotion to senior-level engineer at Lockheed Martin, a defense contractor for the US Government, and have been responsible for assignments, ranging from software development, system specification development, to system test. I recently led and completed a software port from Windows to the Unix platform. The port was concerned with an electronic technical manual for various defense programs. This activity required knowledge of both UNIX and Windows.

Dr. Fawcett's materials have sometimes been more difficult than work, so his classes give you what you need to know. Even though I enjoy my time off from part-time studying, I sometimes miss classes at SU.

You know which was the course -in my transcript- they were interested in? "Internet Programming" It was because of that course that they called me. The course is called Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (that's more or less the translation). The professor who taught this course last time worked basically with 3 things:

1) XML : XLT, XSL, XSD, leer y escribir datos XML con un DataSet
2) Web Services: proxies, creating, using web s.
3) XML and web services integration

Dr. Fawcett it was because of the course I took with you that I got this job. It is a program for people who work. I think I have to say thanks.

Have you listened the CD? Read about God, He will be pleased if you talk with Him often. Have a nice day. If you have any comments or suggestions about the course just tell me.
best regards Carmen V.

In December 2002 I was promoted to Program Manager, Electronic Vital Signs for Welch Allyn, Inc and reside in Syracuse with my wonderful wife Wendy and three beautiful bouncing baby boys - Ryan, Aaron and Ethan (not shown). I still fondly remember Jeetendra beating Dr. Fawcett in ping pong after we completed Design Patterns the summer of 2000... killer serve!

At HP, I worked on a project creating a distributed application development environment between Windows and OpenVMS using Visual Studio, and am currently working on a similar project using NetBeans which is a java based IDE. I am single and live in Nashua, NH which is about an hour drive from Boston, MA."