Graduates

I am working as a SDET at Microsoft for the MS Office team. My area of focus is Word and Publisher - publisher is used for desktop publishing, to create catalogs, newsletters, brochure, etc. and our customers for it include small businesses and universities. I own certain features on both these applications and develop automation scripts for testing various workflows, behaviors and performance of my features.

Before coming to Microsoft in November, 2011, I worked for more than two years at Epic Systems Corporation. They develop software for healthcare organizations – Electronic Medical Records. During my stint at Epic I acquired a good understanding of the healthcare industry and how software can be used to improve medical services provided to millions of people.

Things have been going good for me so far and one of the major reasons for getting a great start in my career has been your awesome coursework and pragmatic projects, that match up with the current industry trends. I would like to thank you for all the detail oriented classes, your invaluable guidance during our school and for pushing us hard to bring out the best in us.

Thanks a lot for everything! I wish you great health and many more years of awesomeness!!

Sincere Regards, Karan Advani

The 4 courses I took at Syracuse under the guidance of Dr Fawcett are instrumental for my work and I can only wish now that I should have also taken Software Studio. My work involves designing, development in C++ (with some Perl for scripting) on Unix.

Thank you Dr. Fawcett for working so hard in designing and explaining courses. I wish you a great health.

Currently I am working on a project to analyze and predict problems on a group of devices, by using statistical inference (in R and C++). The main goal is to derive some safety measures by the server when large volume of problems are reported from devices, and suggest product strategy for device-groups.

A few years back, I worked on mobile apps for Windows phones and tablets. Before that I worked on financial modeling for fixed income products; before that I worked on Oracle RAC cluster fixing bugs, and before that I worked on run time libraries for compilers.

And during all these years I took many, many courses, and I come to see Dr. Fawcett's website almost every other month.

In August 1998, I joined the Language and Compiler group in Digital Equipment Corporation, which later became a part of Compaq, and then on to become part of HP in 2003. Under the supervision of some fine engineers in compiler technology, I became a "code-writer with least problems" for two math run time libraries and two user interfaces. I've been a major contributor to six projects, and project leader and technical leader for three projects.

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 am now president of a holding company in Manila which has investments in a software development company, IT School, and others. I don't program anymore but I still look over the technical development of our programmers. I just wrote to say thanks and hope that you are doing OK!

We also developed a test harness which takes test data from XML and invokes the APIs. This is similar to the SMA 2nd project (Fall 2004). But the programming language is C++ so we did not have reflection. Our team used gccxml (open source tool) which contains the metadata of all the header files. This helped us to know the type of the object we need to create and we generated code (invocation stubs) based on this information in the make phase using python to accomplish reflection.

Since I am very confident of Application Programming by taking your six courses in Syracuse, I wanted to increase my knowledge in system programming since VMware is fully into systems programming. So I took Operating Systems course from Stanford University which was a great learning experience. This semester I am planning to take Introduction to Networking.

I also occasionally work in other teams when there is shortage of resources in C# or Java. You know, whenever I design anything in C++, the first thing I do is to go and read your OOD website. I also read Modern C++ design some months back as you suggested and it was a great successor to your OOD course and Design Patterns.

Thanks, Vijay Appadurai

One advice to the people reading this. Take ALL of Dr. Fawcett's courses if you plan to work as a developer. Start all the way from Software Modeling and Analysis (extremely important) to OOD, also very important because then any other project you have in your work era won't take as long to complete so you will be prepared.

I will end this Bio by giving a big thank you to you, Dr Fawcett, and next time I come to the States if it happens to be Syracuse we'll go have a drink together.

I have been working at Autodesk Inc. since the time I graduated. It has been a great 2.5 years. During this time I have been working as a software developer. I work for a research and development group within the company called the Advance Development Group and am based out of Manchester, New Hampshire. What makes my job interesting is that though our company is a product based company (AutoCAD, Inventor, Revit Architecture to name a few), the group for which I work is not directly associated with any one product. we try to be a little ahead of the regular development cycle, working on prototypes that incorporate the latest in technology that we think could be used in one of the many products. This requires us to be the ”Jack of all trades but master of none“ type people. I find that fun though because we get to work on new things all the time. For example: right now I am involved in an initiative to make various products within the company interoperable. We are using the “Package File” concept (essentially a zip file that contains required metadata) to transfer useful information between each product.

A great percentage of what I have been doing has been based on C#, Visual C++ and MFC (It just seems so painful to use MFC after having worked with winforms :-)). None of this would have been possible without the excellent education that you gave. The 2 years that I spent at SU provided me with the tools required to face the real world. A lot of friends that had the good fortune of having taken your courses talk about the content of your courses and how helpful they have been for us, but for me that is just one tiny part of the whole picture. What is most important for me is that I could and still do look up to you as a role model. I wish I could have the same amount of energy and positive attitude that you used to bring to the class. I remember with great fondness the late nights at CST and MADLAB and I believe it was completely worth it. It taught me the importance of sticking to deadlines and to this day I am able to bring that to use when I am running against time to get things done at work.

With regards, Arjun

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.

I joined Syracuse University in Spring 06 and graduated in Fall 07. During my masters in Computer Science I took three wonderful courses under you, OOD, SMA and DO. I must say these courses changed my approach towards computer programming. When I was making my decision to join Syracuse University a couple of my friends (former students) suggested me to go thru your website and courses offered by you. Looking at those courses I decided I must take them. I must say I was not at all disappointed and very glad that I joined Syracuse University.

I am currently working for Acme Packet (Burlington MA) as a software engineer in Security and Lawful Intercept team. My role is to design and develop new features for Acme products. We work mainly on VxWorks with C++ as our primary programming language with a bit of C. I realized the power, beauty and importance of OOD once I started working here. I have to admit that your course made my life very easy (in your words piece of cake). Our system is large and uses all the hardcore C++ fundamentals but getting used to it was not that tough (I was very comfortable dealing with code using smart pointers). We here follow a similar coding practice (standards) as you suggest in OOD. Knowledge gained in SMA is helping me every time I prepare functional specifications and design documents. I was able impress our architect by presenting designs that were created using the ideas from SMA. I have completed a year in Acme Packet now. During this one year I have finished two major development projects and few minor enhancements to Acme products. I also developed simple testbed for the developers in my team and automated a performance evaluation tool.

In plain words your courses have immensely helped in proving my skills at work and being successful all in the assignments given to me. I strongly agree with every one's opinion that Dr Fawcett's courses are a must. Thanks a lot professor for all the help support and guidance.

Regards, Avinash

Eshwar

Your courses have helped a great deal in understanding the principles of OOD and good software development practices. Irrespective of the field and the programming language, I always remember these fundamental principles and how valuable it is to have a good understanding of these design concepts. Thanks a lot for your valuable insights. I will cherish those all along..

All the very best to all your students.

Thank You, Murali.

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!

I had taken some of your courses, OOD (Spring 02), Design Patterns, etc. Currently I am an Architect with Haymarket Media Inc (http://www.haymarket.com/) and heading their development effort here in USA. Your courses (especially OOD & DP) laid the perfect ground work on top of my experience then. I still refer to my OOD notes, to get back to basics, and also use them and some of your current material to teach my juniors. But your mentoring has helped me the most in my day to day dealings.

Here at HMI, I have developed a Content Management System that handles all of our websites using Asp.Net, but is based on a flavor of the MVC design pattern, and also uses other patterns like Dependency Injection, Open Session in View, etc, and uses some open source projects such as nHibernate, and log4net.

I would love to stay in touch with you after a gap of so many years - Amey Bordikar

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!!

There are around 1500 employees working at SIG worldwide and about 400 of them are part of the information technology team. SIG develops software which allows its market makers to trade options on various domestic and international stock exchanges and indexes (DOW, NASDAQ, AMEX, NYSE, etc.) and abroad. There are also various, non-trading, applications designed and developed internally for company wide use.

For the past two months as a part of the Technology Associates (TA) Program, I'm working with a team which develops non-trading applications. My work, currently focuses on ASP.NET (Ajax & C#), VB & .NET and a lot of Microsoft SQL Server + Oracle. It has been really fun juggling between different languages and different database tools. I learned a lot about the software lifecycle and actually applied the skills I gained from being a Test Manager in Software Studio. In the TA Program, I also learned the importance of being a team player in a professional environment, thanks to the Teaching Assistantship (TA) for Object Oriented Design and Software Studio course. All your courses gave me a good perspective of working on existing applications and improving the already existing code. Your courses befit my experience here at SIG. Besides that SIG offers many great benefits like free tickets to baseball games, free breakfast and lunch everyday, visits to NYSE & AMEX (as a part of new employee training) and lots of educational poker games. These two months have been amazing and I'm hoping to use everything I acquired from your courses in the future. You have really been a great mentor.

Regards & Best Wishes, Nandita

I am working as a Software Engineer with the AllScripts which make software for the Healthcare industry. My work, currently focuses on C#, WPF and PL/SQL. Before joining AllScripts I worked at Aberdeen Group, my work here was focused more on web technologies (ASP.net, JQuery, PL/SQL, Ajax, WCF and Webservices).

I joined Syracuse in Fall 2006. I took Software modeling and analysis, Object oriented Programming & Software Studio; I also worked on two CASE projects which prepared me well for the industry.

The energy and enthusiasm that you have for the technology is unbeatable, there was never a dull moment in any of the lectures. I still visit your website regularly to refer to course material. I would like to thank you for the guidance and support you provided.

Best regards, Akshara

I am employed by Microsoft since i graduated and am working on the Javascript Runtime team as a Test Engineer. Given the power of web apps in current scheme of things, being in a javascript compiler team has given me great experiences. While studying I never thought of working on testing a programming language, it's quite different and almost always deals with the theories we studied in our Masters course.

I always seek good advice from you and visit your website on a weekly basis to catch up on something new. I am looking forward to all the blog posts you are planning to make............... those are words of wisdom!! Personally, I contemplate switching to developer from test. I am awed by the experience/ knowledge of developers in our team; all of them are senior, very intelligent and i feel that they get their job done, quickly and accurately!

I wish you All the Best and May God bless you with healthy and happy life! With Warm Regards, Sanyam Chaudhary

Hari & Rohit, my colleagues and your former students, are doing great in MS. We always talk about courses taken from you and the life in SU.

[Earlier message]
I have been working at Microsoft for two months now. Everything is good. Currently I am a SDET in Content Management Server group using C# to write automation testing code. In our group, we have a tradition called “ring the bell” – every time a feature crew checks in their code, they get a chance to ring the bell (It’s a REAL one!) and let all the members get noticed and share the happiness. Luckily I was the first person to make it during this milestone. My lead even danced in the hall to cerebrate it. Surprise! No one expects a new hire can do that so soon. But I made it. I attribute this to you and your courses!

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

Being a medium size team, it gives me opportunity to get involved in building modules from scratch, working closely with team mates, supporting customers, documentation, getting business perspective and in helping the product to find new markets. The challenge has been to keep it as a generic modular product as well as to customize it for business solutions (after figuring out what customers really want). My previous experiences with search, parsing and retrieval has been very useful in bringing new dimensions to the product usability.

Praying for many more wonderful years for Dr. Fawcett with the next generation of students. Many thanks, Sijo Cherian

[Earlier Post]
I graduated in MSCE 2004 and since then have been working with Virage Inc, Boston. We are a small group developing news broadcast capture, analysis and retrieval system. That involves juggling video encoding, speech recognition, speaker segmentation, machine translation and information retrieval, all for real-time-consious customers. I am involved in search engine retrieval and all steps of dev and release.

Dr Fawcett with his jokes about his Grandson and anecdotes from Radar industry, has blessed my life both at a personal and profession level. The real lessons of software design start with the basic understanding of 'things', e.g. deciding between 'is-a' or 'has-a'. Thats what OOD gave me. Design Patterns helped formalize this with patterns from Factory to ChainOfResponsibilities. And the 4AM project submissions taught valuable lessons-on-procrastination. Thank you, Professor !

For the current students: Hang in there, learn your stuff well, believe in the Almighty, and be honest.

Thanks, Sijo Cherian

Sometimes, I remember the days that I studied in Syracuse. One of the best parts is taking your courses. And I love those jokes that you told us every time. I am very proud of myself that I took your course every semester since I came to Syracuse in 2003 fall. I think the best part for me is not learning the technique, but learning the way of solving problems and doing projects. Honestly speaking, you are the greatest professor that I ever met.
Best regards and have a wonderful summer time.

Charlie Chung

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

I would like to attribute a major part of my success to my Prof, Dr.Jim Fawcett whose footsteps I chose to follow. His enthusiasm, energy, hard work and determination have always been my inspiration. Even today, I recall his encouraging words which helped me bring impossible tasks down to mere challenges and then to effective outcomes. There have been many times when his decisions have helped me move forward in the right direction. For instance, coming from an electronics background, I had some initial confusion as to whether to continue in the hardware field or shift to the software track. His solid reasoning in favor of the software field led me to take up software-related courses under him. Later, I took up the responsibility of a team leader in one of the course projects. I was also fortunate to become a teaching assistant for some of his renowned courses. I consider myself to be really lucky to have been able to obtain his constant guidance and knowledge"

Thanks and Regards, Devendra Chauhan, Software Engineer, Garmin

Thanks Dr. Fawcett for everything.

Truly thank you professor! Without you I would not have today's achievements. I have been working in Google for two weeks. It's my first job and everything is great so far.

The new semester is coming. I'm assuming that you are about to welcome the new students very soon. Well, don't forget to tell them to choose more your courses.

One of the attached photos is taken on the commencement. Another one is my picture in Google.

Wish you great health and thank you again! Best regards Huanming Fang

“I started my MSCE course in Fall 2007 with my focus on Hardware and VLSI. However, (in Summer 2008) as part of the designed course structure, we had to take Software Modeling and Analysis (CSE 681) as a mandatory course, and this was my introduction to a totally new and encouraging world of Software Development. I must confess that I was not comfortable with programming languages since I had no background in it. But over the semester Dr. Fawcett’s encouragement and support saw me overcome this mental barrier.

Later in the following semester (Fall 2008) with the course like Object Oriented Design (CSE 687) I had not only got stronger with my concepts of programming but also developed a liking for it. I had realized by now that I have the potential to think and become a good software engineer. I would also like to thank Dr. Fawcett for his support for Algorithms and Data Structure (CSE 382) in Spring 2009.

After my graduation I had to return to India for a Job and I would wonder if there would be opportunities for me to utilize the skill sets developed during my MS. As it turned out to be I was in an advantage position. The Indian IT industry was in a boom and had a lot of demand for professionals with knowledge of .Net technologies, on which I had enough exposure thanks to Dr. Fawcett's courses.

I am currently working with a company developing financial applications for a major client based in New Jersey. I am soon going to switch my job to work with another company which is specialized in IT solutions in Health Care domain. At work I am constantly appreciated for my in-depth analysis of issues, good coding and testing practices and developing efficient code. I believe that the credit for all this goes to Dr Fawcett’s teaching, projects and Friday Doubt sessions. Last but not the least my sincere thanks to all Teaching Assistants for their endless and patient support.”

Regards: Rahul Gathoo

Having had no exposure to the web development world at SU or at work, I was pretty nervous to start at SkyDrive, given it is Microsoft's cloud service. First few months were tough and I am still in my learning phase, but I think I did pretty ok. From OneNote documents to cookie authentication to performance & stress investigations of large document uploads and downloads, I enjoyed every bit of it.

At the start of current milestone I got to be involved in PM, dev and test spec reviews too and my experience and familiarity from your Software Studio course proved to be pretty helpful :) I remember our class using SkyDrive as a share for our project. Now working for SkyDrive, I'd be glad if you tried the new SkyDrive and desktop client sometime. :)

Along with work, slowly I have been able to start exploring the beautiful Cascades with some of my fellow SU friends. It was always my dream to work at Microsoft, it saw the light. Another one was to be at a SU Career Fair representing Microsoft, which I am trying hard and hoping for in the Fall.

Hope this message finds you in great spirits and with challenging projects. I started my Master's degree program in Fall 2006 focusing on Hardware Track. After completing major courses in Hardware Track when it came to do the core course, Software Modeling And Analysis, I had never thought that the course would completely change my days to come. I'm happy that the turn took me to an amazing world of programming. That was really my first encounter with ‘software’, and believe me, the course pumped it all into me. Great course content, nice help-sessions and your invaluable inspirational words boosted my confidence and it kept me putting all I had into challenging projects. I still remember the afternoon of August 6, 2007 when I received Karen Pardee's e-mail notifying me being appointed as your TA for following Fall semester; I was spell bound by the trust you had shown in me and I will always feel indebted to you for the confidence boost that resulted thereafter.

My interest and energy never ceased to amplify and I kept on chasing the project due dates of Software Engineering Studio, Object Oriented Design and Distributed Objects (wish I could also take Internet Programming and Design Patterns). That pain didn't take long to pay-off when I got employed. Today after about 6 months of my job, I must admit, I am reaping the benefits of every bit of my effort and time I invested in course projects; let it be writing an OCD, a specification document, understanding a project statement, struggling to get the projects running or even simply searching for sample code snippets on MSDN/Google, I am being profited by everything, literally, everything I did.

Best & Sincere Regards, Aniruddha Gore

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

After returning to Turkey, I started work at TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) as a Senior Researcher. The division in which I work mainly focuses on software development for governmental needs. I was lucky that I joined the team at the time when the software project officially began, which will be a good experience of an industrial size project from start to end. Three months have already passed but still we have not start coding yet, but are producing required documentations, such as the SRS, High Level Design Document etc. Now, I deeply understand the value of Software Studio, which was a useful practice from real software development life.

Up to now, my responsibility includes the analysis module for the project, which involves mostly data mining. The project will be implemented with Java and .NET - my part will be in Java. However, understanding the principles of OOP, OOA and OOD will be a great help. I only need to get familiar with the existing libraries and Java development tools.

With this occasion, I would like to express my gratitude to you one more time. You were a role model for me, not only for academic but also socially as well.

Respectfully, Murat Gungor, PhD

Before I joined UC Davis, I worked as a project leader at Oracle Corporation in Redwood City, California. My job was to design and develop Internet based E-Business software, including Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) applications. Through all these years, I greatly benefited from the knowledge and skills I learned at Syracuse University, especially from the graduate software design courses taught by Dr. Fawcett. I miss the golden years I spent at Syracuse.

I am a tester at Microsoft in the Windows Core OS Division. My group is responsible for delivering engineering technology and test tools for all of Windows. I spend most of my day writing C# code and the rest debugging it!

I use model-based testing approach i.e. designing a ‘model’ that mimics the expected behavior of the target software. A model can be thought of as a finite state machine, although it’s more than that. I then automate the test cases generated by the model, using C# and sit back and watch the show! I am automating the target software’s UI a lot these days and it is amusing to watch invisible hands manipulate the UI through a bunch of user scenarios.

Then there’s testing internal components and APIs down below, where the light of the GUI never shines. Loads of text logs is the only eye-candy here. In my job I use knowledge of finite automata, graph theory, C# and .NET framework. Design Patterns steps in to help once in a while. Currently we’re heads down and driving hard to ship Windows Vista.

Everything I learned at Syracuse University has helped me prepare for my career ahead. The courses I took under you have been particularly invaluable. Software Studio and Design Patterns courses probably had the most impact. I still have your course handouts and the gang of four’s Design Patterns book next to me here at work. Yes, I refer to them too :)

Best Regards,
Amol Hardikar

Hope this email finds you in good health. As discussed with you, I joined Goldman-sachs on May 21st as "Analyst Developer" and have steadily started picking up my work responsibilities. I work with the Futures front office team and am currently working on developing their strategic Order Management system for the futures business.

The work is primarily on C++ /python on Red-hat linux environment. My work here started almost from where I left in Distributed Objects coursework, which I took last semester.

Thanks and regards, Shashank

I got into Cisco Systems in June 2010 as a software developer. My wife and I moved from Syracuse to Massachusetts and I started at Cisco on June 1st at Boxborough, Massachusetts. The 2nd week of August, we went to San Jose, California for a week. Cisco sent me for a training program in software designing, development and testing. We returned after a week seeing the Golden Gate Bridge, China Town and Lombard Street in San Francisco.

It has been over 4 months now at Cisco and my work is going great sir. I am working as a software developer in the team NSSTG - Network Software Systems and Technology Group. My work is mainly in C, C++ and Unix (yeah, the black-screen boxes :)). There is a bit of tcl, Java, XML and shell scripting as well. I work for the network protocols development team - we design, develop and enhance the OSPF (Open Shortest Path First) routing protocol for IPv6. We do unit-testing as part of that activity. Our clients are based in almost every country.

I am really enjoying this work very much. If time permits, I am planning to do CCNA sometime this year. The work environment, flexible-timings and all my colleagues here at Cisco are really amazing. I got my H-1B work visa at Cisco last week. Your courses really helped me a lot with programming, software designing, testing, algorithms and analysis. OOD (CSE 687) really helped me become a better programmer, designer and a tester sir.

My wife and I are living in an apartment in the busy town of Framingham here in Massachusetts sir. It is 20 miles from Boston and 20 miles from my work. The town has nice malls and community. There are a lot of Indian restaurants (and other cuisine too) here.

I really miss SU and my grad-days. I was thrilled to see the sticker "Syracuse University" on the back of a car on I-90 highway the other day. I have one on the back of my new car too.

Bye and good luck for everything. I always need your blessings sir. Thanks and Warm Regards, Vikram Ganesh Hosakote.

Currently I am working with Arphic Tech. in Taiwan. We sell computer fonts and my job is to maintain existing systems and to develop new ones. I use c/c++ and java at work mostly and probably will do c# on .Net framework on future projects. All those coding and design principles and techniques I learned in SU really help me to survive the real world, not to mention your demanding projects are just like the real-life projects. If one can survive your courses, he/she may definitely survive the professional world.

Here is a list of something I think I was benefited from or something I should do: Go to every help sessions even if you have to stay up all night long. No late projects, begin to work ASAP. Ask as many questions as you can, bother the TA's as much as possible. Polish your own code and feel the improvements.

At present time, it is the Chinese New Year, and many of us in Taiwan have a break for about a week. I wish you continue to have great health, spirits, and enjoy teaching in SU. You helped me develop a mind set to select software development as a career. Thank you, Sir, again and again.

Sincerely, Po-Hao Hsieh

I also got job offer from Amazon in Seattle. Personally, I like that city very much, but considering about the great IT environment in the bay area, I decided to move to CA.

These things would be totally diffeernt without your wonderful orientations and projects. The most important thing you brought to me were not only the knowledges and skills but also the interests in software engineering.

Thanks, Best Wishes, Weimin Huang

Update on my side: Professionally I got H1B visa this year, and still work for the same company, though it was bought by a PR software company called Cision Inc. So we are currently part of that.

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 currently work as software engineer at Mailshell Inc, Santa Clara CA. Mailshell provides anti spam engines to larger software vendors (AVG antivirus suite, panda software, secure computing etc). My task is to enhance the engine's SDK and improve the classifier (bayesian, scoring based etc). In a regular day's work I use C/C++ with a bunch of throw away scripts in ruby, perl, bash etc(on Linux). I sometimes co-ordinate projects with an outsourced offshore team and the teachings from SMA has really helped me keep miscommunication to a bare minimum and progress more quantifiable. OOD on the other hand really helped in understanding and writing the advanced code I was exposed to after graduation in the industry. In fact I still find myself going to the website for help.

Ever since I have joined this team it has grown and we have teams working in US, Australia, China, Ireland, and Israel. The team also gives me exposure to cross-group collabration. We have very tight schedules in terms of releases and those deadlines remind me of your deadlines (I was on time everytime). All the courses I took SMA, OOD and also my Independent study have helped me to achieve whatever I have (still long way to go). I still use your comment style and refer to projects we did in your courses.

Thanks Dr. Fawcett and SU for giving me this rewarding Career at Microsoft

Developed and partially designed gateway to get Trade Capture reports from an exchange. The gateway feed is a live feed. We then have a real time service which uses this data to display active positions. Extended MS COM Real time data service which causes an excel display to automatically refresh when a new trade message / price change comes in. This helps traders in making informed decisions.

Hearbeat monitor: Designed and developed a stand alone state monitoring library which monitors a multicast group. State transitions from active to critical to dead state based on the frequency of the messages received on a multicast subject. The library can be used in any application using multicast feed to monitor state of the feed.

Designed and extended .Net combobox to perform non-sequential search on the text of its items. Users can key in any part of the item text and the items in the combobox would get filtered. The key challenge here was to conduct a non-sequential search with decent performance. Also to bind the results / refresh the items in the combobox without too much overhead.

YTD Report Calculator and Web Report: Extended a single threaded calculator to a faster multi - threaded calculator. Developed a library to manage report information and display the results using a web report.

Currently i'm working on processing trades on Options on Futures. I've also learnt a lot. Read and modified lot of good designs and code.

Thanks, Julian

It’s been about 8 months here and I have enjoyed every bit of it. Time flies by here real fast and the job always keeps me on my toes. I am glad that I have enough training through your courses and am ready for whatever challenges I may face. I studied SMA, OOD, DP, IP and SWS under you, and for me all of them were equally interesting and challenging in their own way and certainly I miss your lectures and help sessions.

You have been a great mentor to me. Thank You Sir. Wish you good health and all the best.

Best Regards, Kedar

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

I am currently employed by Google where I have spent the last 4 years. The main projects I’ve been working on are Google Voice and more recently Google Docs. I am mostly focused on backend server development of highly scalable services.

Thanks again for all your help! Alexey

I was working for Echostar, a Dish network company in 2010 in Atlanta. Since most of my friends were in the west coast I thought of a job change and joined Intel, Folsom in November 2011.

The skills and techniques that I learned in your course have always come in handy. The courses that I took under you have equipped me sufficiently to tackle the challenges at my work place and makes me feel confident about my work. I always remember the time spent at Syracuse, the co op job I did for ITG under your guidance and am very thankfull for the way things turned out.

I had taken most of your courses including OOD, Design patterns, SMA and Distributed Objects. OOD was my favourite and Design pattern made me realize how OOD can be put to use. I will always cherish the memories of Syracuse be it the snow, the projects I did in my course work, the friends I made during my stay at syracuse and the co op job at ITG.

I have been travelling for a fair amount of time in USA and I love it. I did a cross country trip from Atlanta to Folsom drove for 2800 miles in 4 days. Recently did a Yellow stone trip, Yosemite etc.

Regards, Prashanth R Kalose

I will keep in touch and also keep you updated with my progress.

Thanks for everything, Jaimeen.

Since 2006 I've been working on Windows Devices Core OS Image Update team, part of Microsoft's Mobile and Embedded Devices initiatives, targeting mobile devices, entertainment devices, GPS and automotive devices.

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.

It is needless to say that the programming skills I picked up during the course have held me in good stead through my time at VMware. The technology lessons in .Net behaviors, c++ niceties and COM plumbing which I picked up in the various courses I took with you have helped me through everyday work and allowed me to resolve numerous issues. Working as part of the product team is remarkably similar to your software studio course. However, looking back the simple and clear application of design principles in your projects to achieve the complex tasks in the most elegant manner has been my biggest lesson through all your classes.

I am glad that my graduate career lead towards courses conducted by you and highly appreciate the immense body of knowledge you imparted. I am particularly thankful that you allowed me to work as a TA under you in the 2nd year of my Masters for it was one of the most educational experiences. Thanks a great deal for everything. Hope this Holiday Season brings you much cheer and great joy.

Warm Regards, Manas Kelshikar, MTS R&D: VIM Solutions (VMware Inc.)

I have finished almost 1.5 years at my work place, Intel Inc. To briefly describe what I am working on , I am Writing API’s (C-Style) for a High Performance Computing Chip at Intel. It is known as Knights Corner (or MIC-Many Integrated Core), not sure if you would have heard it’s name? I still refer to your handouts and course material from time to time to brush up what I have forgotten.

I haven’t gotten a chance to visit the east coast after I shifted in the Portland, Oregon Area. :( I will definitely visit you whenever I plan for that side.

Warm Regards, Grishma Kotecha

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

I have taken four of Dr. Fawcett’s courses (SMA, OOD, Distributed Objects, Studio) besides doing a thesis, and an independent study under him. These are excellent courses, and Dr. Fawcett is a wonderful teacher. My thesis work on AOP that I did under Dr Fawcett was the most enjoyable learning experience for me at SU. I should stress that I learned a lot of new things during my thesis. Two other courses that I have found equally enjoyable and educative are Dr. Per Brinch Hansen’s ‘Message Parallelism in Java’, and ‘Compiler Design’.

I strongly recommend the following courses to new students: SMA, OOD, Distributed Objects, Software Studio, and Design Patterns by Dr. Fawcett, and Message Parallelism, and Compiler Design by Dr. Per Brinch Hansen.

[Added recently]
I am currently in the Windows User Experience team (formerly called Shell). For Vista, I tested icons/thumbnails and shlwapi, besides developing a framework for logon ui automation. I get to work on various technologies including Windows Services, DCOM and UI automation. I am also in the review team where I get to review code and design documents, and decide on test frameworks and harnesses. Microsoft is a great place to work!

Good luck to the new students at SU. Thank you Dr. Fawcett.

[added Nov 2015]
I am now working for Microsoft India, and am a developer in the Microsoft Antimalware team. Our products include Windows Defender, Microsoft Security Essentials, and System Center Endpoint Protection. Our team’s headquarters is in Redmond, although we have teams across the globe such as in Israel, Australia and Ireland. Our production code is in C++ (with some occasional C code), and I work on various Windows Technologies such as Windows Services, RPC and COM.

When I joined my new team a couple of years back, I was pointed to a large piece of code that I would own; mostly well-structured with object oriented design, but the supporting documentation for it was limited. The first thing I did was to do a type dependency analysis (like we did in the OOD class), part of it with a tool and part by simply reading and noting down the various types. It took a couple of days, but it really helped me understand the type dependencies, and gave me a kick start.

This was just one of the many instances when I realized that I was applying the principles that I learned in OOD and SMA classes while I was at it. Thank you Dr. Fawcett. To the new students at SU, I strongly recommend all of Dr. Fawcett’s courses; they will teach you good programming design and coding.

I am also attaching a couple of photos of Shyamal and me. Thank you. Sincerely, Ramaswamy

HP Software was interested in our product and bought our company in 2007. Later in 2008 HP closed the office in Connecticut and moved me to Roseville, California, which is about 2.5 hours from Silicon Valley. I like the area because its living environment is much better than the valley. I'm still working on the same product, which will be part of Business Transaction Management, a new area in the IT Management space. I work on the QA side of the R&D team, but I also have to develop many test programs using Java and C on many platforms, even including AS/400 and mainframe. It's a lot of fun (and effort) to work on so many different technologies and platforms that our product supports.

Working for HP is a great experience to me. We have a very dynamic and collaborative team. We help each other on any problems; we conquer many challenges due to rapid product integration; we work painfully with other R&D and QA teams in different time zones. In short, it's exciting, stressful, but very rewarding.

I thank you so much for teaching me, mentoring me, and helping me to land on this job.

Joncheng Kuo, Software Designer, QA, HP Software and Solutions - TransactionVision R&D

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.

My work has been keeping me quite busy. There isn't a single day when I am not learning something new. A couple of months back, I received an Achievement Award from my division in recognition of my efforts in co-developing a Low Power Design Flow.

I have very happy news to share with you: This November 27th I got engaged and legally married to Ms Sowmya. She is a Software Engineer from the same hometown, Mysore. The religious ceremony is scheduled to be held on April 22nd and 23rd 2007 after which my wife will join me here in the US. See attached pictures of my engagement ceremony.

Thank You! Take Care, Divyanand

As my team grew with the new platform still evolving and Blend being the primary authoring tool for the platform, we were the first team to create a Framework to support UI automation of WPF apps (Blend itself is a completely managed app built on WPF). Since I joined, a year back, I have added pieces to this framework and extended it to support Silverlight testing as well. It was very easy to understand the whole architecture and begin contributing as it felt very similar to what I did in my first course with you, Software Modeling and Analysis where we designed and implemented all those variations of Test Harnesses. That was the first time I used C# and that’s all I use now (a little bit of Javascript since Silverlight has arrived).

It’s fun going through all those PM specs and writing Test specs although they might not be as complete as the specs we had to write in Software Studio for the Repository Testbed System. I think SWS and Object Oriented Design were easily the most important courses for my education in this field. Still remember working on that generic Graph class - Graph<VertexType, EdgeType>. All that experience working on a team in SWS paid off tremendously as I realized working is how well you can do something but working on a team is that + how well you can deal with people on your team and other teams that you have to work with.

Nothing can compare to the [Software Studio] Qualification Test experience, sitting hours in Madlab and finally getting it done. I thought I had also seen the last of COM when I completed DO but that was not to be. Although Blend is mostly a managed app it has some native code in it and I had to go through it to understand where our coverage was weak and what we were not hitting in out tests. We have interesting tools that we use to measure code coverage and I get to be the lucky one on my team to use those and make sure that our tests provide a healthy code coverage for the product.

All the courses that you take are worth every bit of effort put in them (ensuring that the complexity is less than 10, all methods and classes and are commented and many more, I used to hate to lose marks for that kind of stuff).

I am very proud that my team has shipped version 1 of Expression Blend a few months back and would love to hear your feedback on it. (http://microsoft.com/expression …. A little bit of marketing). You have two of your students on this team (Mario Tayah and myself) and several more in MS which just shows how well your work is appreciated at MS.

Thanks a lot for all your help and guidance!

I will surely drop by If I visit Syracuse. Please give me a call whenever you get a chance to come to NY or NJ. Have a great summer.
Thank you, regards Sreevatsa

I hope this email finds you well. It’s been 3 months since I graduated from SU, and I think it’s time to share some of my news with you. I joined AllianceBernstein, a growing investment and asset management company in May. From what I experienced so far, I would say I love this job. It’s exactly the kind of work that I wanted, I’m doing my passion, and it feels fantastic. My department is specialized in fund investment. And because of the small size of our development team, my job is interesting while challenging. It’s interesting in that I’ve learned a lot about the financial industry, and it’s challenging because I’m taking much responsibility.

Working as developer in a fund company is much different from working in other places. Because not only am I required to deliver and maintain our software system, I also have to understand tons of business in the financial world: my company enrolled me in an online mutual fund specialist certificate program the first day of my work.

As for now, I’m working with my team on building a new trading engine (remember the stock trading system I built for my final project? very similar). And our code base is mainly C#.net and SQL; on the other hand, I provide IT support that facilitates our daily trading (our back office has lots of trades to process for every NYSE’s business day, all of which need information gathered from all over our IT infrastructure).

More than once I reflected on those days when I was in school after work, and every time I felt I so, so much benefited and blessed from you, your courses and your instruction that I feel obliged to give some suggestion to all the students who either are taking your courses or come across your website. Here are some that I come up with: If you are serious in either software development or cutting-edge technologies, or if you just want to be marketable and easily find a job after school, my suggestion is to take Dr. Fawcett’s courses, as many as you can. The reason being: all his courses (well, almost all) are project based and use cutting edge technologies, which makes you marketable.

I took OOD, SMA, DP and DO taught by Dr. Fawcett and here is how all these courses benefit me: OOD provides me hardcore OO knowledge, principles and practices that are favored everywhere in modern software development; SMA distinguished me from a simple programmer: it made me a software designer; DP brought the knowledge I learned from OOD and SMA to a higher level and greatly improved my public speaking skill (each student will teach a lesson to the whole class for 3 times); and DO directly helped me launched my current job: we were allowed to build whatever we want or feel cool, using interesting technologies, and I built what I needed under Dr. Fawcett’s instruction which successfully launched my dream job.

One final word: I want to thank Dr. Fawcett, for everything you’ve done for me and for all of us, I deeply appreciate it. I wish you continuously enjoy your life in Syracuse and SU as you train more and more great software engineers for our community. Have a nice new academic year.

Sincerely, Yuanzhe Liu

Dr. Fawcett's teachings not only influenced my knowledge but also my life and career. When I graduated, I was promoted to Manager Network Services, managing a team that designs and maintains Data and Voice networks across the enterprise, and it was the teachings of Dr. Fawcett that prepared me for this challenging opportunity. I wish every student at SU has an opportunity to take at least one of your courses.

I owe this to you Dr.Fawcett.

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

Three months here and already I have written lot of code. With that experience , I want to convey some of the important expectations of the industry in our code and you may even start having them in your courses which helps students to get the industry standards while in the college: Always write unit tests, follow coding standards (naming conventions – very important), always code against interfaces (Allows you to test anything), Know how to use your IDE effectively (Visual studio has lot of extensions and plugins - try to use at least the major ones like code analysis etc) and, Write at least one functional test for each requirement.

I have taken Design patterns, OOD, SMA, and IP. I think Design patterns are considered most important topic in the industry, Because everybody doesn’t need just software, what they need is a scalable software . May be you should make this as one of our core courses.

I never thought qualcomm had a big software team but these guys are really smart & techy. And San Diego ROCKS. I can walk wearing shorts and see sun “At the same time” during winter . I am currently living in Lajolla where lot of Hollywood stars and WWE stars live. I usually work 11-13 hrs everyday. But weekends we have lot of beaches to visit and places to enjoy.

I thank you for all your help & courses which landed me in this job. I pray for your better health and lot of students should get your support and guidance while they transform into a professional.

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.

I have been working for CodeObjects, a start up in San Francisco Bay Area since my graduation. At CodeObjects, we offer end to end Business solutions (both on premise and on demand) for Insurance Companies. We are a very small company of 18 people with only 12 Engineers and I am the youngest of them all. My work has been very fast paced with aggressive deadlines and involves learning a lot of new technologies on the fly. My usual work week is around 60 hours. Thanks to all the courses that I took from you, the transition from academic life to professional life was very smooth for me.

I use all the fundamentals you taught in Software Modeling Analysis, Object Oriented Design and Design Patterns on almost a daily basis. In my personal opinion they are the most important courses if one has to make a career in Application Software Development. My work involves mainly writing code in both C# and Java, a lot more Java code though. I interact a lot with our business team and implement the requirements in the application layer of our Software.

We have a custom framework which helps us in building Enterprise Applications based on our Customers' requirements pretty quickly. Most of the time, I only need to change the application layer for that. Our framework generates code for Data Access and UI layers. Sometimes I do UI customization as well. We support both WPF client as well as Web client applications for the end user.

My Engineering Director liked the 3 most important concepts you taught to me in your courses: Code Comments, Modularity (function size of about 50-60 lines) and Exception handling. Whenever I write code, I always keep those in mind and my Engineering Director has really liked my style of writing code. I have learnt that in Application Software Development, it is very essential to write code comments, keep the function size to about 50-60 lines, handle error conditions well and include sufficient logs in the code. When we run into production issues, all those things will make debugging easy.

Other than that, my life has been really good. San Francisco Bay Area is a great place for Software Engineers with a lot of start ups and buzzing with a great deal of technical activity. Of course, I really don't have to mention the weather. Its great through out the year. I am very thankful to you for shaping my career. I sincerely pray God to bless you with good health and a long life so that you can continue to inspire and guide many more students.

Thank you for everything sir.
Regards,Supreeth Murthy

I joined Syracuse in Fall 2000 and started my Software Engineering course cycle with CIS554. I did enroll for Software Modeling Course in the same Semester and canceled it as I thought I would not gain much from that course especially without having any idea of first lecture about Modules and Exec – I now realize how ignorant I was during that time. My first course with Dr. Fawcett was OOD and it is my best course to date. I liked that course so much that I attended that class again during the next year and enjoyed every single topic in it. With Dr. Fawcett’s guidance and concepts I learned from OOD, I got my internship at Microsoft during Summer 2001. After my internship I also got Full Time Job at Microsoft.

With a great experience in OOD, I wanted to take as many courses as possible with Dr. Fawcett before my graduation. I took Software Modeling and Software Studio in Fall 2001. I was happy to play the role of Software Architect in the class project for Software Studio. The memories of the final project (CONFIGS) sign-off are still with me. In Spring 2002, I took the COM class [CSE775 - Distributed Objects] and it was an important course for my career at Microsoft. Then I was in Design Patterns and Windows Programming courses during Summer 2002. I was very fortunate to take most of the courses offered by Dr. Fawcett during my stay in Syracuse.

I know I’m not the only one who is thanking Dr. Fawcett for what he’s shared with us. A Big Thank You!

Apart from remembering to forget semi-colons, there has been so much new to learn in VB and .NET! In a way, I feel that I am reliving the same anxious initial days from SMA and OOD :). I shall always remember the invaluable lessons that I have learned from you, Dr. Fawcett. You have been a constant source of inspiration for me and shall continue to inspire me through my life.

Work aside, life is also chugging along. I am taking violin classes here and enjoying the same. I am also learning to drive (albeit poorly at the moment). I keep bumping into friends from SU on weekends [He probably doesn't mean with his car]. SU now has quite a strong representation at Microsoft. All of us fondly remember you and the classes we took under you.

I have this to say to future students - Take ALL of Dr. Fawcett's courses if you plan to work in any software profession. They will definitely hold you in good stead.

With Respect, Regards and Best Wishes, Ghanashyam Namboodiripad

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".

I graduated from Syracuse University in August 2000, with Masters degrees in Civil Engineering and Computer Engineering. I am currently working as a software engineer in the Civil Development Team within Autodesk, Inc., primarily known for its AutoCAD line. Our team is developing CAD software for the Land Development industry and expect to have a major impact in the Civil Engineering software market.

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!

Hope you are doing great. I went through this year’s Studio Project – Remote Software Assistant. The specifications look very good and I am sure it will impart a whole lot of exploration and learning on the students. I am in touch with the Architect, Tilak Patel and he was telling me about the project too. In Microsoft, there’s a separate Windows Test Tools division that develops tools to automate test related tasks. It’s pretty neat given that it enables running automation on any platform and does a thorough job of running test automations but even then we detect bugs now and then. It looks like Remote Software Assistant focuses on all aspects of software development and will definitely provide an all round knowledge. My best wishes to the team.

My work is going good and since it’s a V1 team, I am on my toes with many challenges everyday. Its lot of fun and I cannot be more grateful to anyone as I am to you Sir! Thank you!

We had our company meeting a few weeks ago, and I met Bill Gates on stage for the first time. The whole crowd offered a standing ovation for at least 10 minutes for the hero of MS ! Corporate VPs talked about their respective divisions, demoed Zune - it was pretty cool. MS Research demoed surface computing too which was a cool concept where all a user needs is a projector and he can use just a surface as an interactive intelligent interface.

Other than that life is good - all Syracuse University students are doing very well too and I meet them pretty often.

Take care Sir! Best Regards, Priyaa.

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.

I took OOD, SMA, Software Studio, Distributed Objects, Design Patterns, Comparative Platforms and also did my master’s thesis under you. I also worked on two CASE projects (carrier and clairus). In Amazon I use J2EE and other open source technologies (and it is *nix only) and I must admit that because of different types of projects I did under you, I am still able to think and logically reason things without knowing everything about so many things. It won't be a surprise for you but any small thing that I learned in your courses has some application somewhere in my work. How can you structure your courses and project so perfectly?

I am working as SDET in Product Ads. It might sound strange but I am only one responsible for all testing/automation and internal tool development. I feel like I am doing software studio one more time. I enjoy my position as first customer before real customers and as Amazon tends to be very customer centric, I have strong say. When not busy with projects, I also spend time on internal tool development. Often work is challenging and has lot of visibility and responsibility and I am on my own but I feel confident just because I was your student.

Thanks for everything Dr. Fawcett! Best Regards, Tilak

Thanks to you, I had a head start in these technologies even before I had any real-time industrial experience. When I was deciding between universities, a lot of former students strongly recommended SU and that I should not miss out on any of Dr. Fawcett’s courses. Any of Dr. Fawcett’s courses are fun, interesting, challenging and enlightening. Even today I check your website for code examples. I enjoyed your energetic vibe as well as learnt a lot from your courses.

Thank you for everything! Regards, Archana

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.

After moving from US, having worked for investment banks like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, I was offered a role as a Senior Manager with Morgan Stanley, Mumbai. My responsibilities include (but not limited to) liaising with Business end-users (traders) and technology team to understand their technology needs, eliciting requirements, analyzing business applications (e.g trading/crm applications and strategies), documentation and preparing recommendations based on the same.

Dr Fawcett, I have still preserved your OOAD and Software Design notes. I even refer to them from time to time. Having taken your courses, I can now confidently say that I am able to analyze and document requirements much more effectively. This has also helped me in defining test cases and test scenarios.

I visit Dr Fawcett's webpages atleast twice every month - just to see what new projects are now being worked on by students.

Graduating from Syracuse in May 2004 with a Masters degree in CS, I took several of Dr Fawcett's courses, but the ones that really help me professionally are OOD, Software Modelling and Design Patterns. I would recommend the Software Track to anyone who is going to take a plunge as a programmer/developer/analyst in the professional world.

I thank Dr Fawcett from the bottom of my heart for the knowledge he has imparted to all of us. For being so kind and understanding towards the needs of us students and also working so hard for us and cheering us when we accomplish something great.

Dr Fawcett - May this new year bring you good health and happiness.

I am feeling immense gratitude for being one of your students at Syracuse University from Spring 2014 to May 2015 for MS in Computer Engineering program. During my program, I took all your courses: Object Oriented Design, Software Modelling & Analysis, Design Patterns, Distributed Objects, and Internet Programming. The whole program of study required immense hard work but also had many memorable moments for me!

A few of my most memorable moments at Syracuse University were:

• My first day of graduate studies began with our very favorite OOD course and in later semesters got the opportunity to work as a Teaching Assistant for the same course.
• Our pic together on graduation day (see EECS/StudentPictures).
• After all interview rounds I got a job opportunity at my dream company, Goldman Sachs, as an Analyst Developer in my dream city NYC. Now while I am writing this email it has been around two months in New York city since I started my job. The office building of Goldman Sachs is next to World Trade Center in downtown NYC. My current team is divided across different regions in the world including London, UK and Bangalore,India. The main technology we use here is Java and the frameworks that we are working on have millions of lines of code. People at work-space are very sharp, quick but also very down to earth and helpful. All thanks to your courses I took because of which I am able to push myself everyday more and more required for here. With heavy work also there are some fun elements here. We had a small team party recently and I have attached my team picture with the email.

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

It is been a little over 6 months since I joined Microsoft as a Software developer engineer for the ASP.Net MVC and Web API team. I am one of the primary developers for ASP.NET scaffolding feature which was released last week along with Visual Studio 2013. ASP.Net scaffolding is a new code generation framework for ASP.Net web applications. This new feature allows web developers to add fully functional framework code to any kind of web project. With this feature we will be able to easily create web projects having any combinations of the following - Web forms, MVC, Web API and OData. It is been really exciting to be part of this great team.

I joined Syracuse university in Spring 2011. I took IP, SMA, OOD, DO and DP while I was at Syracuse under Dr. Fawcett and It has helped me shape my career tremendously. Recently I have been working a lot on WPF and COM (working with Visual studio shell) and I still refer to the notes from SMA, IP and DO class. There have been times here at Microsoft during the design meetings, people would be just talking in terms of design patterns and the Design Patterns class has always come to my rescue.

In the first couple of months since I joined here, I even wrote a Public API for MVC using one of the design patterns that I learned in the DP class. The projects that I worked on during the IP class using MVC always helps me to get a users perspective when I develop new features for MVC now. The coding guidelines which you asked us to follow while developing projects for your class has always helped me to stand out from the crowd. I strongly encourage any one planning to come to Syracuse to take all the courses.

Thank you Dr. Fawcett

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.

It's been only two months now since I joined and I am the only new grad in my group. I am doing a unique project here and developed a tool (a low level driver integrated with a GUI) for our group - Production and Design Engineers - to help them in answering questions about Flash behavior on different hardware platforms and for different sequences of writes, reads and erases. Currently we are using it on the 2GB ORNAND-QuadBit 90nm Flash chips.

I am using C, Managed C++ and VB.NET for my development. The experience with Managed C++ was quite frustrating in the beginning- It's different and surprisingly an amazing blend of C++ and .NET. My manager and VP are very happy and impressed with my work, they showed confidence in me and want me to go one step ahead and develop this tool as a product. I am very excited about it, its going to be a huge and challenging job. I am not only going to be a programmer but also a system architect.

Though I am an Electrical Engineer, programming is my passion. SWMAA and OOD, these are the only two courses I took from you and I must say, what am I today these two courses contributed a lot in it. I still test my code using famous Anal (.exe) and grade myself using your grade sheet. Wow! I am scoring well.

Thanks a lot for everything.

Jaideep Sagar

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

After 5.5 years at Microsoft I moved to Amazon Seattle. At Microsoft I was part of SQL Azure team and later worked for Skype team. Now at Amazon, I am part of Seller Experience team building machine learning solutions to forecast seller traffic, issues, volumes and things are going pretty good.

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.

It’s been a while since we chatted, how are things going for you? I hope you are keeping a good health and actively working on new projects and courses. I believe you were working on some books, how is that coming along. When you publish your book, please do send me details and I will definitely buy one.

Otherwise things are going pretty good here, you must have seen all the big announcements from Microsoft on Windows8 at BUILD conference last week. I was part of the effort and my team shipped the preview for Blend for HTML and Windows XAML designer in Visual Studio 2011. If you get a chance, please do take a look and let me know your feedback.

Regards, Navit Saxena

I am thoroughly enjoying my work here and guess its a reflection of all the hard work we did under you; and your projects gave us a real feel of the pressure out in the working world. Thank you for all your support and guidance. Couldn't have done it without you!! As an aside, the weather here is amazing. Not missing the snow at all :)). We have loads of bright sunny days here at a stretch and its a welcome relief from 6 months of winter.

[note added from a recent email, several months later:]
I had my review and my manager is really pleased with me. So all the hard work with you is really paying off.

Regards, Saurav

I joined SU in Fall 2001 in the Computer Engineering program. I went the CAD-VLSI route as I always wanted to make use of my EE undergraduate education. I thoroughly enjoyed my stay at SU. Where I stand today is all due to my education and experiences at SU. I took Objected Oriented Design under your guidance. Before going through any interview I would refer to your notes. The format of your class prepared me very well for industry. I would like to take more of your courses.

I went to school part- time to get an MBA. I am in my last quarter and will be graduating in October, 2006. I will be moving soon into Strategic planning/marketing where I can leverage my engineering + business skills. The Rest all is fine..everything is going great at my end. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank you for the great education that you gave us. I wish you all the luck and hope that students at SU are blessed with your education. God bless you!

Best Regards, Chirag Sheth

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 joined Microsoft Business Solutions in October 2008 which is formally called "MBS R&D" at Fargo, ND. I work on business logic and data access layers for core financials and accounting modules. I mostly work on X++(Similar to managed C++), Win32 and C#. I'm also working cross-group with tools team where we work on ActiveX controls and other UI elements.

Now, the excitement begins - Syracuse University and Dr. Fawcett! It was a phenomenal experience working with Dr. Fawcett. I joined Syracuse University in Fall 2006 and I started working with Dr. Fawcett from October 2006 to 17th October 2008 (The day I left Syracuse). I took most the courses offered by Dr. Fawcett - Software Modeling and Analysis, Object Oriented Design, Design Patterns and Distributed Objects. I still regret not taking Software Studio. Dr. Fawcett was my advisor for my Master's Thesis and my Graduate Assistantship at CASE. I have no count of number of Projects I've worked with Dr. Fawcett. All courses of Dr. Fawcett that I took were very comprehensive, in-depth and truly amazing. The projects were very challenging and an excellent opportunity to realize our potential.

Sir, I want thank you for all your help and advice. You have been a great mentor and an amazing teacher - for all of us. I'll certainly miss Syracuse and working with you. I'll always remember and cherish the great time I had in Syracuse. I'm very grateful for confiding in me and giving me a number of opportunities to work with you. I would like to end my note by saying ' Anugurihiitosumi' - meaning "Thank you and will always remember" in Sanskrit. I'll make sure I'll meet you whenever I'm in Syracuse. I hope and pray for your good health and look forward to read your book soon.

Thanks a lot for everything, Best Regards, Santosh Singh

After graduation I moved to Cambridge to work with Akamai Technologies. Here are at Akamai I work on developing the next generation of distributed storage and delivery mechanism. This distributed storage is used by more than 150K Akamai edge servers to share metadata.

Design principles and patterns studied at in CSE 681 and CSE 776 come very handy to me at my job. During my first assignment discussions on multi threading in our class helped me figure out many race conditions. Also during one of the projects I had to monitor the health of a software from within the software. I was talking to myself that there must be some design pattern to solve this complicated problem. And guess what, I found one. Above two classes at Syracuse help me in writing clean and maintainable large scale software.

Cambridge/Boston is a great area to live. With some good education institutes around I get to meet people from different fields for study. Proximity to MIT from my work place lets me take classes there under advanced study program.

I had been thinking of writing to you for a long time and finally got a chance to do so today. I hope your health is good. I am currently working for Amazon in Seattle as an SDE II. I work for the Amazon Lending Team here. We are in the business of lending money to sellers on the Amazon Marketplace to grow their business. It is an invitation only program and we do a lot of data mining and select sellers based on various business rules.

I particularly work for the Loan Management module which concerns everything after a loan is issued. Technology wise I work a lot on Java on the backend. My manager is really good and let me also explore other technologies on the UI such as Ruby On Rails. In fact, our pages were written in some very old language called "Mason". 5 of us were allowed to "go dark" for 3 weeks to completely learn and transform everything to Ruby on Rails. That was an amazing experience. Its a very popular language. You could think about using it in one of your courses.

The best part of working for Amazon is the amount of responsibility. We code, test, build , deploy to production all by ourselves which helps us understand our systems and all the critical processes associated with them. I can even drive new features, give a new look to public web pages and innovate to a good degree. Your courses have really helped me settle at Amazon and I hope you continue this journey with other young students as well. I would always like to keep in touch with you.

Yours Sincerely, Harsh

The courses which you have taught me have been of great help to me. I believe one of the most important lessons that I learnt from you was one of your favorite quotes "Good judgement comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgement". It has helped a me a lot in looking forward to and adjusting to changes in coding language (started my work life with C\C++ and moved to C#) , technology (from operating system to distributed real time system) and organizational changes (a fact of life in Microsoft). In my opinion a positive attitude towards taking measured risk and learning from experience and bad judgements is extremely helpful.

Thank you for all your hard work in helping me prepare for the real "work life" - Tushita.

I think writing actual code is much easier than designing it and without the training that I received at SU it would have been a real tough job. I also very much admire Dr Fawcett's cheerful, helping nature and the difference he is making to his former and current students' lives...it's just amazing.

Thank you.

What I like about our process is that we are very plugged in to the team status. Our kanban board gives us instantaneous feedback regarding work in progress and alerts us to any bottlenecks. Due to our shared team space the developers are very connected to the testers and project managers. With very little effort we all know what each other is working on and can easily communicate with one another.

There are a lot of ways for customers to contact us directly and have their voice heard. We all read the unfiltered support email list for customer feedback and feature requests. We respond to messages sent to the CodePlex twitter account or any of our personal accounts. We have a section of our website devoted to user feedback where they can vote for new features. I like how connected we are to our customers because it helps me make sure I am working on the right stuff.

I have been handling support requests (such as converting project source control systems), fixing bugs, and working on product features (such as our recently released UI refresh). I am learning a lot, collaborating well with the team and making a big impact in the customer experience. I owe a lot of my success to your coursework and professional advice.

Take care.

How are your doing? Every minute of the past 3 months - has really been very interesting, I guess I have never given so many interviews even in my previous life! I realized the lack of experience that I had in the IT field was one of the main reasons which was behind this delay factor. But nevertheless at the end - hard work really paid off for all those tough times I went through.

Million thanks to you for being there the whole time as a Guide/ Mentor/ Motivator and for creating new opportunities for me at the University. This especially gave me enough time not only to prepare myself but also to find what I'm really good at and then pursue my career in a way that would benefit me the most!

After giving interviews for a range of companies from Google, Amazon, Cap Gemini etc., to the smallest start-up that I could Imagine across The United States, I worked hard and ended up with a bunch of offers in different domains from which I could choose from. Considering the work environment and the exposure to the market, I settled down with a company called "ESM solutions" located in Warrington, PA.

ESM does a lot of e-procurement processing and offers cloud services that makes a procurement process go completely paperless! They are growing rapidly and they are now well known for their SaaS based financial services and solutions in the procurement market. I started work very recently and the first thing I wanted to do was to - write to you. A link to this company's website: http://www.esmsolutions.com/ . I consider that you are one of the solid reasons that I have reached this place. Thank you very much once again.

With Best Regards, Balasundaram Subbusundaram

I have taken the Distributed Objects course of yours and it helps me immensely in understanding the code base and i was really appreciated for my ground knowledge on COM. I was able to create my own hosting interface, which was very much appreciated where all i had to do was implent few interfaces like IDispatch. I was always referring to your website when i wrote that code. I want to express my sinciere thanks for all the knowledge that i gained by taking your courses professor.

I wish you good health and thank you for everything.
Sankar Sundaram

The type and quality of work and the learning one gets from Dr. Fawcett's classes, if diligently pursued, are sufficient for anyone to feel confident of his/her skills in any organization dealing with software. In my case, I currently work at Microsoft helping build the web version of Outlook and while choosing to join Microsoft I had offers from RSA (a security and authentication company) in Boston, an aircraft software manufacturing company in Florida and Vmware (a virtualization software company). The feedback from all recruiters was that the list of projects I had worked on during Dr. Fawcett's classes looked very impressive on the resume for consideration in the first place and they were very enthusiastic about the details of those projects - great stuff to keep your interviewers engaged :).

Besides his classes, students will love the personal attention, mentorship and some great career guidance besides an honest evaluation of one's skills while coaching under Dr. Fawcett. My most favorite classes are Software Studio, Design Patterns and Software Modeling and Analysis.

Thank you, Dr. Fawcett, for the great work you have done in shaping so many successful careers.
-Avinash T. Suresh (Software Engineer, Microsoft / Graduated MSCE 2007)

[Mario interned at Microsoft as an SDET with a team working on part of the Windows Presentation Foundation Framework - a new model for building windows application interfaces based on structuring with XML and drawing with vector graphics. As an intern he was assigned a design project and daily testing activities. His design project was so well received that he got a job offer before coming back to Syracuse.]

I have been very busy lately, I moved to a new team. I applied to teams around and got two interesting offers: 1) a team that is partially a research team, they do incubation projects for ideas that are to be implemented in applications in microsoft. 2) a team that does business applications (erp systems, crm systems...)

Although i was tempted to take the first offer, since it is a very prestigious team and an interesting idea, I ended up taking the second position since this is the domain that I would enjoy working in as well as get experinences that i need.

I currently do: web controls (.net, ajax, jscript), c#(business logic), x++ a proprietary programming language that encapsulates database objects (so that you don't need to worry about oracle vs sql server...) as well as allows you to write business logic. Although I have been working really long hours and weekends, I enjoy this new job, am learning new things that I did not know much about before.

warm regards, Mario

I took most of Dr. Fawcett's courses and would suggest everybody take them. I believe they are very well tailored to equip students facing real life challenging projects in industry. I truly appreciate Dr. Fawcett for the excellent job he is doing for students and syracuse university. His help and guidance has enabled hundreds of students to acheive high goals in life.

Thanks Dr. Fawcett and keep up the good work.

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.

It has been a week I stared my work and for last couple of weeks I am in Little Rock. So I thought to drop in and say hello to you. Little Rock is really a nice place, quite big city. We have State Capitol and Clinton's Presidential Library, which are very interesting. I do enjoy my stay here except it's humid and hot atmosphere. It is about 100 F every day! Never the less, it is a nice place to stay.

Next, I do enjoy my work in Planning and Scheduling of projects. It's nice; global manufacturing company. My colleagues are very nice and helping. I am sure, I will have useful professional experience here. Before I complete, I would like to express my gratitude for being there and guiding me. I am really delighted to have you as one of my professor. And I respect you a lot. If you happen to visit this region, please let me know. I will be more than happy to welcome you.

Thanks and regards, Dhaval

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.

[This is a picture Camen sent me recently of some of her students.]

After graduation I moved to California and worked with Sun Microsystems and then with NEC Electronics America until last year. I’m currently based in Portland, Oregon and work for LSI Logic as Director for the Product Management and Engineering group.

I got married to a wonderful person in 1998 and we have two terrific kids who are 5 and 3 years. This is a quick note to touch base with you after a hiatus of 10 years.

Regards, Dilip Venkateswaran, Tinnelvelly

You had said in the orientation that you would throw us in the ocean and you did exactly that. But you were always there to help us anytime. Initially, it was very difficult for me to cope up with your courses, but your extensive website and regular help sessions saw me swim through the ocean. Also, you showed a lot of faith in me by making me the Team lead for the Software Studio course.It really helped me boost my confidence

Today, I am working in my dream Investment Bank (Goldman Sachs) and in my dream city (New York city). I am working there as an Technology Analyst and enjoying every bit of it with a lot of business knowledge to gain. We use a lot of different technologies. I stand out in my team, as all my teammates are from Java background whereas I am from the .Net background. Truly, its a much bigger ocean and you are not there to help us this time around.

All things said and done, you are the best professor ever. Thanks, Jay Vora

I would also like to mention that Dr. Fawcett's courses have given me a strong foundation for what I have achieved so far. I would specifically wish to thank you Dr. Fawcett for 'Software Studio' class which gives inexperienced student like me, a chance to work as a part of a team and realize the kind of effort, understanding and cooperation needed to accomplish a big project. My Graduate degree in Computer Engineering would have been quite incomplete without the five amazing and fruitful courses I took under Dr. Fawcett.

SIG is a growing financial company, which has lots of new and challenging projects to work on. I started with working on an ASP.net project, where I could apply the knowledge I gained from my independent study of Internet Programming class under Dr. Fawcett. Right now I am working on developing a project in which I am able to use multi-threading concepts and windows forms provided by the visual studio environment which I had learned from 'Software Modeling and Analysis' and 'Software Studio'.

As is said, “All work and no play makes jack a dull boy”, can never be observed at SIG. I think here at SIG there is a perfect balance between professional and personal life, so we often go to watch games and have picnics. All teams regularly go for team lunch, and people here have a different and interesting way of developing their analytical skills like by playing poker, and I too have started my march towards developing my analytical skills.

I feel I am very fortunate to have been able to get enough knowledge as being a student of Syracuse University and also get the opportunity to apply the same as a part of SIG.

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!

I was asked to design and implement one of the ad-hoc routing protocols we’ve investigated. I spent the month before our holiday vacation designing and coding this, and the day before vacation was asked to demo it to the Vice President of Engineering! I was nervous, but confident everything would go smoothly because I kept up with my test stubs (for the first time, since I used to do test stubs after I had finished coding), and everything did go well with the demo. All in all it was about 3100 functional lines according to the famous anal.exe.

I just want to say that I received a quality software education from your courses and I feel like I am light years ahead of other college graduates that have started working at Harris since. I also would like to say thanks for giving us students a good mix of both C++ and C#. I say this because having worked for about a year I have been asked to participate in some interviews of college graduates. A lot of schools seem like they are almost solely teaching Java. We need programs like yours that teach C++ so people can learn how to manage a heap for themselves! By the way, thanks also for teaching us to write clean, well documented code. When looking at some of the open source stuff, I saw some ugly code with functions that were pages long!

Thanks for everything, Mike Woodruff

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."

I took your OOD course in 2010, and it showed me how to use C++ in a real project although I struggled a little bit at that time. ;) And then I followed you, learned some issues from Design Patterns to finish my Master's Graduation Project. Thanks for your great teaching, patience and encouragement.

I am currently working in Cisco System Inc. as an ASIC Verification Engineer. Our group is to design a switch， and my work is to verify the design modules and test the tapeout of these designs with C++ and System Verilog.

I think each of your students gets lots of benefit from your wonderful teaching and impressive courses. Thanks a lot for all your kindly help.

Regards, Hao

Worklife over here is getting more interesting. Although I am still a level 1 support engineer at this moment, my supervisor is going to promote me into a developer. I don't regret being a support engineer at all, because I learned our products from a business prospective and have gained substantial experience working with customers during the first 3 months.

In case you are curious, we are a CRM/Helpdesk/Defect Tracking software provider that targets enterprise clients. I will let you know any exciting progress I make along that path.