Moumita Dey

Georgia Tech
Ph.D. Student

"It is of great importance to learn the basics correctly and apply them to something practical, and I think DDL is the perfect course for that. Kevin and Dr Collins do a fantastic job in designing and planning the course, making DDL one of the coolest courses to take."

Justin Eng

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Spacecraft Avionics Hardware Engineer

"Knowledge of FPGA design is an increasingly versatile skill in hardware engineering, and DDL was the catalyst that inspired me to specialize within it."

Christine Gebara

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Mechanical Engineer

"Shortly after taking the DDL class, I started working on Prox-1, a satellite project at Georgia Tech. We faced a lot of issues that I was able to understand only because of my experience in DDL."

Derek Gobin

Savannah River National Laboratory
Engineer

"In addition to a myriad of technical concepts, the most useful skill I took from DDL was the art of debugging. Hardware and software alike become much easier to fix when you stop blaming the system and focus on good old-fashioned user error. "

Peter Huynh

School of ECE, Georgia Tech
Senior IT Professional

"Being able to quickly diagnose their issue and effectively communicating the issue to the student, so they can understand the root cause of their issue, is an important skill I picked up as an LTA."

Armaghan Mahmud

Advanced Systems Engineer

"My supervisors and peers have time and again appreciated my style of writing and explaining difficult concepts in a lucid and simple manner."

Jay Mehta

Landis+Gyr
Product Manager

"...all students must work in a team and present their design project on AmigoBot and to me that was another great learning experience. Because that's where I learned how to write a proper technical project document, how to efficiently work in a team, and how to present these technical data...."

Aditya Somani

NVIDIA Corporation
ASIC Verification Engineer

"I've learned so much from DDL that I consider it as one of the best things that happened to me in my life. I ended up falling in love with what I do and I hope to do more of it in the future."

Marvin Tingler

College of Computing, Georgia Tech
School Administrative Officer

"The DDL offered me the opportunity to develop my skills in communication, teaching, and problem solving. The lab reports required me to be more aware of my grammar and technical writing skills."

Shelly Bagchi

NIST
Electrical Engineer

"As a DDL GTA, I learned a lot about Technical Writing and how to best explain a topic to someone without previous knowledge. Doing individual consultations with students showed me the different ways in which people choose to present information and helped my own writing skills as well."

James D'Amato

GE
Sr. Data Scientist

"... tasked with comparing a few technologies with one another and presenting my results ... I completed all of the technical aspects of my assignment, but didn't know the industry standard to share or present my results .... Thankfully, I saved all of my DDL technical paper assignments from GT and used one of them as a template. Every principal engineer, consulting engineer, and manager was overly impressed by the format, clarity, and conciseness of my results and it immediately helped me gain some technical credibility, so thank you!"

Brian S. Smith

Apple, Inc.
Scientist

"DDL gave me more than just lectures on digital circuits. It was an opportunity for hands-on, project-based learning with friends and class mates. I am so glad I took the opportunity to continue assisting as a UTA/LTA, because it improved my technical and communication skills, and it was just a lot of fun!"

James Liu

Google
Software Engineer

"The experience in teaching at the lab taught me that we are always the student and the teacher. It has reminded me there is always more to learn and improve upon."

Jian Chen

GTRI
Research Scientist

"Presentation skill is the most valuable."

Karthikeyan Nagarajan

MS ECE at Georgia Tech
Hardware Engineer / Technology Analyst

"VHDL - Got me familiarized with a hardware description language. Helped me later in my Computer Aided VLSI system design course in graduate school. Helped me in my internship where I had to work with FPGAs and spectrum analyzers."

Lijun Zhu

Georgia Tech
Research Assistant

"DDL lab was the first place I came across hardware programming in VHDL/assembly language. Although most of my later work is involved in algorithm design and theory proof, the experience in coding directly on FPGA gave me more understanding of how computers work and why some algorithms appear in the forms they are today."

Michael Kuchnik

Carnegie Mellon University
Ph.D. Student

"DDL taught me core hardware and engineering skills which were useful in my undergraduate career and beyond. I found the experience gained with software/hardware co-design and FPGA prototyping to be the most valuable. The final projects were also great learning experiences as they are often the first time students build a complex system as a team. There is much to be learned from debugging a system until it works. I think this is especially true when it contains components you didn't create."

Nabil Taha

Global Power Technologies
Founder/Principal Engineer

"DDL -- with the group work, presentation and communication aspects of the course -- was among the most relevant classes I took at GT. Being an LTA for DDL taught me many skills that I use almost daily when mentoring new employees, It is important to allow new engineers to try find their own answers with support when they need it and honest critique of their work."

Sid Easwar

Amazon.com
Senior Management, Software Development

"An important part of my job is to coach and mentor engineers. Being a UTA (and then LTA and eventually a GTA) took me down my career path of technical management as it made me realize I had a passion for helping engineers meet their full potential. In your careers, very little of your learning will be driven by others; learning how to learn new things is something that will be invaluable to your continued success after graduation."

Digital Design Lab Alumni