About the Job

This summer I worked for Computer Science Corporation (CSC) in Rockville, Maryland. I soon found out that CSC has several locations around the DC metro area because they do a substantial amount of work with the federal government. CSC also has offices in every state and several in foreign countries. The corporate headquarters of CSC is located in El Segundo, California and the local corporate offices are located in Falls Church, Virginia.

 The location in Rockville had a specific role in the company structure, much like the office in Chantilly was geared towards Defense contracting work. The office in Rockville was the location of CSC’s federal transportation sector. In other words, here is where work gets done for the Federal Government in regards to Transportation matters. For example, the majority of this office complex was working for the FAA. This office was located off of the wonderful Washington beltway (495) and the I-270 corridor. This was known as the ‘tech’ corridor due to the number of technology companies building offices here. Some of CSC’s neighbors include Lockheed Martin and HP.

 The number of employees working on the En route Automation Modernization program (ERAM) in Rockville was about 45 full time employees and contract workers. ERAM is a vast program that contains employees across the country and involves several companies coordinating joint efforts. All of this will be explained in the next section. The complete scope of our work and who we work for is very detailed and complicated. CSC was contracted by Lockheed Martin, who was in turn contracted by the FAA to update the entire flight tracking system for the United States . Since CSC was contracted we report everything to Lockheed Martin in regards to ERAM, so Lockheed was technically our employers and we are the suppliers of our code to them.

 I had two immediate supervisors to report to during work. One supervisor was an administrative assistant who would need our help in preparing documents and retrieving and formatting them in UNIX, which she did not know how to do. We would help her out with the more administrative tasks to help facilitate the code inspection process. My second supervisor was the technical manager named Michelle Simmons. Michelle had the daunting tasks of coordinating, managing, and supervising all of the technical aspects of the code in regards to the work done by the programmers and testers. She would assign us our technical responsibilities and projects. Linda Esker, the program manager of ERAM, was my top supervisor who was in charge of hiring me and in turn supervised Michelle.

 This was a very fast paced project that I was working on. Updating the FAA’s flight tracking system is a process which takes several years though requires constant deadlines and check points along the way. It was a mass consensus that this project was being done at one of the fastest, most hurried pace that anyone has every worked on. Many full time employees and contractors were required to come in on weekends and work extended hours in order to complete deadlines. This project had the potential of a Death March project but CSC and its employees were competent enough to complete a project that was assigned an unrealistic schedule from Lockheed Martin.

My specific title within CSC was technician 2. The primarily meant that they wanted me to do a lot of systems testing though my job evolved from that. CSC expected me to know a fair amount of coding and in specific, Ada . A working knowledge of UNIX was also expected because I had stated it on my resume. From this they would explain how to adapt my skills to what needs to be done within the company. This is why it is important not to lie or over exaggerate skills on a resume, because when it comes down to it, it doesn’t help to get the job but have no idea what to do. Don’t worry though, it is not expected to be up to par with the full time employees as an intern or recent grad on your first day of work.

My employer’s first goal for me was to remove the warnings left by the complier when code was not up to Lockheed Martin’s specifications. When code was complied and there were warnings that were not allowed by Lockheed, such as unused with clauses and unused declarations. We were required to fix and remove them or add a waiver to the file. This involved going through the code and fixing these mistakes if they were in our grasp of knowledge. Much of the warnings could be fixed though due to the size of the project and the range of warnings, not all of them could be fixed and waivers had to be added to acknowledge the presences of these warnings. The language that I was using for this job was Ada because the majority of the code for ERAM was written in this language due to its rule in the Defense coding.

 Another one of my tasks was to create drivers for C++ code. This involved testing actual code that was being submitted to Lockheed Martin by creating a driver and passing the driver values and checking their return value. This is similar to basic CS 239 code testing though much more involved. This task was difficult at first because everyone was so busy with their own work that I often time had to figure out how and what the majority of the code I was testing does. This was difficult because, at that point, our deliverable involved 17,000 lines of code and several hundred work products to deliver. This made it rather difficult to determine the use and function of code beyond the comments made within. Once I had a successful build and created a fully tested driver, I then submitted the results to a Unix directory on a Lockheed Martin server for further review. 

 A common problem I found when working on coding specific tasks was due to the complexity of this project. ERAM is a huge project that requires almost 20,000 lines of code and multiple years of work. As a summer intern it is very difficult to walk into a half completed project and try to navigate your way around acronyms and UML diagrams that have been in existences for several years. I was able to eventually figure out most of the design of the program, which helped immensely with future tasks. Another problem I had was contacting my immediate supervisor, Michelle. She was often very busy and out of her office so it was difficult for her to explain what exactly she needed me to do or how to get around a certain problem. This eventually led me to turn to other employees for assistance, which in turn ended up being beneficial. This allowed me to network and meet employees who had similar projects, problems, and headaches as me.

 I was able to work with another intern from the DC area. Don West went to Embry-Riddle University in Daytona, Florida. This school specializes in matters regarding to flight and air traffic. His knowledge of the FAA, flying, and aeronautical engineering landed him the job, which supplemented his lack of coding experience. I found that about 1/3 of the employees working on ERAM were contractors from a few different contracting companies, such as Bearing Point. This was done to help alleviate the work load from the full-time CSC employees while also filling in necessary skill areas that needed short-term workers quickly. I found that contracting work was a common occurrence in certain industries, especially those facing strict deadlines. I found that the majority of my coworkers were confident in their abilities and enjoyed their jobs, though faced overbearing work schedules at certain points due to the stressful deadlines. By the end of the summer, I was able to go to them for help and many were eager and willing to help me out and have a conversation with me to make me feel part of the team. This makes the work environment much better to have friendly and helpful coworkers.