Mark Wecht: Staying Close to the Leading Edge
EP alumnus Mark Wecht's company is headquartered in the same building as the school's Dorsey Student Services Center in Elkridge, Maryland -
and not just for sentimental reasons.
His connection to part-time engineering at Hopkins goes back to 1980, when he began taking evening courses that would eventually lead to a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. This was his second venture in higher education. Inspired by his parents' dedication to meeting human needs - his father as a minister, his mother as a nursing supervisor - Wecht initially pursued a major in sociology. But back in high school, he had helped two of his teachers installing electrical systems that connected the bridge to the engine room in tankers, and he was longing to get back to that kind of work. So he began spending his days handling technical jobs - quality control, equipment and microprocessor design, software development - and his evenings in Hopkins classrooms. His professional and academic careers advanced in tandem.
"Every course I took was paralleling what I was doing at work," he says. In addition to the value of exploring technical issues in both theoretical and real-world terms, Wecht's part-time studies at Hopkins also provided a ready-made professional network of fellow students and instructors working at other companies - a network in which everyone could learn from other people working in other fields. On school nights, he recalls that he would "get there early, hang out in the lounge, and share war stories from work."
Wecht has managed to duplicate this collegial atmosphere in the company he founded in 1996: Embedded Systems Design, Inc. An engineering services provider, ESD designs and implements solutions for defense contractors, typically at the boundary between hardware and software. The work also occurs at the interface between various organizations. "We act as ambassadors between people and organizations," Wecht says, so ESD engineers must also carry people skills in their toolbox. To make sure they have these skills, he still relies on Hopkins. A high proportion of his staff members are Hopkins students or graduates who have benefited from the same kind of social skill-building he learned years earlier.
Reflecting on the state of the industry, Wecht believes "we're about to have another one of those huge surges in technology." He intends to be ready to ride that surge. While providing services to clients, his team has also had time to develop the StreamBlade™ single board computer - a relatively simple, inexpensive circuit board that can be networked with others and assigned specific tasks to create powerful computing systems in a limitless range of configurations. "It's like a leaf " says Wecht, referring to the StreamBlade™ board. "You can build a flower, a bush, a tree, a forest... it's all a matter of how you put the leaves together." With ideas like this and Hopkins right in the same building, it looks like ESD will have no trouble staying current in a fast-changing field.