Naval Postgraduate School
September 2000
The first business trip for Class II was taken to Monterey, and coincided with the orientation session for NPS's inaugural class. Our students had the unique opportunity to spend most of the trip with their peers entering the PD21 program at NPS. While in Silicon Valley, students visited Sun Microsystems and met with the Director of Business Strategy, who provided a comprehensive perspective on the business and technical environment at Sun. Another company visited was Lockheed-Martin in Sunnyvale, where the VP of Product Operations and Director of Common Products Development & Chief Engineer briefed the students prior to tours of assembly facilities for solar arrays and commercial satellites. Students also heard from a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Terry Clapam, RIT graduate and co-founder of VISX, on his experiences with VISX and several other startups. At NPS, students sat in on a design review and toured the PANSAT (Petite Amateur Navy Satellite) lab, the Modeling, Virtual Environment, and Simulation lab, and the Smart Structures lab.