10 April 1996
I recently interviewed with Dr. M- regarding employment with MIT Lincoln Laboratories. As a result of that meeting and his encouragement, I am extremely interested in a research assistant position, especially in Air Traffic Control or Satellite Communication Systems.
I am a December 1995 graduate of the University of Wisconsin - Madison, earning my Honors Bachelor's Degree with a triple major in Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy (GPA 3.5/4.0 - please see enclosed copies of transcripts). To earn my Honors degree, I completed an Honors Undergraduate Thesis, an independent research project using the resources of the UW Astronomy department. Using the 36-inch refracting telescope and polarimeter at the UW Pine Bluff Observatory, I collected spectropolarimetric data from several regions of the Lunar surface (see enclosed copy). I reduced and analyzed the resulting data on Silicon Graphics workstations and integrated it with data from the Wisconsin Ultraviolet Photo-Polarimeter Experiment (WUPPE) aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour in March 1995. I planned and executed my entire yearlong project from scratch, learning in the process how to manipulate raw data from both ground- and space-based equipment, as well as the intricacies of handling large pieces of quirky and often temperamental equipment. Murphy's Law and the Wisconsin weather taught me a few lessons in humility, yet despite the setbacks I learned much about scientific research outside the classroom.
In addition to my experience with research, I worked full-time over the past summer at the UW High Energy Physics department for Professor Albert Erwin, assisting him with his work on the KTeV project at Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory. My duties included soldering and testing circuit boards and machining equipment and power cages to support them. I learned how to operate shop machines such as the drill press, milling machine, and band saw to shape aluminum, brass, and lucite to my will. I also ran errands ranging from laying network cable, ordering parts from large supply companies (DigiKey and Allied Inc. for example), and graphic design.
I also have extensive experience with personal computing. I am extremely comfortable in both the Macintosh or IBM-compatible environments, and have used most popular word processing, graphics, & desktop publishing packages on both platforms, as well as various data analysis and mathematics packages such as Mathcad, Mathematica, and Microsoft Excel. Internet browsing software such as Netscape and Mosaic, various email suites such as Eudora or Pegasus Mail, and file-transfer programs such as FTP and Fetch are extremely familiar to me, and have published on the World-Wide Web using HTML. My programming experience lies mostly with BASIC (mainly for simple graphics and for chaos/fractal models) and Pascal (mostly involving pointers and dynamic arrays for manipulating data) - I prefer the 'building block' style of programming with lots of small, simple subroutines that I assemble into the final product. I even used UNIX and X-Windows on Silicon Graphics workstations, so I feel at home in virtually any computing environment, and can usually adapt to any new software on any platform with a very quick learning curve.
I often am forced to be innovative when confronted by unusual computing problems while at work. For example, I once aided a user in translating a graphics file (received as an attachment over email) from its Windows 3.1 native format into a file type readable by his Macintosh! Users have amazing skill at developing strange new maladies on their disks or machines, so I often adopt a "make-up-as-I-go-along" approach to problem solving. I typically learn as much as the user does. I often must take advantage of similarities across platforms - for example, my knowledge of Macintosh menus helped me puzzle out an application on a Silicon Graphics workstation.
Despite my technical skills, the abilities of which I am most proud are my interpersonal communication skills and writing abilities. Teaching workshops to students and my current position as a Teaching Assistant at UW-Madison have helped me develop an easygoing, pleasant personality (or so people tell me!). I am eager for the opportunity to impress myself upon you and would greatly appreciate an opportunity for further interviews or to answer any questions. I can be reached via email at apoonawa@students.wisc.edu or by telephone at 608.238.4824 until May 10th, so please do feel free to give me a call or drop me a line if there are any questions. I look forward to our further correspondence.
Sincerely,
Aziz Hatim Poonawalla