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Elizabeth Wong briefs guests on the Navy/Marine Corps intranet.

A cross-corporation collaborative effort

Key to its over 40 years in serving the public interest is the MITRE Corporation's commitment to working in close collaboration with its customers and sponsors. To support this commitment, MITRE has staff at over 60 sites around the world. So when the U.S. Navy's Space & Naval Warfare Systems Center moved from Crystal City, Virginia to San Diego, California, MITRE expanded its San Diego site to support this effort.

Elizabeth Wong, a MITRE Networking and Communications Engineer, shares her perspective on working at the San Diego site and discusses her work on a few Navy-sponsored projects.

"I started at MITRE in 1997 in the Reston, Virginia, offices and transferred to San Diego in 1999. Shortly after I began at MITRE, the Navy SPAWAR headquarters moved from Crystal City to San Diego. MITRE, in continued support of our Navy sponsor, began transferring additional staff to San Diego," says Wong. "What's great about working here is that we're a small close-knit team of 40 people and all our work is supporting the sponsor. We interact with the sponsor daily and we're actually located at the SPAWAR Systems Center-San Diego on base so that we can better support them."

"Over the past year and a half, I have worked on the Base Level Information Infrastructure (BLII) and Navy/Marine Corp Intranet (NMCI) projects. In both projects, MITRE focused on equipment analysis and network design and development of the architecture for Navy ship and shore communications. More recently, I've been working on the Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnsissance (C4ISR) architecture study for Taiwan. In this project, MITRE is providing the technical expertise for the C4ISR architecture so that when Taiwan receives U.S. equipment, it will be able to fit it into its infrastructure and know how to run it and use it for military operations," explains Wong.

"One of the most interesting aspects of these projects is the cross-corporation collaborative effort that makes them work," she adds. "On both projects, we have an extensive network of MITRE staff contributing their expertise. Staff from Massachusetts, Virginia, and several other sites are involved."

"I really feel fortunate to have had this type of work experience," continues Wong. "I came to MITRE straight out of school and have had the opportunity to learn from some of the best in the field, and it's been very rewarding. You actually do something that makes a difference. And at a site, the best part is that you feel like you're making an immediate difference. The daily interactions almost guarantee it."