ECE Undergrad Makes Disney Magic

Tiffany Ma is a longtime Disney fan. Her favorite character? Winnie the Pooh. She’s been to the Disney parks in California, Hong Kong and Tokyo.

Ma, a junior majoring in electrical and computer engineering, was learning about programming languages in one of her honors classes and decided to look into an application that particularly interested her: Disneyland’s new MagicBands. These radio frequency identification, or RFID, bracelets store park-goers’ information and act as everything from a hotel key to a method for making dinner reservations and small purchases.

She spent fall 2017 researching the “internet of things” and the ethical considerations Disney took into account when designing a device to hold guests’ personal information. The next spring, she worked with ECE professor Kathie Melde, who taught her how to use a spectrum analyzer to measure the frequencies of antennas and see how they affected the frequencies of MagicBands.

Then, Ma decided she wanted to go work at the parks herself. She joined the Disney College Program, excited to learn about the operation of the parks’ engineering services and facilities and work alongside Disney Engineering professors. She attended several engineering seminars throughout the program, but some of the most valuable experiences she had were when networking with imagineers and other engineering services people while she worked at Toy Story Land. 

“It was a good experience to learn about how they got into the job I want,” she said.