Wednesday, May 20, 2020

Sameer Latif

2002 Batch FAST Islamabad

It was Fall of 2002 when I joined FAST Islamabad in a small campus as a Computer Science student. The Wireless Communications program started in 2003 and created many opportunities and challenges. The future of wireless communications was promising, and I believed in the leadership at FAST in improving the program with time. This motivated me to enroll in the Telecommunications Engineering program. In the first semester, all we had was a classroom and a small make-shift lab where we were tasked with building a robot that would participate in a contest in Japan. We took the challenge and worked diligently along with our faculty. The robot never made it to Japan, but we were able to implement important functionalities which marked the beginning of a new era.

Within a year, a new campus was constructed and kept on expanding. The resources improved quickly and so did our studies. It was never perfect, which inculcated in us the ability to think of out-of-the-box solutions that would prepare us for real world problems. FAST provided many on-campus opportunities for Teaching Assistant and Grader. I took 7 such opportunities which helped me stay connected with my previous courses and also helped my younger fellow students.

FAST also did a great job in connecting students with the industry. I completed a successful internship in 2005 with Micronet Broadband (now called NayaTel). Months before I graduated in 2006, a group from MicroTech Labs visited our campus for recruiting purposes. They were looking for the same skill sets that I developed in the robot project in 2003. They liked my work and offered me a role of Firmware Design Engineer for a GPS System. In 2007, I joined And-Or Logic as a Design Engineer and implemented cryptography algorithms on FPGAs.

In 2008, I pursued graduate studies at New Jersey Institute of Technology where I focused my studies on VLSI and Wireless communication. In 2009, I joined Mini Circuits in New York where I worked in the field of RF Designing playing the role of RF Characterization Engineer. At Mini Circuits, I introduced the use of digital control schemes for effective RF designing. In 2014, I joined Skyworks Solutions in California as Staff RF Validation Engineer where I was part of designing state-of-the-art RF front end modules for the cellular applications.

In 2020, I took the role of RF Design Validation Engineer at Apple where I love making some of the greatest electronic products of the world. There are several people and several companies that played a role in the success of my career, I truly believe that the knowledge and experience of designing things with limited time and limited resources was a skill that I developed at FAST. The tough projects and exams with an artificially created tight deadlines truly built confidence and skills to solve the real-world problems in real deadlines. I thank my teachers, my fellow students and the staff at FAST Islamabad for the positive impact they made in my career.

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