Unlocking the Door to (Job) Opportunity

A towering, mysterious black cube sits in the lobby of the Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Engineering this week. Hordes of students will try to find their way inside, but only a few engineers- and computer scientists-to-be will succeed in unlocking the Challenge Box.

It sounds like the setup for a sci-fi film, but it’s actually a 14-foot-tall puzzle (and recruiting tool) from Lockheed Martin, the global security and aerospace firm. 

Students walk up to a screen on the box, which contains three engineering and three computer science problems, several of which focus on space travel. Enter the correct solution, and the door swings open with a whoosh, revealing a mirrored room with an immersive cosmic experience.

“By thinking your way into this box, you’ve proven you have what it takes to work with a team of the world’s greatest engineers,” says a celestial female voice inside the cube. 

Student winners get to chat with Lockheed recruiters and earn a spot high on the company’s recruiting list. Particularly ambitious students can take on one “high-value” aerospace engineering question—one that recruiters say generally takes days to solve—and get an immediate job offer from Lockheed Martin if they succeed.

The Challenge Box has traveled to a handful of engineering schools around the country since it debuted in 2018, but until it reached the University of Maryland, it had never before posed computer science questions. Lockheed Senior Recruiter Joe Portnoy said the company is actively searching for strong computer science candidates, and Professsor Dave Mount and graduate students Alireza Farhadi, Hamed Saleh and Hadi Yami, all of the Department of Computer Science provided challenge questions to help find them.

The company, which renewed a strategic partnership with UMD last year and last month announced a donation of $3 million to the A. James Clark School of Engineering for a variety of initiatives, is on the hunt for a broad range of talent, said Keoki Jackson, chief technology officer at Lockheed Martin: “We expect to hire 50,000 STEM professionals over the next decade.”

Tim Lin ’20, was the first student to solve a computer science problem, which in simple terms, asked students to design the shortest possible fence around a garden of given measurements. He did it in about 45 minutes. 

“It’s a kind of pattern similar to what I’ve seen before,” he said of the problem after he emerged from the space-y interior of the shiny cube.

Every student who unlocks the box also receives a copy of the Voyager Golden Record. Now traveling beyond our solar system in NASA’s Voyager probes, it contains sounds and images from Earth and is meant for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe—as long as they have old-school record players. 

The box will be in operation from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. today and tomorrow.