The annual Cal Poly EE banquet held at the Madonna Inn is a great event to network with older students, professors, and industry representatives. Today, I attended the event and got some insight from some upperclassmen about defense companies.
When signing up for the event, attendees were allowed to write down any industry representatives, professors or students they wanted to sit at the same table with. I requested to sit next to an industry representative from Raytheon, however the table I was seated at did not have any industry representatives. Fortunately, my table was filled with other students who had filled out similar preferences. I found out that many of the upperclassmen who sat at the table had internships at major defense companies and I asked them some questions.
The first student I talked to was a junior who had an internship this summer at Raytheon. Raytheon is notoriously known at the job fair for telling applicants that they “are not accepting resumes and to apply online”. However, according to the the students at the table, that just means your resume did not meet their specifications or impress them enough.The junior I talked to was asked by the Raytheon job fair representative to email him an unofficial transcript and some more detail on the projects he had done. The junior did so, however the representative seemed to have lost interest him. Fortunately, his resume was still in Raytheon’s system and a different department discovered him and eventually he got an internship. I asked him if every 3rd year student gets some sort of internship because it seemed like I hear that a lot of upperclassmen get internships. He said that real paid internships that have you do actual work is hard to come by and only hard working students are able to obtain them. He said to keep gpa high and do a lot of side projects to add to your resume. He told me that the PolySat club on campus had good opportunities for side projects.
The second student I talked to was a 4th year who was doing the 4+1 masters program. He had an internship this summer at Loral Space Systems. He said the interview he did for Loral was all personality type questions(ie: describe a difficult situation etc.) much like the ones discussed in my Tech Writing Class. He said that he was even offered free housing. Loral is located in the town I was raised in and housing there is quite expensive. This made me think that interns must be very highly valued to have their relocation fees paid for. The 4th year student also told me to check out PolySat and to also learn Matlab because professors will expect you to know it even though no classes teach it for EE students.
The last student i talked to was a graduate student who had an internship at Northrop Grumman. He was graduating soon and was basically offered a position. The hiring manager at Northrop bluntly told him that if he was offered a better salary from a different defense company they would offer more. He said that his roommate had an offer from a tech company that was about 15000 more than what a defense company offered his roommate but the defense company said they didn’t have the means to match it.
Overall, I am glad I went to the banquet because I got some valuable knowledge from older students who are currently living through the job and internship finding process.
Defense Company Profiler 
There is some good information in here. The companies seem to be highly selective of their interns, but they greatly value the ones that get accepted.