Academia

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

Tim Sodergren
Project Engineer for a Geotechnical Consulting Firm

“MATLAB has enabled me to obtain very useful scientific information without spending weeks or months writing complex code.”

Tim Sodergren graduated from the University of Utah in 2002 with a degree in geophysics. Today, Tim is a project engineer at a geotechnical consulting firm

In which college classes did you use MATLAB?
I learned MATLAB in the course, Linear Systems and Signal Analysis. This was very helpful since I ended up using MATLAB in other courses, such as Exploration Seismology, Physical Fields I and II, Global Geophysics, Advanced Structural Geology, Math Modeling, Advanced Scientific Computing, and probably a dozen more.

Which other products did you learn in college?
Through my education, I learned other MathWorks tools, such as the Signal Processing and Image Processing toolboxes and the MATLAB Compiler.

How do you use MATLAB in your work?
I use MATLAB almost exclusively in my current position to develop various data analysis techniques for geomechanical testing and predicting log-based properties.

How did college prepare you for this position?
I can't overstate the importance of MATLAB for both in school and with my current work. MATLAB has enabled me to obtain very useful scientific information without spending weeks or months writing complex code. It was also essential to my thesis research in college.

Finally, and most importantly, my knowledge of MATLAB was crucial in obtaining my present position with this company.

What has been your most interesting project using MATLAB?
The most interesting project using MATLAB would be, without a doubt, my master's thesis work. Using MATLAB and other tools, I was able to develop a method based on previously established principles for analyzing complex geophysical data to extract large-scale, regional geologic information about the central Great Basin in Nevada. The results of this research are actually quite exciting and have been presented at several national meetings. This research is also being submitted for publication.

What is the best thing about MATLAB?
In addition to scientific computing, I find that the input/output interface is useful for work which would not normally require a software tool such as MATLAB. The ease of reading and writing text and using cell and structure arrays makes using standard C or FORTRAN code obsolete. Also, the ability to produce stand-alone code with the MATLAB Compiler is quite useful as these applications can be distributed both internally and externally to clients.