Graduate student Jie Zou is working in the Linux Consortium, testing how hardware interfaces with the Linux operating system. Photo by Michael Warren '83

Like an NFL Draft

Their work experience and the contacts they make in a red-hot industry that can't find enough skilled workers serve IOL students well. "Upon graduation, it's typically like an NFL draft," says Froning, who receives calls from recruiters "all the time."

"The greatest thing I ever got out of UNH was the IOL, absolutely," Hadriel Kaplan says over a crackly cell phone from the San Francisco airport, where he's traveling on business. "Hands down, it was undeniably the best experience there." Kaplan, a philosophy major at UNH, was hired a year ago by Nortel Networks as a manager and team leader for a lab working on technology for making telephone calls over the Internet.

Kaplan estimates he had a five-year jump on the typical computer science or engineering graduate because of his IOL experience. "You don't have to go looking for a job; you get offers while you work there." He had about a dozen, and as anyone who pokes through the Sunday employment section of a major newspaper knows, these jobs pay well.

Retaining staff members who acquire a broad knowledge of the data-communications industry is one of the biggest problems for the IOL, Reinhold says. "Our people are in demand. We have to pay university salary scales with people who are in the hottest segments of the industry, and of course they just get pulled away."

Will the lab's phenomenal growth continue? Barry Reinhold isn't sure. "I don't know if I really want to see it continue to expand, because it's become quite an institution, and I'm not particularly a fan of institutions. You have to do all the things required to run and maintain an institution. My joy comes more out of seeing students learning and gaining competency in solving technical problems."

The IOL will continue to evolve as the data-networking industry continues to change at its nanosecond pace. "We're trying now to change our structure a bit," says Reinhold, "so that we're not doing consortium things, but engaging in research and development projects. We have thousands of opportunities." ~

David Appell is a physicist and free-lance writer from Gilford, N.H., who specializes in science stories.

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