I worked at MITRE in Bedford for my second co-op. MITRE is a federally funded research and development center, or FFRDC, for the government. Our company took on many different problems for the government including anything from cyber security to GPS systems. The team that I was a member of was a team working on a GPS system. Although I cannot discuss many specific details of the project, I can say that our group would be considered to be doing interdisciplinary work.
Throughout the co-op, you could consider my discipline as computer engineering. My tasks generally involved programming hardware of some sort to integrate with the GPS system. There were two other disciplines represented by my team members which were electrical engineering and physics or mathematics. There was a lot of interaction between these disciplines throughout my six months at MITRE since we were creating an actual physical system. I had to do a lot of work with one person whose discipline was electrical engineering because my component needed to be added to the system’s circuit board. I had to test my software on the board that he fabricated in order to ensure that the system was working properly. My software component was just receiving data from the board, this information that I received was then used by the person with a physics discipline to actually produce coordinates of the system.
It is easy to see that this work could be considered interdisciplinary. There were three different disciplines, physics, computer engineering, and electrical engineering that each utilized parts of the other disciplines in order to create a functioning GPS system. I could see myself doing interdisciplinary work like this after graduating and entering the work force. Working with other disciplines allows for a little variety in the work that you are doing. You need to have knowledge of the entire system to make your components work rather than just doing your individual part. Constantly collaborating and working with other disciplines allows for an exciting and interesting work experience.
