Seeds of Change

 Sherry Hess, Vice President of Marketing, AWR. Read profile >>

AWR’s current ad, “Ideas Grow Faster in the Right Environment” graces the front of our 2010 AWR Magazine (6mb PDF) this month. There are many interpretations stemming from this visual (pun intended) that can be explored. But for now and for the purpose of this blog, the sprout portrays AWR’s corporate culture: innovation, spawning new ideas, the right environment for creativity, growth into new markets, seeds of change…

Rather than recreate that cover story here, I invite you to download the magazine online and read it for yourself. Instead, in this blog I’m going to sprout out in another direction.  .. academia and university outreach. 

AWR recently gave root to a new growth opportunity for our software in the academic community. At the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads Association (ECEDHA) Annual Conference in Florida this past March, I announced in my ECEDHA Perspectives interview AWR’s Graduate Gift Initiative, which provides qualified* 2010 graduates a free, fully-functional, one-year term license of  Microwave Office and Visual System Simulator (VSS) software suites - inclusive of AXIEM 3D planar EM software. The goal of the initiative is to give graduating electrical engineering students a career head start by providing hands-on exposure to AWR's high-frequency design software.

This initiative is a follow on to our Preferred University Program, which works with universities worldwide to provide students with access to RF/microwave software tools. These programs have been launched  in direct response to industry and academia expressing the need for students to have hands-on experience with these tools prior to graduating and entering the job market.

And, most recently, AWR has announced the donation of free licenses of our software as the prize award to the winners of the IMS/MTT 2010 Power Amplifier Student Design Contest.

What better way to sow seeds of change and spawn the growth of new ideas, new engineers, new technologies, etc. than to enrich the academic environment by providing the software engineering students need to learn and grow from the classroom and into their first job? Our students of today are the future of the industry—we need to empower them with the best and latest tools so they are prepared to flourish.

How to Be a Good Blogger

 Sherry Hess, Vice President of Marketing, AWR. Read profile >>

Blogging: My first experience at blogging came with an invitation from editor David Vye to contribute a guest blog on the Microwave Journal website. It was like a jump into the deep end of the pool!

I had never blogged prior and certainly not imagined such a prominent place on the MWJ site, but knowing David for many years, if he was willing to ask me to try it, I was willing to give it a go.

Now that I am a self-anointed expert blogger after six months of contributions to Microwave Journaland a recently-launched blog on our own AWR website, I thought I would share some insights I’ve gained from my experience.

First, I think you must possess at least three traits in order to be a good blogger:

1) You need to be outspoken (geesh, I guess I am not afraid to have an opinion or share my thoughts/views/perspectives on things).

2) You need to be entertaining (a VC friend told me he likes that I do not take myself too seriously on these things—that has never been me and so my own personality worked well here—I am a bit goofy on occasion or so I am told ).

3) Be relevant. This was the hardest one. Week in and week out how do you try to convey something that will be relevant and interesting to hopefully more than a handful of readers? Pulling from friends, colleagues and life experiences was key. I like to have a lot going on in my life and this has helped me to find inspiration on more than one occasion.

In the end, I started to blog about technology life, or rather, living in the career world of technology, if I have to give it a catch all. I was surprised by the response. The first month on the MWJ site, my blog was the most read. The trend continued as I continued blogging. People would comment, e-mail me, stop by at an event to say hello. What a great feeling! To find out that you have connected with people in the same career field as yourself and that you are able to meet new people and make new connections as a result. I was also amazed to realize that I was not only presenting myself in a multi-dimensional way, but that I was conveying a personality for AWR, too.

Blogging has turned out to be both fun and functional. So much so that I have taken the blog to AWR and have gotten others to join in and blog along side me. For those of you like me who have uncovered that work life is not a separate life of its own, but rather a life that blends, merges with our own personal lives, social lives, etc., blogging was one of the first ways (and albeit interesting too) to convey this complexity and connectivity.

All of you out there who are nodding their heads as they read this, start blogging…you’ll find it rewarding on many levels!