Matt Tisdale – Internship leads to high-tech career
When he was a Christopher Newport University student, several state governors knew Matt Tisdale by name. Through an internship with NASA, he made presentations on air quality that attracted the attention of top-level officials.

But DEVELOP, Tisdale's well-paid NASA internship, had even better benefits. Because of the high-level technology experience and skills he has gained in the program, including writing software to extract data, Tisdale landed a job soon after he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in computer engineering.

He now works as a consultant in the Norfolk office of Booz Allen Hamilton, a global strategy and technology consulting firm that was named one of Fortune magazine’s "The 100 Best Companies to Work For" in 2006.

CNU students have an inside track to NASA internships such as DEVELOP and LARSS, the Langley Aerospace Research Summer Scholars program, because of the University’s reputation for excellence in preparing students and its proximity to NASA Langley Research Center, a cutting-edge aerospace technology laboratory.

"It's a slam dunk for our students to get NASA internships," said Dr. David Doughty, chair of CNU's Department of Physics, Computer Science and Engineering. Because students are only minutes from the research center, they can work during the school year as well through the summer.

And NASA internships were selected by The Wall Street Journal as one of the best programs in the nation at attracting the attention of employers. "High-tech employers frequently cited a government agency - the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Langley Research Center in Virginia - as producing some of the nation's finest engineers," the 2006 article said.

Plenty of other opportunities await students in CNU's Department of Physics, Computer Science and Engineering, both before and after graduation.

"We can't fill all the opportunities we have," said Doughty. "Our department does a first-rate job of preparing students for cutting-edge jobs in technology fields," he said.