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Joe
Trost (left) and Professor Richard Thompson
in the Tele Lab, March 2003.
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Joe Trost hesitated as
he faced his decision about attending graduate school.
Then this thought crossed his mind. He could be a programmer
with a computer science or even a business master’s
degree… and be one of millions, Or he could earn
a Master of Science in Telecommunications (MST) and be
one of a select few. He chose the MST program at Pitt
for its 50/50 blend of technical lab work and classroom
learning. He could see that at Pitt, hardware people
and software people came together to form a multidisciplinary
experience that really let students learn about entire
systems, from the human factors right down to the resistors
and capacitors.
Joe Trost is flat out friendly. He’s the sort
of good guy that most people just naturally respond positively
to. As a student he hit it off with his Telecommunications
instructors, especially with Rich “Dr. T” Thompson.
Matriculating in the summer of 1991, but still scrambling
to find housing, Joe received an invitation to stay with
the Thompson’s temporarily… Mrs. Thompson
once coined their home “Dr. T’s Home for
Wayward Youth!” In the classroom, Joe initially
struggled, but with Dr. T’s encouragement he learned
to “run, not just jog along,” and rose to
the top of his class. Trost and Thompson remain true
friends today.
Joe is currently the Director of Software Sustaining
Engineering for the Broadband Routing and Switching (BBRS)
division of Marconi, Plc. Marconi is a UK based telecommunications
and networking equipment supplier with a major facility
located near Pittsburgh, PA. Joe’s division is
a significant supplier of ATM switches to corporations
and governments. He leads three product line teams, 14
people in all. These teams focus on software bug fixing
and the development of customer requested features. He
says that his MST gives him the technical underpinning,
which combined with his solid non-technical and people
skills, gives him a genuine niche.
Joe joined FORE Systems in 1995 when it was a booming
telecom startup with about 320 employees. At the peak
in 1999, when FORE was bought by Marconi, about 2,300
were employed at the Pittsburgh facility. Now that number
hovers at about 900. Although three years of contracting
sales have caused painful restructuring at Marconi and
across the industry, Joe feels that the cyclic downturn
is bottoming and is convinced that his MST expertise
will remain valuable long into the future. Through it
all, Joe has maintained an extremely active and close
relationship with the Telecommunications Program at Pitt.
He considers his contributions of time and money to be “interest
payments on my MST education.” And, he concludes,
telecommunications is fundamental to the economy; computers
will be ever more densely networked in the future.
The Marconi home page:
http://www.marconi.com
The Marconi BBRS products page:
http://www.marconi.com/Home/customer_center/Products/Control/Broadband%20Routing%20%26%20Switching
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