Student Center

From School to Industry: Putting MATLAB to Work

• Alex Nielsen Senior Application Engineer, Robert Bosch Corporation
• Carl Klopstein Radar Systems Analyst/Engineer, ITT Gilfillan
• Tim Sodergren Project Engineer for a Geotechnical Consulting Firm

Carl Klopstein
Radar Systems Analyst/Engineer, ITT Gilfillan

“The only limit to MATLAB is your imagination.”

Carl Klopstein graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2002 with a degree in electrical engineering. Today, Carl is a radar systems analyst/engineer at ITT Gilfillan.

In which college classes did you use MATLAB?
I learned MATLAB in the course, Applied Numerical Computing. This was very helpful since I used MATLAB in other courses, such as Introduction to Communications Systems, Wireless Communications Links and Antennas, and Active Microwave Circuits.

Which other products did you learn in college?
I also learned to use other MathWorks tools, such as the Signal Processing Toolbox.

How do you use MATLAB in your work?
MATLAB is an integral part in the completion of my radar system design and performance analysis projects. Since radars are generally custom products, the need for custom models and simulations of the product is fundamental. These simulations and models span many aspects of radar performance and signal processing and include the design and analysis of MTI systems, pulse compression waveforms, plot processing and spatial correlation, statistical target detection models and simulations, antenna patterns of phased arrays and reflectors, and radar cross sections.

How did college prepare you for this position?
Learning the MathWorks products in school has been extremely useful for my current position. MATLAB has given me the ability to create the foundation for models and simulations and enables me to share my scripts with other MATLAB adept colleagues.

As a daily MATLAB user, I appreciate the data visualization tools (array editor and ease of creating plots), the specialized built-in functions and toolboxes, the matrix-based philosophy, and the general ease of developing code in MATLAB. These are just a few tasks that make MATLAB superior to any other language.

MATLAB has been immensely important to me in my career. Data visualization tools enable me to express technical ideas and findings to fellow engineers. Most importantly, MATLAB has enabled me to express my technical talent and quickly gain the respect of my peers and seniors.

What has been your most interesting project using MATLAB?
The most interesting project using MATLAB is a program that I wrote to calculate the far-field antenna pattern of an arbitrarily shaped (non-parabolic) reflector antenna. This was accomplished using the aperture-field method and geometric ray tracing techniques. This problem is non-trivial and is highly valuable for reflector antenna prototyping and design.

What is the best thing about MATLAB?
People who are interested in learning MATLAB, or simply what MATLAB is about, often ask me questions like, “What can you do with MATLAB?,” or “Can you do ____ with MATLAB?” My immediate answer is always, “The only limit to MATLAB is your imagination.”