I haven’t watched it for a while, but one of my favorite television programs used to be a show called Connections. The premise of the program was illustrating ingenious correlations among seemingly random historical events that, when viewed with historical hindsight, were shown to have definite connections along the path of technical and cultural evolution. For example, the show’s amusingly bizarre links might easily illustrate that Napoleon’s army trudging across the Alps somehow resulted in the invention of the padded toilet seat and that in turn caused the invention of fiberglass insulation. 

While I suppose you could hope for historical relevance that way, my guess is that the engineers and software professionals attracted to Circuit Cellar know that their ultimate place in the history books will happen only as the result of hard work and proactive behavior. For technical professionals, it has to involve more than just getting a degree. It has to be about doing something provocative enough to get noticed. It’s about demonstrating real technical performance and not just tenure on a resume.

Showing the world you know something requires a combination of product and prospect. The most direct scenario is to simply create something and present it to the world by starting your own business. Of course, not everyone is gutsy enough to risk their family and fortune every time they have a good idea. The more risk-averse approach is to spend your time developing and documenting your idea and then leave the heavy lifting of public promotion and finding manufacturer interest to a highly regarded publicity outlet. For many, the place to do just that is Circuit Cellar.

We have a great deal of evidence showing that Circuit Cellar has been the stepping stone up the career ladder or the key ingredient in a successful match with a prospective manufacturer for many of our authors. Over the years, I have come to simply refer to this potential career boost as the Circuit Cellar experience. Publish an article in our magazine, be one of our design contest winners, or simply have us select your design project for our web site, and see for yourself how it can help jumpstart something better in your career.

Being part of the Circuit Cellar experience has evolved over the years. In the early days, the only ideas we promoted came from our magazine authors. Sometime later we started having sponsored design contests to increase the quantity and variety of published and posted applications. At some point in the process, I realized that the response to contests and the desire for promotional benefit overlapped. Designers not only entered projects because it was a contest, but also because Circuit Cellar selected a significant number of additional projects to receive awards and be afforded the same publicity as the contest winners. The results were that the experience got to be shared by a whole lot more people.

Evolution is part of the game around here, and something that has worked so well in one area certainly has to have applications elsewhere. Since almost the beginning of Circuit Cellar, I have supported our colleges and universities. I’ve put my money where my mouth is by sending thousands of issues of Circuit Cellar magazine to qualified engineering classes. (To find out more, go to www.circuitcellar.com/products/collegeprogram/.) The Internet might have made it a lot easier to obtain general technical information these days, but professors and students all agree that Circuit Cellar is still a first-class reference for advertised products and materials and a superior source for well-documented applications.

Ultimately, even that program has to evolve. Contest postings were greatly expanded when I recognized the quality and quantity of project entries we received. The other revelation is that a significant number of students combine our various sampling programs and their senior class project or contest entry. Unlike the projects you or I might have made in class 20 years ago, many of today’s designs are elaborate and equal to anything the student might be assigned on the job later on. It only begs the question whether a student would have a better job opportunity if he could prove his pre-job technical expertise by showing that a highly regarded magazine had published his project before that job interview.

We’re still in the preliminary stages, but I think it’s time to show that there is some real expertise among these senior projects and give the designers an opportunity for a little career boost by becoming part of the experience that much sooner. We’ll be contacting professors in our college program, but ultimately, I want to post senior engineering projects on our web site. I want to make a promising engineering student’s definition of historical connection be the boost he gets out of the gate from Circuit Cellar.